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alternative: “stopping the trolley now is unfair to all the ones already died” - student loan forgiveness opposition logic
The argument against student loan forgiveness is that there are better ways to spend the money, like on universal childcare, than on people with college degrees. Basically any social program you can think of will give a higher return to society. The only reason to support student loan forgiveness over these other programs is for votes.
With the student loan forgiveness I think it’s also about it not being fair to those who chose not to go to college, because they didn’t feel like they could afford the loans, so went to work instead. Blue collar workers paying for white collar workers to get their degrees.
You can stop the trolly anytime, but it’s unfair for the people not on the train tracks.
We don’t need to force the metaphor.
It’s the same metaphor though. Helping a group of people doesn’t hurt a different group. Did they make a decision based on whether they expected to get help: yes. Does providing that help against that expectation hurt them: no.
It’s an especially good metaphor because nobody is even talking about taxing tradies to fund the relief.
Two people are going for the same job, one has a degree while the other doesn’t, who is more likely to get the job, all else being equal? Who, on average, gets paid more, those with degrees or those without degrees?
Those who are getting the degree get a boost above those without one, so those who chose to forgo the degree, who would have chosen differently with loan forgiveness could argue pretty effectively that it hurt them.
The government is funded by tax dollars. Everyone who works, including those in the trades, pay taxes. White collar workers who were self taught or went to a boot camp are also at play here. There are many companies that only let you move up so high without certain degrees. So Sam’s tax dollars pay for Alex’s degree, and now Sam works for Alex.
And all of that isn’t even the biggest issue. They aren’t fixing the system. Loan forgiveness today simply kicks the can down the road a couple years. If they want to fix the problem they should fix the problem and stop tying people to the tracks in the first place.
Can’t they do both? Do they still need to kill all the people on the tracks? That part of the argument isn’t coherent.
They can and should do both, but if they aren’t going to stop tying people to the damn track then they should stop pretending they’re doing anyone any real favors by telling them they will loosen some knots. This is a political move to buy votes with tax payer money. That’s it. If they gave two shits about people with crippling student loan debt they’d change how the system works to stop with the predatory loans, which would in turn force universities to cut their bloated administrative costs, and lower tuition to a reasonable level where a degree and actual be worth getting.
Until they do that, this loan forgiveness stuff is just a dog a pony show.
Any solution to a problem that’s existed in the past is going to be unfair to those who had the problem in the past. That can’t be an argument against doing something now. Some blue collar workers could turn around and use the improved system to go back and get degrees, and an improved economy from less people in debt will indirectly help others.
didn’t feel like they could afford the loans, so went to work instead.
That’s me, I did that. If I’m what’s stopping it I don’t think loans for horrible interest rates should be given to a jobless teenager and if you took that risk that’s too bad you didn’t make better investment decisions. Those loans did more harm than good and canceling them now will help reverse that a bit.
They aren’t doing anything to fix the underlying issues with the loans. So they forgive stuff, cool, how about all the loans they are continuing to issues? Are we going to have a big forgiveness event every few years when it’s politically convenient to win some votes?
If they want to actually fix the problems, I’m all for it, but they aren’t doing that. Their trying to bail out a boat that’s still leaking, when they cause the leak and have the power to patch it. It makes no logical sense.
The underlying issue is that education is expensive and it should be free. I don’t understand American’s obsession with keeping the public stupid but I’m sure you’ll defend it.
Education doesn’t have to be as expensive as it is, even if it isn’t free. These people give college students blank checks, because the loans are backed by the government. Knowing that the kids have an unlimited supply of debt, the universities have become bloated and wasteful, letting administrators get rich on the backs of these kids.
Even if it’s made free, the out of control spending of these universities has to be reined in, as it will lead to taxpayers paying the inflated costs, but just not being able to see it so clearly.
Right and that’s a great thought, we should do that; just like we should nationalize healthcare and immediately eliminate private health insurers and PBMs and all the other dozen middle men that make health care more than 10 times as expensive in the US than abroad. But massive sweeping reforms are massively unpopular amongst the wealthy, and the wealthy through use of undemocratic systems of control like the Senate and Electoral college can wield supermajority control of the government despite only having support of 20% of the people – so it’s not happening until wider reform happens, and during that time tens of millions of people are being crushed by a trolly.
To really push this metaphor it’s ‘do we invent planes so people can stop being tied to train tracks, or do we stop the trolley.’
It’s not an either or situation, it’s not a zero sum game, we can do both, but we absolutely should do one regardless of our choice to do the other.
My issues with it is we’re going to have to keep doing it every other year as new debt gets created. Does it happen on a schedule or do we do a little forgiveness here, then wait until people are in crushing pain again in 5-10 years and try to do it again… how many massive student loan forgiveness programs can we do before we fix the actual problem.
