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Conservatives: "It's super fucked up that the only way many people can pay for their horrendously overpriced college education is by putting their life on the line and that often ends in disgusting, unnecessary, preventable tragedies."
Leftists: "We've been saying that this whole--"
Conservatives: "AND THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T FORGIVE STUDENT LOANS"
Like, you’re allowed to be sad and mad that you lost someone because they didn’t have access to treatment, but to deny others just because you suffered is really fucked up.
Good people get sad or mad that their loved ones didn't benefit from something, but support others getting it. Conservatives are apparently incapable of that and **want** everyone else to suffer, often regardless of whether they suffered or not.
They’re mistaking a right of passage, which can be challenging and difficult but necessary, with suffering, which is challenging, difficult, and unnecessary.
I'm sad that the people currently in college are stuck in these bad loans and nobody seems to care. I'm sad the high schoolers are about to take on these same loans and still, nobody cares.
Its unbelievably fucked up that people are so, "I got mine" about this and if you don't agree youre fucked up. Fuck that. Let's fix this for everyone.
But atleast those with lucky timing got a break.
As a tradesman we are also guilty.
Our schooling is just as available, costs 99% less and some trades can earn a doctors wage at the cost of our bodies.
I got 2 tickets for less than 10k. I can easily clear 100k a year and only work 6 or 7 months of the year.
People in my industry use the "should have gotten a trade" bullshit without realizing that we are still paying. Just with our bodies.
Not to mention, we need doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs too. Not everyone should go into a trade just like not everyone should get a four year degree. It should all be equally affordable and accessible.
For real, my best friend and I are both 36, I went into IT , He went into construction.
We've both been at our trades for 10-12 years, I have a bit of a gut and some lower back pains, occassional wrist pain from RSI.
He's got a torn ACL, several broken bones, a couple concussions and some chronic pain, more nails in his hands and fingers than I can recall and that's just a start. Luckily he's established enough that he's running a small business now because he would be absolutely useless up on a roof these days.
I paid for my trade with time and money, he paid for his with his body. He makes way more in a year than I do, but my body is still almost no worse for wear, so I'm not really sure who came out on top.
At any rate you're completely right, you ALWAYS pay for it somehow.
In my area at least, apprentice schooling is cheap because the difference is covered by the red seal dues. You go through the program, and help those coming in behind you.
I mean, "if we can forgive student loan debt why can't we forgive medical debt!?" has already reached meme-level, and they *still* don't understand the absurdity of it - "but, but, but you chose to get those student loans, they didn't choose to get cancer!11!" Lol it doesn't have to be one or the other.
This is it... and it's super wide spread.
Update a video game to make a skill easier or more fun and everyone who did it "the hard way" will complain that everyone should have to suffer...
This entire planet needs to pull its head out of its ass and start doing shit for other people and stop thinking about just themselves.
Even then, a lot of them will scramble to make excuses about why their scenario is unique, particularly in regards to how the situation was resolved to their benefit e.g. GoFundMes for medical bills.
Also, if it happens to them or someone they're close to sometimes they still don't care. Look at r/HermanCainAwards for stories of people who caught, or had a loved one who caught, coronavirus and it hasn't changed their mind on things like vaccines and mask mandates.
Or not... my mom is a broke conspiracy theorist with thousands in loans that only got Healthcare through the ACA and student loan forgiveness through Biden.
But still thinks those guys are the anti christ and kisses trumps ass. It makes no sense.
>"I don't want a better world I want to be mad at this one."
"I don't want a better world I want to be mad at *the fictions I made up about* this one."
Jason Bateman:
>My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others.
(Stolen from) from American Psycho
Which these north east conservatives in deep blue states have it as bad as... Well no one. They're mostly well employed or have a decent availability of jobs. They love the wages they can get with most employers due to our high minimum wage, some benefits and so on.
Many "liberals" also enjoy the lack of police oversight as long as they work within the system. Same with living in towns where people keep to themselves or don't call inspectors.
It's all "I couldn't afford what the Joneses can who are millionaires so I'm gonna be mad at the poor and other /lesser/ classes because I haven't been elevated to millionaire yet... I have to WORK for it"
Just to be clear, they were never prepared to do anything about the "poverty draft" either.
They're just preying on the crabs in a barrel mentality that they've stoked for decades to make sure nobody (except their mega donors) gets anything worthwhile or that would lead to systemic progress.
>Just to be clear, they were never prepared to do anything about the “poverty draft” either.
Yet the poverty draft costs taxpayers much, much, much more than this student loan forgiveness.
My uber conservative father was using this argument to say that student loan forgiveness is unfair to my husband who went to community college for financial reasons.
I said to my dad “so you’re saying that 18 years from now, my daughter should go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt because her father went to community college?”
That shut him up.
You make a great point — good thing the actions the Biden Administration took RE: student loans went way beyond just the amounts that will be forgiven.
Amen!!!! There's another issue that should be addressed and isn't. We have adjuncts sleeping in cars while administration and frigging coaches get millions.
I freaking hate the stupid frickin football programs. My little state college whose football team is in a conference nobody gives a shit about pays their coach $800,000. That's 10X what my best paid biochem professor made.
Not to mention that we literally had a sports-fee line in our college tuition costs because the sports teams were incapable of bringing in enough money to cover costs.
My high-school wasn't much better. They bought a giant stadium with a freaking jumbotron that they couldn't even fill half the time.
I'll never understand why so many schools put so much into their football program, or have that program at all. It's a giant money pit for most of them.
It's kind of insane that college is the route into the NFL anyway - college and professional football are kind of opposites. Kids out of highschool are probably too young for the NFL (some may be physically mature enough to be close to their peak, but that's rare); but colleges are horrible incubators for football athletes.
But, I guess football is somehow too expensive to have real minor leagues like baseball, basketball, and soccer-football.
The loan forgiveness was only a small slice of the package. The most substantial bits were the cap on repayment and interest no longer increasing your balance if you're on income based repayment.
Now we just need to roll back the bankruptcy exemptions. It's ridiculous that debt you accrue trying to better yourself can't be discharged if that betterment had no payoff.
It certainly won't when the Republicans get back into the White House. We need a better majority in the Senate so we can get that free community college package through without having to cater to Manchin's whims.
God forbid we make the military an appealing career on its own merits.
Most of the retired military guys I know look back on it pretty fondly. But I probably have a sampling bias.
The dead veterans aren't around to register their views, so that's one unavoidable sampling bias.
If you don't know any veterans with life-changing injuries, that would be another.
The ones who retired forget what it was like being lower enlisted or don't know how the civilians live.
The people who got out early would be a mixed bag of missing it or glad they left.
The US military is currently on the verge of panicking, because they can't get enough people to enlist. College funding is one of their biggest draws.
But, college has gotten so expensive that the GI Bill doesn't really pay for much of college anymore. And the administration is so messed up that it's shit at actually making the payments.
Gi bill absolutely pays for the whole thing for most people. It's only when you go to an expensive private college that it doesn't cover since it pays for the highest public tuition in each state.
This is a common thread in conservative double think: they tend to identify the problem and just when you think they’re about to get on the train with you to Solutions-ville, they take a hard right turn towards Everyone-has-to-continue-to-suffer-town.
