Student Loan Amnesty

I'm on a roll!

Last month, I posted a provocative argument about "Free Speech" on social media, which, instead of getting me incinerated, completely stopped all discussion. On a social media thread. In 2022.

I seem to have done it again. On the topic of student loan amnesty, I posted:

Pay back everyone who worked their way through college FIRST.

If everyone gets retroactive free college, let's start with people who didn't sign contracts promising to repay and who did more than cash an easy check.

...and, of course, I was attacked for being an elitest boomer tyrant fascist MAGA mo-fo. One onlooker stuck around after the beating to question me a bit, finally surmising that maybe I wasn't totally against making education accessible (this was infinitely kind of him; in this era, a stranger expressing a "bad" opinion is ALL BAD THINGS WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Like, don't even ever FEED him).

Here was my reply, which appears to have actually shut up yet another angry crowd:

There's vast space between desire for accessible education and retroactively paying (via taxes) for the education of people who elected to sign loan contracts. I'm in that space.

Similarly, I support accessible housing but don’t want to pay off people's mortgages because their obligation feels oppressive.

It's not entirely hypothetical. The 20-somethings screaming about student loans will eventually be 30 and 40-somethings screaming about mortgages (and, yes, I know it's not exclusively 20-somethings screaming about student loans).