Was this even a problem created by the wealthy? This seems like a monkey paw situation, where the government was like, “we want everyone to be able to get a degree. We’ll back the loan so no one gets rejected… tell us how great we are.” Then time passes and people get $80k loans to get degrees in shit that will never get them a job which will allow them to pay it back. Now the government is like, “we’ll forgive the loans… maybe… someday… if we can… just vote for us again… we promise we’ll totally do it next year…” They tried something, it didn’t work, undo it. This shouldn’t be hard. Like applying the scientific method to government.
Easy, give everyone the amount of the person with the most student loan debt.
I’m going to assume this is a joke…
There are people (it seems semi-common with dentists) to have over $1m in student loan debt. So we give $1m to everyone in the US and that’s a $340 trillion dollar program. That doesn’t fix the problem, as the next generation will have to take out loans again, because they didn’t get any of that money, so we’ll be right back here in 20-30 years.
The GDP of the entire world is $105T, so we’re talking more than 3x the GDP of Earth. Not so “easy”. We’d have to print so much money it would all become worthless, go into hyperinflation, and the global economy would take a shit as the world’s reserve currency becomes garbage overnight.
Make the ones giving out these loans responsible for funding the program. After all, they’re responsible for its necessity in the first place.
That’s what I want and have been saying in other comments. If the government stops backing these loans and the loans need to make actual sense, they would be much smaller. And when the loans are smaller the colleges have to trim the bloated administration so it becomes affordable again, ideally to the point where some people can work while going to school and cash flow it, if they get a decent enough job… or save up during high school.
Do that and they fix the problem for all the new people and loan forgiveness or not, it will all work itself out in time.
“You can only help people if everyone gets the exact same amount of help”, is the dumbest argument on the planet. And I’d challenge you’re premise that blue collar works are paying for white collar workers to go to school. With progressive taxation, really it is upper middle class and wealthy people that are paying for that school regardless of education background. Very little of that money is coming from the blue collar workers that aren’t brining in a lot of money. If $2 of Joe the cashiers taxes go to paying for education but $20,000 of random rich guys taxes go to bettering education, I really don’t think that is such an unfair system like you make it seem. The lack of a debt burden on a large subset of society ends up benefitting everyone, including the janitor or cashier.
Without doing anything to fix the system that created the debt burden, they’re simply kicking the can down the road. It’ll start building right back up again. This isn’t a sustainable solution to the problem. It’s like we’re attaching a few balloons to the top of the trolley so it’s a little lighter when it runs over a few people, but then the balloons pop and we keep throwing on weight. Fixing the issues that have led to the current price of college will likely save future students more than they would ever get from a debt forgiveness program. This isn’t a real solution, it’s a ploy to win votes and apparently it’s working.
I agree it should be fixed, but our present legislative branch is incapable of taking on that kind of progress, they can barely wipe their own ass. If that’s the best they can do I think it is still better than doing nothing at all. “ploy to win votes” is another way of saying doing what people want, or what they are literally paid to do. It’s funny to try and propagandize that into a negative thing.
If that’s the best they can do they should be removed from office. People who are unwilling or unable to work with others should not hold public office where that is a basic skill required for the job.
As for the ploy to win votes, the issues is both the timing and the way it which it was done. Biden announced the first forgiveness stuff going into the midterm elections and they were just promises from an executive order. It likely gave them a boost in votes during the midterms even though nothing happened yet, and ultimately nothing happened, because he didn’t have the authority to do that according to the courts. But the election already happened, so he just gets to say, “my bad, we’ll try again next time”… Now they’ll dangle this BS carrot in front of people through 2024 to try and prop them up in the 2024 elections. Will anything meaningful actually happen? I’m not holding my breath.
War edition:
You can stop the trolley at any time but then all the people who were run over would have died in vain.A.K.A why we can’t forgive student debt
I’m sure a decent chunk of the people lined up on the tracks are shareholders shouting at him to keep the trolley running at all costs.
“theyre only gonna run it a little more but they’ll stop before it gets to me surely”
Fortunately everybody’s mind keeps jumping from one body to the next, like in the Infinite Hotel problem, so as to escape the bodies being thrashed by the trolley.
That seems to be the state of fixing the global warming problem for you.
Is there a collection of these trolley problem memes? Or an active community on lemmy where these are shared?
I would like to see all the variations that can come out of this. I have already seen a few on lemmy.
I know what the Nestle Trolley Co would choose.
they would switch to a track with even more people
“Unfortunately, due to a system malfunction that is the direct result of safety deficiencies and cost cutting measures that place immense pressure on overworked frontline employees to pay lip service to safety but cut corners thanks to metrics pressures designed by management, the trolley went out of control, killing several people. We have sacked some unimportant people as scapegoats to appease the public and will conduct an internal investigation that will result in shuffling things around, some new titles and safety posters, but no real change. Should this be insufficient and the event not blow over quickly we will quietly change our name to something equally as forgettable as the previous one and the public will conveniently forget about us in short order.”
That’s how you solve a trolley delimma. Signed, Management.
Nah. In Germany it’s normal that a train simply doesn’t arrive or at least doesn’t arrive on time
I think I remember this scene in Atlas Shrugged. Is that rail made of Reardon metal?
this basically describes what Chicago did with their parking
daaaaaaamn