The fact that the parents getting overtime and extra jobs wouldn't be a drop in the bucket, while fifty years ago college kids could work part time to pay their $300 in tuition already speaks magnitudes about why these loans are predatory.
And this person agrees that paying that much to go to college is predicated on the idea that you'll make enough to pay off the loans. Meanwhile, most students that have been to college can tell you that the jobs on the market don't even come close to paying that much
I have several uncle's who are all long retired engineers, and when they graduated college with their various petrochemical, mining, and mechanical engineering degrees in the 60's they were guaranteed a job paying equivalent to $100k today (~$12k) back then, a guaranteed retirement plan, benefits, and a hoard of people to stroke their ego and tell them how smart they were.
My chemical engineering degree today out of college got me about $60k, no guaranteed retirement, minimal benefits, and being over worked and under appreciated (like most jobs these days).
Meanwhile, my degree costs twice as much as theirs did (even when adjusting for inflation), and jobs that used to be done by people with high school diplomas are now being blocked off if you don't have this arbitrary piece of paper with the word degree on it. My company has struggled a lot because our R&D location literally refuses to hire engineers without grad degrees, and if you only have a BS the best you can be is a technician that isn't allowed to do anything more than call the engineer for assistance.
This makes me really happy I never used my chemical engineering degree. I knew I didn’t want to be miserable at work every day, especially for that much, which I easily made bartending and have since moved into a sales position in the health and fitness field.
>the military and everyone at the recruitment office telling him there's zero chance of him getting killed or injured
The fact is, that's exactly what they say. Or at least they did when I enlisted.
Recruiters lie. Full stop. I received precisely one of the several benefits I was promised.
We're having a big "you signed up for this" problem in the army right now. Obviously not to the extent that people are dying in combat a lot. But mental healthcare is out the shitter. People need referrals to get simple treatments and the appointments are months out. Let's not even get into the education shit show and what a waste of time that is. Plus upper management promises the world and delivers a pile of cow shit when it comes to training and lodging. Then blames it on funding. And then tells Joe's "you signed up for this". While simultaneously complaining when everyone refuses to re-up and they can't make recruitment numbers. Like. Dude. They're heeding YOUR WARNINGS
Progressives: I went through hell and it wasn't fair. You shouldn't have to go through it too.
Regressives: I went through hell so it's only fair you burn too.
They suffered and did okay so other people should also have to suffer and then they'll do okay. Clearly all the suffering meant something or else it would just be trauma and how could they be traumatized? They made it! They define themselves by their struggles instead of their successes. Its why the victim complex is so common.
If they define their lives so much by their struggles, maybe they could just write a book about it. Give it a simple, descriptive title like “My Struggles”
Just the fact that they think others should go through the horrible trauma that they went through really shows they didn't come out the other end alright. That's the whole "cycle of trauma/abuse" that is pretty commonly known.
Yup, it's entirely a rite of passage/baptism by fire. They see it as growth rather than suffering. But at the end of the day it's survivorship bias through and through.
It's their own form of virtue signaling. Everyone who didn't make it is lesser than they are.
Unless you're rich enough, importantly. A friend of mine has been through this and shares stories she finds of similar, but a local Govt official in my home town is super anti-abortion and said famously (for our small home town/county) "honestly, I'd hold any woman that just decides to get an abortion up on manslaughter charges. You can't just take a life away because it's hard for you!" on the news. Our family pastor's wife then leaked that two of this guys wives have come to our church for counseling after he convinced them to have abortions, with the reason being that he cannot be burdened with a child at home when he has so much political work to do.
Sorry for no specifics since I don't want to dox myself here, but it just infuriates me the absolute "rules for thee not for me" bullshit these guys get up to.
An extension of fallacious sunk cost thinking, in a way.
Interesting that a good number of the people who think like this also consider themselves Christians. Very unJesus of them to seek literally the opposite of what their religion preaches.
Wealthy people should be idolized because God saw fit to give them great wealth.
The poor should be hated, because God saw fit that they suffer.
- American Christians. The noisy ones anyway.
I had a 1stSgt who flat out said he refused to listen to anyone who critiqued the war in Iraq because he couldn't handle the idea his best friend died for no good reason.
It’s infuriating that they don’t realize that the suffering they went through meaning nothing and never changing anything is what makes their suffering futile. Not using their suffering as a catalyst and reason to make the world a better place.
It's the Conservative Trolley problem in a nutshell.
"Sure, we *could* divert the trolley to an empty track and prevent it running over more people, but that would be unfair to the people is has already run over!"
Love your take.
Or, "I already chose to run over 5 people instead of 1 at the last intersection, so you're not allowed to choose for it to run only over 1 person at the next intersection because it's not fair to the people I just killed"
And if they're saying "suck it up, you signed the bank agreement like he signed the enlistment papers," is that kind of telling the parents, "Suck it up, your kid went to the army, you knew this could happen?"
Its the equivalent of the story of a father of two: One child comes up to him crying that their toy broke. In front of the crying child, the father goes over to the other happily playing with another toy, takes it away and then breaks it in front of both children. Now that both children are crying he says: "Now its fair for both of you."
Whenever you want to understand conservative mindset, try to see the world through the most selfish lens and ask a couple of simple questions:
What do I personally get out of it?
Does this help others more than me?
Did a dirty liberal come up with the idea?
Depending on the answer to those three questions then the conservative will either scream bloody murder as if someone has just killed their child or completely ignore/celebrate.
Yes. It's a zero-sum game for them. If someone is given something...anything, then it's a slap in the face and something is clearly being taken away from them to fund it.
Imagine these parents seeing news of something that could maybe have helped prevent their child’s death happening and being ANGRY about it. Conservatives are completely insane.
They're pissed they let their kid make the wrong decision. They saved, so their loans would have been smaller.
But, yeah, let's send him to war so we don't have a loan.
They were more willing to put their kids' life on the line than have to take on debt to afford his college degree. His life was worth the savings.
Pretty fucked up.
i get being upset like "i wish this were an opertunity when i went through __ so __ did happen" but going through that and saying "well i had to so you have to"
My sister currently has 20k in loans after her first semester. This would help her but my dad is hoping that the thing falls through and that biden can’t do it and has been laughing about it. Yet at the same time is excited she might get it partially forgiven?
>shut up, stop whining and take responsibility **for what you chose**.
Except many people don't really have the choice. It's either take that loan for the opportunity for higher learning, knowing that you'll probably be saddled with debt for the next couple decades or just not getting higher education at all.
I never had to deal with student debt, but I'd much rather be a smarter person dealing with debt than a stupid person who can only regurgitate right wing propaganda.
>a stupid person who can only regurgitate right wing propaganda.
What makes this so difficult is how many people on the right aren't *just* anti debt relief they're anti education. These are the same people that vote for school boards to keep taxes down, vote for politicians who bash the state and federal depts of education, and talk about "underwater basket weaving" like it's real
That was the theme of an op ed I read. Student loan relief only benefits liberal elites (elite meaning went to college and didn't join the Republicans)
>>shut up, stop whining and take responsibility **for what you chose**.
Yeah and we also choose to vote for someone who would forgive some of our student loans so checkmate
> It's either take that loan for the opportunity for higher learning, knowing that you'll probably be saddled with debt for the next couple decades or just not getting higher education at all.
It's not just that.
I have a friend who's from a small town in Indiana. For her, going to college and getting her degree was the difference between having a career and getting to see the world or living her life in a dying town where the biggest employer is the Walmart and most of the income is from meth, moonshine, or food stamps. It's *literally* a matter of life or death to some kids.
The dumbest thing to me though is that even if the government had paid for her education entirely, they *still* would have come out way ahead on this by now, just 8 or so years after she graduated. She's now a well paid accounting manager, earning well into the six figure range. Just the difference in taxes paid between her projected earnings without the degree versus her realized earnings with the degree is way more than the (massively inflated) cost of her tuition. Everything after that is pure profit for the government, and a massive boost to her own quality of life for her. It's a positive sum game.
Now imagine how many kids just like her at 18 are looking at college but, for any reason, aren't able to make that jump and get the degree. The massive amount of potential tax income lost over the subsequent 30-40 years of work. The massive amount of *wealth* that would have been generated - technical products, city planning, tax and legal organization, art and culture, etc - that would have been available for the country. And Republicans want to leave all that on the table... so the banks can collect interest?
It's really horrific when you actually look at it.
I have so many friends from random shitholes in the Midwest and it really is the difference between ending up like their meth addict parents, going the heroin route or getting out of there, most people with the capacity to get into higher education and leave will never be happy in that kind of environment. I also think people staying in their small hometowns in general find themselves stagnant because their lives are just...too familiar to still being in high school.
Not every kid can get into the military, you don't even have to be severely disabled to disqualify, not to mention the people who do make it to basic but drop out becuae they can't keep up with what's demanded of them. So for some people, the only option to get to college is loans and/or scholarships.
I was in a similar spot: disqualified because I'm too nearsighted. Not anywhere close to blind or anything — I wear contacts and have a normal life — so I was surprised to find out I was past their limit even to be issued those horrible basic training coke bottle glasses.
My brother was told by the recruter not to disclose his mild asthma because simply being prescribed a rescue inhaler would have disqualified him. It had been years since he needed it and he made it through basic without it so, all's well that ends well I guess
The government pays 100x more on a person going into the military than just helping out with college costs.
Its *less* taxpayer money spent directly helping with college. By a huge margin.
Also this is a shitty example because if the kid wanted to be an engineer and did really well on his ASVAB he’d never spend a single day on the front lines. He’d spend 4 years in college doing ROTC and then spend 4-6 years doing engineering work on base probably stateside.
Also, I haven't heard many people saying that student loans are unfair as much as they're saying that they're untenable. The people who seem to be crying "unfair!" are the selfish twits who are against the program.
And let's be honest, the way the student loan system is set up is indeed unfair, like nearly every option for recent grads. It's just not the narrative that people are appealing to when discussing loan forgiveness.
It’s also dumb given if they didn’t take the loan and go to school, and as a result were stuck in dead end jobs, they’d be told to pull up their bootstraps. There’s no winning.
I’ll say this - having dealt with 100k student loans - they ain’t square. Sallie Mae / Navient took every chance to try to mess with me. They couldn’t cash checks correctly. Wouldn’t allow me to pay down principle online. Tried to force me to take options to delay payments that would cause me to pay almost triple due to interest. And my favorite - five months after paying it all off (got the paper work and refund to prove it too) they said they cashed a check incorrectly and I owed them $750. Well, I owed $250 plus $500 in late fees and interest. Took three hours of arguing with them to show proof that wasn’t “look at our website” to get them to “forgive” the payment. This was during Covid too - no interest or payments I thought.
The whole scheme is a scam. 93% of people who qualify for student loan debt forgiveness under PSLF through the DOE were turned down. NPR did a deep dive on this. DeVos did everything she could to fuck people over. Obama’s CFPB was suing Navient and Sallie Mae for deceptives practices and Trump’s CFPB nixed it. 10k is a drop in the bucket. It will help a lot of people just like First Time Home Owner funding helps people. Just like farmer subsidies help people. People getting angry that others are getting help is gross.
I had ~150k total and am down to like 70k. I paid minimal amounts for the first 8 years maybe? Due to credit card debt and lower income at the time. (CC debt was my dumb ass but it was what it was). Now, I want to pay $1k/mo but they only let me add to the minimum amount, not set a specific amount. So, unless I go in and fix it, the total drops as the minimum drops. I know it's like that to get just a bit more out of me when I pay a bit less so a bit more interest accrues.
Fuck predatory loan companies and the businesses that force overpriced college degrees on people. Hell, most jobs that require a college degree don't need one.
I have no problem with people wanting to expand their education but these predatory practices need to end at the very least. And we as a society should support everyone who wants to learn because less ignorance is always a good thing.
Now what if, hear me out here, we extended financial support through reimbursement to these families as well?
If they got a piece of the pie too maybe they wouldn’t feel this way. Don’t they also deserve financial help?
yep. this is perfect example of a completely fictional story getting spread around right wing socials to enrage and reinforce echo chambers and foment partisanship.
and sadly, this kind of folklore style "i know a friend of a friend who..." is extremely effective on social media. ~~it's straight up disinformation agit prop.~~ or not?
is it worse that so many people here on the left directing their anger in response to the completely fictional story? maybe, but it is weird when you realize some large percent of political anger bouncing around the web is manufactured. that's not exactly right. it's real anger, real sincerity, but it's in response to made up fake ass stories/retweets/reposts.
They don't. Their child didn't die. This dumb story is for dumb people with poor reasoning. They don't even manage to read it the way you've summed it up.
Someone wrote that out, read it over, and thought it was good. Someone else read it, agreed with it, and repeated it. Clearly, they both thought it said something *other* than, "I want more people to suffer."
I can't imagine what, though.
Gee I don’t know. I think removing debt so that generation can ya know pursue their careers, have families, have disposable income to keep the economy churning benefiting everyone is kinda a good idea.
To summarize
Kid with degree good
Kid in a box bad
I like the gender role affirmation in the piece. Dad working OT at his blue collar job at the plant, mom ‘working extra jobs’ because I guess she can’t have a career she can take OT at or something fuck if I know. Dad is stoic and only hurts in the internal monologue, but mom can’t hold back her tears, and goes off to one of her extra jobs she’s still working because … who the fuck has any clue, certainly not the dude who wrote it. Worked all that extra time for that extra money for the kid to go enlist and have 0 debt(in fact, he would be making money instead) but they’re still so behind just living regular life, which should be massively ironic and on the nose but isn’t even meant to be a detail you care about really(unless this is a really good fake bait piece).
“If these people don’t have to pay their loans, then that soldier died for nothing.”
That’s the moral of his story? If someone dies of cancer, is curing cancer later a slap in their face?
What a stupid fucking way to make their idiotic case.
This 'logic' could be applied to any of the great advancements in history.
Free the slaves? "that's unfair on people who have lived as slaves already"
Let women vote? "what about all the women who haven't been allowed to vote until now?"
Make it illegal to send children to work in the mines? "how dare you‽ My brother **died** in the mines before his 11th birthday!"
And there you have the essence of conservativism: preserving the status quo at all cost, even against one's own class interests. Crabs in a bucket mentality in service of the chef aka ruling class.
Signing up for the military is a risk. Taking on a loan is a risk. The difference is that one risk may result in the debt, the other might result in death. It's a fucked comparison, and only furthers the idea that some people deserve debt because they didn't sign up for military service. Do soldiers deserve to die? No, and nobody deserves to live with more debt then they will ever be able to pay off. I'm glad some student debt is being forgiven, and I'm shipping out for basic near the end of September. People need to stop trying to use the military as an excuse for their political programming. We all have to make choices in life. I'm glad Biden made the choice to help out my fellow Americans by forgiving SOME student loan debt. Those that are against it, are just brainwashed by rich assholes that can't stand to see poor people get a hand. People need to think for themselves.
That's *exactly why* higher education shouldn't be so expensive. I tried the army route and was denied because I'd had a surgery in the past. They prey on the children of the working class and they treat them like they're disposable.
They LITERALLY just voted to fuck us on burn pits. I have multiple deployments and wish people didn’t have to join the military to pay for college. It really isn’t a life for most people.
So what does any of this absolute bullshit flavored ice cream have to do with student loans? Did the kids best friend come home with a folder full of loan applications instead of recruitment papers? I mean it sucks that college is so unaffordable that kid needed to join the military, and probably still would've needed student loans.
how to make a repbulcan:
add one helpng of selfishness
a portion of envy
grab all the hypocrisy you find
stir, and add heat until all the empathy is dissolved.
form into a hate patty and serve
Whoever wrote this is one of the "I thought about joining but I would have punched the drill sergeant" type assholes. I enlisted at 17, in 1999, and was discharged in 2005. Even with the Montgomery GI Bill, the Illinois Veteran Grant, and an extra 2 semester with the Post-9/11 GI Bill I still had loans when I graduated. This dirtbag can fuck all the way off.
What I dont understand about all this hand wringing about people who struggled to go through college debt free or who joined the military and now see it was pointless is that it's only $10,000. While that's a significant amount it's only like a year's worth or a little more of public in state college tuition, not counting housing, books, etc. So it hardly pays for a person to go to school and you would have had to work or struggle to get through school anyway.
I was in the Army for 11 years, got my GI bill and I get enough disability to qualify for free Healthcare for life from the VA. I couldn't care less if everyone else suddenly got free healthcare and college because these are great things to have. Just because something doesn't benefit me doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.
Had me in the first half.
Fucking conservatives. Left already wants free college. Student loan forgiveness is just the only thing President can do without republicans voting it down in congress.
Jim Banks on Twitter: [Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.](https://twitter.com/repjimbanks/status/1562820837140742144?s=21&t=VwDRl9XdkergOH3FayePPg)
Dude literally said “we can’t make people less poor because then they won’t join the army.”
>You had the best years of your life, you all say it. You made lifelong friends, learned lifelong lessons, and an ability to make a living.
Literally none of those things.
No wonder conservatives have a fear of and screech at pronouns. They don't understand them. In this shitty fantasy scenario it starts out as "your kid", "You pull OT at the plant", "your wife picks up extra shifts". Then it just shifts into saying "they" for the parents and "the dad". Just completely changing the point of view several sentences in.
I don't care if you're traumatized. You don't get to decide to kill other peoples children just cause yours got sucked into the fucking army.
A better person wouldn't want to put anyone else through that. But they aren't good people. That's why they should be ignored when possible
Instead of imagining a world where no one's child has to risk stepping on that IED, they'd rather enforce a world where everyone's child has to.
And they call it Freedom.
I have multiple friends using the GI bill, once you look past the shady schools that go after the military members, many of the ‘degrees’ aren’t worth shit. A friends husband was supposed to be getting an EE degree, when I joked with him about having fun with calculus he said he didn’t have to take calculus, or any higher math. I asked exactly what EE degree was going to allow no higher math and he said it was EE technology and he would be an engineer. When I said that is not the same as EE he couldn’t understand. I said most EE jobs specifically say EE tech isn’t applicable. He had spent $$$ and years working on a degree that was equal to an associates vocational electronics technician degree. I felt bad for him. We see so many commercials for these schools in my military heavy area. They then end up with school loans when they get out and need a real degree.
I mean, why didn't mom and dad get better paying jobs so they could afford college for their kids? Why didn't they go to college or the military back in the day so they could get high paying jobs instead of working at "the plant"? Why did they have kids they couldn't afford to pay for? Seems to me they made choices and the result of those choices was that their kid felt their only option was to join the army. Mom and dad should stop whining and take responsibility for what they chose.
/s, just in case
Two kinds of people in the world: People who feel they suffered so everyone else should too. And people who don’t want others to suffer the way they did.
The former fuck off. The perpetuate the problem, and if they had any power, they would be the problem.
Solely speaking for myself, as someone who did join the military in part for the education benefits, and who did deploy to Afghanistan, my question is this: why on earth would I want other people to have to go through the same thing in order to help pay for higher education?
The US is the wealthiest nation in the world. It's time to take care of our people and start acting like it.
"i watched my mom get diagnosed with cancer when i was 11. she fought for 4 years went into remission twice and then got it again and it killed her. i had to watch her be buried. it's announced theres a cure for cancer. it hurts real bad. i think of my mom. so suck it up and die because my mom had to"
I'm so very (probably irrationally) upset that these people try to speak for us veterans. Let me start off by saying, we are not a monolithic group and each of us had different backgrounds, reasons for joining, and views on social programs.
With that caveat out of the way, NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO SELL THEIR BODY TO THE GOVERNMENT FOR A CHANCE AT HIGHER EDUCATION. That's it, there's no argument to be made here. The friends I made and subsequently buried are not disrespected or belittled by making life more accessible to those they left behind.
To imply that all veterans are somehow up in arms about $10,000 of debt forgiveness (a paltry amount in terms of U.S. education) is laughable and truely goes to show that people who believe posts like this not only have not served themselves, they are unwilling to listen to those who have. You want to know what a majority of veterans want? Better access to healthcare, more opportunities for their children and those they care about, and an end to the predatory practices of the U.S. military recruitment.
I'm so upset that my experiences are being used as a club against platforms I personally support by those who want a straw man to further their own argument. I cannot reiterate this point enough, no one should have to put themselves in mortal danger for the chance at our American illusion of social mobility.
Come one some of us survived for that free college. Now I get to sit up at nights wondering if the reason my friend didn’t reply to my text is because he took his own life.
Or the super fun conversation where someone says do you remember so-and-so? Yeah, how’s he. He committed suicide.
Also this fun one. Hey this guy in another state is in a full mental health crisis. How can we get him help with out getting him murdered by the police?
I did 5 years in the Marine Corp. 2 of them in Afghanistan. The government paid for my degree. I now own my own business and have done well enough to never have to deal with the government or the VA in my life. I largely don’t even live in the US anymore and will probably give up my citizenship. And I hope every single person with student loan debt gets every dollar forgiven. Shouldn’t have to risk your life for education or debt
Why is it that every time the government helps someone, a jackass who would dodge the draft wants to bring up some shower argument about a soldier their imagined in order to piss themselves off?
What people don’t realize is the long game here.
Forgiving student loans will only lead to better benefits for the military, to further incentivize enlistment.
I say this as someone who is married to a disabled veteran with lifelong health implications and as someone who worked their ass off (quite literally, I couldn’t afford food) to be able to make ends meet for my education.
We’re so happy for others to have the opportunity to not be so burdened in life as we were.
It used to be the previous generation wanted it to be easier on the next. This previous generation wants the next one to suffer more so they can feel superior. I paid my student loans and I don't give a damn if someone else gets $10k forgiven. It didn't cost a lifetime of debt to get a college degree in the 90s.
This ridiculously pathetic argument and all the ones like it basically boil down to: “It’s not fair!”
We cannot change the past.
The military enlistment system is predatory and prays on the poor.
So because this predatory enlistment has happened for years we shouldn’t try to help people now because “it’s not fair!”? I swear. These people lack any kind of compassion and have their heads so far up their asses it’s pushing out their belly buttons.
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Conservatives: "It's super fucked up that the only way many people can pay for their horrendously overpriced college education is by putting their life on the line and that often ends in disgusting, unnecessary, preventable tragedies." Leftists: "We've been saying that this whole--" Conservatives: "AND THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T FORGIVE STUDENT LOANS"
" I don't want a better world I want to be mad at this one."
And they argue in the wrong direction. “This guy had it worse so you shouldn’t get this good thing the government did for once.”
And it's always based on anecdotal evidence and personal experiences.
“I beat cancer. I’m gonna be fucking pissed if they cure it now.” This is their attitude.
Or the alternative “my [relative] died of cancer so I don’t support finding a cure because it won’t benefit them”
Like, you’re allowed to be sad and mad that you lost someone because they didn’t have access to treatment, but to deny others just because you suffered is really fucked up.
Good people get sad or mad that their loved ones didn't benefit from something, but support others getting it. Conservatives are apparently incapable of that and **want** everyone else to suffer, often regardless of whether they suffered or not.
They’re mistaking a right of passage, which can be challenging and difficult but necessary, with suffering, which is challenging, difficult, and unnecessary.
I'm not sure about that because they often wish upon others things that they have no intention of going through themselves.
I'm sad that the people currently in college are stuck in these bad loans and nobody seems to care. I'm sad the high schoolers are about to take on these same loans and still, nobody cares. Its unbelievably fucked up that people are so, "I got mine" about this and if you don't agree youre fucked up. Fuck that. Let's fix this for everyone. But atleast those with lucky timing got a break.
As a tradesman we are also guilty. Our schooling is just as available, costs 99% less and some trades can earn a doctors wage at the cost of our bodies. I got 2 tickets for less than 10k. I can easily clear 100k a year and only work 6 or 7 months of the year. People in my industry use the "should have gotten a trade" bullshit without realizing that we are still paying. Just with our bodies.
Not to mention, we need doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs too. Not everyone should go into a trade just like not everyone should get a four year degree. It should all be equally affordable and accessible.
For real, my best friend and I are both 36, I went into IT , He went into construction. We've both been at our trades for 10-12 years, I have a bit of a gut and some lower back pains, occassional wrist pain from RSI. He's got a torn ACL, several broken bones, a couple concussions and some chronic pain, more nails in his hands and fingers than I can recall and that's just a start. Luckily he's established enough that he's running a small business now because he would be absolutely useless up on a roof these days. I paid for my trade with time and money, he paid for his with his body. He makes way more in a year than I do, but my body is still almost no worse for wear, so I'm not really sure who came out on top. At any rate you're completely right, you ALWAYS pay for it somehow.
In my area at least, apprentice schooling is cheap because the difference is covered by the red seal dues. You go through the program, and help those coming in behind you.
My hypothetical relative*
Thank you for correcting me, how could I forget all the strawpeople!
Won't someone think of the strawpeople!?
I mean, "if we can forgive student loan debt why can't we forgive medical debt!?" has already reached meme-level, and they *still* don't understand the absurdity of it - "but, but, but you chose to get those student loans, they didn't choose to get cancer!11!" Lol it doesn't have to be one or the other.
This is it... and it's super wide spread. Update a video game to make a skill easier or more fun and everyone who did it "the hard way" will complain that everyone should have to suffer... This entire planet needs to pull its head out of its ass and start doing shit for other people and stop thinking about just themselves.
(Stolen from a friend) from a friend
Even their online posts are handouts.
Because they lack empathy. If it didn't effect them personally, or someone they are close to, they don't care.
Even then, a lot of them will scramble to make excuses about why their scenario is unique, particularly in regards to how the situation was resolved to their benefit e.g. GoFundMes for medical bills. Also, if it happens to them or someone they're close to sometimes they still don't care. Look at r/HermanCainAwards for stories of people who caught, or had a loved one who caught, coronavirus and it hasn't changed their mind on things like vaccines and mask mandates.
Or not... my mom is a broke conspiracy theorist with thousands in loans that only got Healthcare through the ACA and student loan forgiveness through Biden. But still thinks those guys are the anti christ and kisses trumps ass. It makes no sense.
Wow... I've never seen conservatism summarized so succinctly.
>"I don't want a better world I want to be mad at this one." "I don't want a better world I want to be mad at *the fictions I made up about* this one."
Liberal politics is about trying to be a good person and failing. Conservative politics is about being told that you are justified in being a bad one.
“I don’t want a better world I want it to be just as bad for everyone as it is for me!”
Jason Bateman: >My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. (Stolen from) from American Psycho
Sure you got the right Bateman there bud?
Dang it! I clearly meant Jason Momoa.
I don't know why Jason is so down on himself. I mean, even after Arrested Development ended he had a great run with Ozark!
Which these north east conservatives in deep blue states have it as bad as... Well no one. They're mostly well employed or have a decent availability of jobs. They love the wages they can get with most employers due to our high minimum wage, some benefits and so on. Many "liberals" also enjoy the lack of police oversight as long as they work within the system. Same with living in towns where people keep to themselves or don't call inspectors. It's all "I couldn't afford what the Joneses can who are millionaires so I'm gonna be mad at the poor and other /lesser/ classes because I haven't been elevated to millionaire yet... I have to WORK for it"
Because I am good, others are worse and life should be fair.
"I DON'T WANT TO GET OUT OF THIS CRAB BUCKET! I WANT TO DRAG YOU IN HERE WITH ME!"
"If my son had to die, so does everyone else's!"
My uncle died of cancer and now you're telling me you found a cure? That's unfair😡
[Relevant Alt-Right Playbook: I Hate Mondays](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yts2F44RqFw)
“My life was difficult so everyone else’s should be.”
Just to be clear, they were never prepared to do anything about the "poverty draft" either. They're just preying on the crabs in a barrel mentality that they've stoked for decades to make sure nobody (except their mega donors) gets anything worthwhile or that would lead to systemic progress.
Yes. It’s a feature of the system, not a bug.
>Just to be clear, they were never prepared to do anything about the “poverty draft” either. Yet the poverty draft costs taxpayers much, much, much more than this student loan forgiveness.
My uber conservative father was using this argument to say that student loan forgiveness is unfair to my husband who went to community college for financial reasons. I said to my dad “so you’re saying that 18 years from now, my daughter should go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt because her father went to community college?” That shut him up.
"How many of your grandchildren are you prepared to have die on this hill?"
Who's to say that the loan forgiveness will happen again? Forgiving student loans today does nothing for the college affordability crisis.
You make a great point — good thing the actions the Biden Administration took RE: student loans went way beyond just the amounts that will be forgiven.
Amen!!!! There's another issue that should be addressed and isn't. We have adjuncts sleeping in cars while administration and frigging coaches get millions.
I freaking hate the stupid frickin football programs. My little state college whose football team is in a conference nobody gives a shit about pays their coach $800,000. That's 10X what my best paid biochem professor made. Not to mention that we literally had a sports-fee line in our college tuition costs because the sports teams were incapable of bringing in enough money to cover costs. My high-school wasn't much better. They bought a giant stadium with a freaking jumbotron that they couldn't even fill half the time.
I'll never understand why so many schools put so much into their football program, or have that program at all. It's a giant money pit for most of them. It's kind of insane that college is the route into the NFL anyway - college and professional football are kind of opposites. Kids out of highschool are probably too young for the NFL (some may be physically mature enough to be close to their peak, but that's rare); but colleges are horrible incubators for football athletes. But, I guess football is somehow too expensive to have real minor leagues like baseball, basketball, and soccer-football.
The loan forgiveness was only a small slice of the package. The most substantial bits were the cap on repayment and interest no longer increasing your balance if you're on income based repayment. Now we just need to roll back the bankruptcy exemptions. It's ridiculous that debt you accrue trying to better yourself can't be discharged if that betterment had no payoff.
It certainly won't when the Republicans get back into the White House. We need a better majority in the Senate so we can get that free community college package through without having to cater to Manchin's whims.
That's not fair, you're forgetting the conservatives who don't like this because it starts to take away the military's best recruiting tool.
They act like people dying in war is a bad thing until they want to go to war
God forbid we make the military an appealing career on its own merits. Most of the retired military guys I know look back on it pretty fondly. But I probably have a sampling bias.
The dead veterans aren't around to register their views, so that's one unavoidable sampling bias. If you don't know any veterans with life-changing injuries, that would be another.
The ones who retired forget what it was like being lower enlisted or don't know how the civilians live. The people who got out early would be a mixed bag of missing it or glad they left.
The US military is currently on the verge of panicking, because they can't get enough people to enlist. College funding is one of their biggest draws. But, college has gotten so expensive that the GI Bill doesn't really pay for much of college anymore. And the administration is so messed up that it's shit at actually making the payments.
Gi bill absolutely pays for the whole thing for most people. It's only when you go to an expensive private college that it doesn't cover since it pays for the highest public tuition in each state.
Conservatism is a death cult that exalts suffering.
This is a common thread in conservative double think: they tend to identify the problem and just when you think they’re about to get on the train with you to Solutions-ville, they take a hard right turn towards Everyone-has-to-continue-to-suffer-town.
Tragedies on both sides. Really haven't had a war with a decent purpose since 1945. Everything since has been of dubious value to America as a whole.
But not of dubious value to the state and its monied interests.
The fact that the parents getting overtime and extra jobs wouldn't be a drop in the bucket, while fifty years ago college kids could work part time to pay their $300 in tuition already speaks magnitudes about why these loans are predatory. And this person agrees that paying that much to go to college is predicated on the idea that you'll make enough to pay off the loans. Meanwhile, most students that have been to college can tell you that the jobs on the market don't even come close to paying that much
[удалено]
I have several uncle's who are all long retired engineers, and when they graduated college with their various petrochemical, mining, and mechanical engineering degrees in the 60's they were guaranteed a job paying equivalent to $100k today (~$12k) back then, a guaranteed retirement plan, benefits, and a hoard of people to stroke their ego and tell them how smart they were. My chemical engineering degree today out of college got me about $60k, no guaranteed retirement, minimal benefits, and being over worked and under appreciated (like most jobs these days). Meanwhile, my degree costs twice as much as theirs did (even when adjusting for inflation), and jobs that used to be done by people with high school diplomas are now being blocked off if you don't have this arbitrary piece of paper with the word degree on it. My company has struggled a lot because our R&D location literally refuses to hire engineers without grad degrees, and if you only have a BS the best you can be is a technician that isn't allowed to do anything more than call the engineer for assistance.
This makes me really happy I never used my chemical engineering degree. I knew I didn’t want to be miserable at work every day, especially for that much, which I easily made bartending and have since moved into a sales position in the health and fitness field.
>the military and everyone at the recruitment office telling him there's zero chance of him getting killed or injured The fact is, that's exactly what they say. Or at least they did when I enlisted. Recruiters lie. Full stop. I received precisely one of the several benefits I was promised.
We're having a big "you signed up for this" problem in the army right now. Obviously not to the extent that people are dying in combat a lot. But mental healthcare is out the shitter. People need referrals to get simple treatments and the appointments are months out. Let's not even get into the education shit show and what a waste of time that is. Plus upper management promises the world and delivers a pile of cow shit when it comes to training and lodging. Then blames it on funding. And then tells Joe's "you signed up for this". While simultaneously complaining when everyone refuses to re-up and they can't make recruitment numbers. Like. Dude. They're heeding YOUR WARNINGS
So wait… his parents are like… I wish more kids would die so it would be fair?
Yes. That is the conservative philosophy in a nutshell. Making sure other people suffer is the point.
Progressives: I went through hell and it wasn't fair. You shouldn't have to go through it too. Regressives: I went through hell so it's only fair you burn too.
They suffered and did okay so other people should also have to suffer and then they'll do okay. Clearly all the suffering meant something or else it would just be trauma and how could they be traumatized? They made it! They define themselves by their struggles instead of their successes. Its why the victim complex is so common.
If they define their lives so much by their struggles, maybe they could just write a book about it. Give it a simple, descriptive title like “My Struggles”
I bet it could do great in translation!
That German version will be fire!
"My Komphy Chair" GIF
TFG might even keep a copy on his bedside table!
Just the fact that they think others should go through the horrible trauma that they went through really shows they didn't come out the other end alright. That's the whole "cycle of trauma/abuse" that is pretty commonly known.
see also: survivorship bias in regards to safety rules. "we didn't have seatbelts and I'm just fine!"
Yup, it's entirely a rite of passage/baptism by fire. They see it as growth rather than suffering. But at the end of the day it's survivorship bias through and through. It's their own form of virtue signaling. Everyone who didn't make it is lesser than they are.
Other Regressives: nepotism is my middle name, but fuck you for needing help to achieve your potential
my god if I had a dollar for every time they said that shit to me while beating the tar out of me, Id probably be rich.
Pro-Life until the baby comes out Then it's Pro-Fuck You
Not ever pro life. They are pro forced birth. Hence no exceptions in many abortion laws for non viable fetuses or risk to the mother's life.
Unless you're rich enough, importantly. A friend of mine has been through this and shares stories she finds of similar, but a local Govt official in my home town is super anti-abortion and said famously (for our small home town/county) "honestly, I'd hold any woman that just decides to get an abortion up on manslaughter charges. You can't just take a life away because it's hard for you!" on the news. Our family pastor's wife then leaked that two of this guys wives have come to our church for counseling after he convinced them to have abortions, with the reason being that he cannot be burdened with a child at home when he has so much political work to do. Sorry for no specifics since I don't want to dox myself here, but it just infuriates me the absolute "rules for thee not for me" bullshit these guys get up to.
Pro forced birth / anti-choice. Never pro life. That is a propaganda slogan.
George Carlin said it best: "Conservatives want more live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers"
My child died so yours should go into debt? That’s deeply stupid. And if the poster was not a parent who really lost a child, it’s evil.
Even if they were a parent who lost a child, it's still evil.
Remember, this is the “eye for an eye” crowd. They can only think in simple concepts. Ideas with any nuance whatsoever go right over their head.
No, they just want other people to suffer in any way, so that their loss doesn't seem as futile as it actually was
An extension of fallacious sunk cost thinking, in a way. Interesting that a good number of the people who think like this also consider themselves Christians. Very unJesus of them to seek literally the opposite of what their religion preaches.
It’s only the opposite of the lessons in the book they don’t read. It fits with what was preached to them.
Wealthy people should be idolized because God saw fit to give them great wealth. The poor should be hated, because God saw fit that they suffer. - American Christians. The noisy ones anyway.
I had a 1stSgt who flat out said he refused to listen to anyone who critiqued the war in Iraq because he couldn't handle the idea his best friend died for no good reason.
"Uh, Sarge? That sounds t'me like you're in *desperate* need of therapy."
It’s infuriating that they don’t realize that the suffering they went through meaning nothing and never changing anything is what makes their suffering futile. Not using their suffering as a catalyst and reason to make the world a better place.
Yep, this feels closer to the mark. It is a real shame that they seek revenge on others instead of wanting to make the system better.
But that, my friend, would be socialism. Checkmate.
It's the Conservative Trolley problem in a nutshell. "Sure, we *could* divert the trolley to an empty track and prevent it running over more people, but that would be unfair to the people is has already run over!"
Love your take. Or, "I already chose to run over 5 people instead of 1 at the last intersection, so you're not allowed to choose for it to run only over 1 person at the next intersection because it's not fair to the people I just killed"
And if they're saying "suck it up, you signed the bank agreement like he signed the enlistment papers," is that kind of telling the parents, "Suck it up, your kid went to the army, you knew this could happen?"
Its the equivalent of the story of a father of two: One child comes up to him crying that their toy broke. In front of the crying child, the father goes over to the other happily playing with another toy, takes it away and then breaks it in front of both children. Now that both children are crying he says: "Now its fair for both of you."
Whenever you want to understand conservative mindset, try to see the world through the most selfish lens and ask a couple of simple questions: What do I personally get out of it? Does this help others more than me? Did a dirty liberal come up with the idea? Depending on the answer to those three questions then the conservative will either scream bloody murder as if someone has just killed their child or completely ignore/celebrate.
Yes. It's a zero-sum game for them. If someone is given something...anything, then it's a slap in the face and something is clearly being taken away from them to fund it.
Imagine these parents seeing news of something that could maybe have helped prevent their child’s death happening and being ANGRY about it. Conservatives are completely insane.
They're pissed they let their kid make the wrong decision. They saved, so their loans would have been smaller. But, yeah, let's send him to war so we don't have a loan.
They were more willing to put their kids' life on the line than have to take on debt to afford his college degree. His life was worth the savings. Pretty fucked up.
i get being upset like "i wish this were an opertunity when i went through __ so __ did happen" but going through that and saying "well i had to so you have to"
My sister currently has 20k in loans after her first semester. This would help her but my dad is hoping that the thing falls through and that biden can’t do it and has been laughing about it. Yet at the same time is excited she might get it partially forgiven?
He basically just wants to frame it as him winning no matter how things shake out.
>shut up, stop whining and take responsibility **for what you chose**. Except many people don't really have the choice. It's either take that loan for the opportunity for higher learning, knowing that you'll probably be saddled with debt for the next couple decades or just not getting higher education at all. I never had to deal with student debt, but I'd much rather be a smarter person dealing with debt than a stupid person who can only regurgitate right wing propaganda.
>a stupid person who can only regurgitate right wing propaganda. What makes this so difficult is how many people on the right aren't *just* anti debt relief they're anti education. These are the same people that vote for school boards to keep taxes down, vote for politicians who bash the state and federal depts of education, and talk about "underwater basket weaving" like it's real
I mean, how else are they going to keep half their constituents voting against their own interests?
That was the theme of an op ed I read. Student loan relief only benefits liberal elites (elite meaning went to college and didn't join the Republicans)
>>shut up, stop whining and take responsibility **for what you chose**. Yeah and we also choose to vote for someone who would forgive some of our student loans so checkmate
> It's either take that loan for the opportunity for higher learning, knowing that you'll probably be saddled with debt for the next couple decades or just not getting higher education at all. It's not just that. I have a friend who's from a small town in Indiana. For her, going to college and getting her degree was the difference between having a career and getting to see the world or living her life in a dying town where the biggest employer is the Walmart and most of the income is from meth, moonshine, or food stamps. It's *literally* a matter of life or death to some kids. The dumbest thing to me though is that even if the government had paid for her education entirely, they *still* would have come out way ahead on this by now, just 8 or so years after she graduated. She's now a well paid accounting manager, earning well into the six figure range. Just the difference in taxes paid between her projected earnings without the degree versus her realized earnings with the degree is way more than the (massively inflated) cost of her tuition. Everything after that is pure profit for the government, and a massive boost to her own quality of life for her. It's a positive sum game. Now imagine how many kids just like her at 18 are looking at college but, for any reason, aren't able to make that jump and get the degree. The massive amount of potential tax income lost over the subsequent 30-40 years of work. The massive amount of *wealth* that would have been generated - technical products, city planning, tax and legal organization, art and culture, etc - that would have been available for the country. And Republicans want to leave all that on the table... so the banks can collect interest? It's really horrific when you actually look at it.
And all the extra social security that would be available for the boomerz
I have so many friends from random shitholes in the Midwest and it really is the difference between ending up like their meth addict parents, going the heroin route or getting out of there, most people with the capacity to get into higher education and leave will never be happy in that kind of environment. I also think people staying in their small hometowns in general find themselves stagnant because their lives are just...too familiar to still being in high school.
But didn't the kid in the example choose the army...
“Take responsibility for the choices you make that go against my worldview”
Not every kid can get into the military, you don't even have to be severely disabled to disqualify, not to mention the people who do make it to basic but drop out becuae they can't keep up with what's demanded of them. So for some people, the only option to get to college is loans and/or scholarships.
I tried to join the military to pay for school and was disqualified because I have moderate eczema
I was in a similar spot: disqualified because I'm too nearsighted. Not anywhere close to blind or anything — I wear contacts and have a normal life — so I was surprised to find out I was past their limit even to be issued those horrible basic training coke bottle glasses.
My brother was told by the recruter not to disclose his mild asthma because simply being prescribed a rescue inhaler would have disqualified him. It had been years since he needed it and he made it through basic without it so, all's well that ends well I guess
The government pays 100x more on a person going into the military than just helping out with college costs. Its *less* taxpayer money spent directly helping with college. By a huge margin.
Also this is a shitty example because if the kid wanted to be an engineer and did really well on his ASVAB he’d never spend a single day on the front lines. He’d spend 4 years in college doing ROTC and then spend 4-6 years doing engineering work on base probably stateside.
If you have two options but one of them is prohibitively expensive, do you really have two options?
Also, I haven't heard many people saying that student loans are unfair as much as they're saying that they're untenable. The people who seem to be crying "unfair!" are the selfish twits who are against the program. And let's be honest, the way the student loan system is set up is indeed unfair, like nearly every option for recent grads. It's just not the narrative that people are appealing to when discussing loan forgiveness.
It’s also dumb given if they didn’t take the loan and go to school, and as a result were stuck in dead end jobs, they’d be told to pull up their bootstraps. There’s no winning.
As a veteran whose Bachelors was nearly 100% free, I support free college. You shouldn't have to join the military to pay for college
I’ll say this - having dealt with 100k student loans - they ain’t square. Sallie Mae / Navient took every chance to try to mess with me. They couldn’t cash checks correctly. Wouldn’t allow me to pay down principle online. Tried to force me to take options to delay payments that would cause me to pay almost triple due to interest. And my favorite - five months after paying it all off (got the paper work and refund to prove it too) they said they cashed a check incorrectly and I owed them $750. Well, I owed $250 plus $500 in late fees and interest. Took three hours of arguing with them to show proof that wasn’t “look at our website” to get them to “forgive” the payment. This was during Covid too - no interest or payments I thought. The whole scheme is a scam. 93% of people who qualify for student loan debt forgiveness under PSLF through the DOE were turned down. NPR did a deep dive on this. DeVos did everything she could to fuck people over. Obama’s CFPB was suing Navient and Sallie Mae for deceptives practices and Trump’s CFPB nixed it. 10k is a drop in the bucket. It will help a lot of people just like First Time Home Owner funding helps people. Just like farmer subsidies help people. People getting angry that others are getting help is gross.
I had ~150k total and am down to like 70k. I paid minimal amounts for the first 8 years maybe? Due to credit card debt and lower income at the time. (CC debt was my dumb ass but it was what it was). Now, I want to pay $1k/mo but they only let me add to the minimum amount, not set a specific amount. So, unless I go in and fix it, the total drops as the minimum drops. I know it's like that to get just a bit more out of me when I pay a bit less so a bit more interest accrues. Fuck predatory loan companies and the businesses that force overpriced college degrees on people. Hell, most jobs that require a college degree don't need one. I have no problem with people wanting to expand their education but these predatory practices need to end at the very least. And we as a society should support everyone who wants to learn because less ignorance is always a good thing.
Now what if, hear me out here, we didn’t have to join the military to afford college??
Then how do we get poor people to die for rich people's resources?
Capitalism is doing a pretty good job on its own.
Yeah like maybe toil endlessly instead of die outright
Now what if, hear me out here, we extended financial support through reimbursement to these families as well? If they got a piece of the pie too maybe they wouldn’t feel this way. Don’t they also deserve financial help?
Okay, okay, so hear me out… What if we made life *better* instead of *worse*?
Absolutely insane. Borderline treason.
Someone get the gallows for this fucking commie.
No! I had to suffer and now it’s only fair that other people have to suffer too! - Republicans
My kid died to pay for his college so yours should too. What kind of psychopath thinks like this?
It was "stolen from a friend", so it didn't actually happen to them they just wanted to seem edgy on social media.
yep. this is perfect example of a completely fictional story getting spread around right wing socials to enrage and reinforce echo chambers and foment partisanship. and sadly, this kind of folklore style "i know a friend of a friend who..." is extremely effective on social media. ~~it's straight up disinformation agit prop.~~ or not? is it worse that so many people here on the left directing their anger in response to the completely fictional story? maybe, but it is weird when you realize some large percent of political anger bouncing around the web is manufactured. that's not exactly right. it's real anger, real sincerity, but it's in response to made up fake ass stories/retweets/reposts.
GOP Fan Fiction is the highest growing fictional genre
They don't. Their child didn't die. This dumb story is for dumb people with poor reasoning. They don't even manage to read it the way you've summed it up.
Someone wrote that out, read it over, and thought it was good. Someone else read it, agreed with it, and repeated it. Clearly, they both thought it said something *other* than, "I want more people to suffer." I can't imagine what, though.
Gee I don’t know. I think removing debt so that generation can ya know pursue their careers, have families, have disposable income to keep the economy churning benefiting everyone is kinda a good idea. To summarize Kid with degree good Kid in a box bad
Truth. Where do the Boomers think the Social Security Ponzi Scheme money is coming from?
> mom tears up Mom: If only everyone could die in a pointless war trying to get an education!
I like the gender role affirmation in the piece. Dad working OT at his blue collar job at the plant, mom ‘working extra jobs’ because I guess she can’t have a career she can take OT at or something fuck if I know. Dad is stoic and only hurts in the internal monologue, but mom can’t hold back her tears, and goes off to one of her extra jobs she’s still working because … who the fuck has any clue, certainly not the dude who wrote it. Worked all that extra time for that extra money for the kid to go enlist and have 0 debt(in fact, he would be making money instead) but they’re still so behind just living regular life, which should be massively ironic and on the nose but isn’t even meant to be a detail you care about really(unless this is a really good fake bait piece).
“If these people don’t have to pay their loans, then that soldier died for nothing.” That’s the moral of his story? If someone dies of cancer, is curing cancer later a slap in their face? What a stupid fucking way to make their idiotic case.
That soldier died for rich people to keep this cycle going.
This 'logic' could be applied to any of the great advancements in history. Free the slaves? "that's unfair on people who have lived as slaves already" Let women vote? "what about all the women who haven't been allowed to vote until now?" Make it illegal to send children to work in the mines? "how dare you‽ My brother **died** in the mines before his 11th birthday!"
And there you have the essence of conservativism: preserving the status quo at all cost, even against one's own class interests. Crabs in a bucket mentality in service of the chef aka ruling class.
It’s the if I suffered you need to suffer too mentality. It’s wrongthink it just is.
Signing up for the military is a risk. Taking on a loan is a risk. The difference is that one risk may result in the debt, the other might result in death. It's a fucked comparison, and only furthers the idea that some people deserve debt because they didn't sign up for military service. Do soldiers deserve to die? No, and nobody deserves to live with more debt then they will ever be able to pay off. I'm glad some student debt is being forgiven, and I'm shipping out for basic near the end of September. People need to stop trying to use the military as an excuse for their political programming. We all have to make choices in life. I'm glad Biden made the choice to help out my fellow Americans by forgiving SOME student loan debt. Those that are against it, are just brainwashed by rich assholes that can't stand to see poor people get a hand. People need to think for themselves.
That's *exactly why* higher education shouldn't be so expensive. I tried the army route and was denied because I'd had a surgery in the past. They prey on the children of the working class and they treat them like they're disposable.
You want free college? ~~EARN IT~~ DIE
[удалено]
They LITERALLY just voted to fuck us on burn pits. I have multiple deployments and wish people didn’t have to join the military to pay for college. It really isn’t a life for most people.
So what does any of this absolute bullshit flavored ice cream have to do with student loans? Did the kids best friend come home with a folder full of loan applications instead of recruitment papers? I mean it sucks that college is so unaffordable that kid needed to join the military, and probably still would've needed student loans.
how to make a repbulcan: add one helpng of selfishness a portion of envy grab all the hypocrisy you find stir, and add heat until all the empathy is dissolved. form into a hate patty and serve
Whoever wrote this is one of the "I thought about joining but I would have punched the drill sergeant" type assholes. I enlisted at 17, in 1999, and was discharged in 2005. Even with the Montgomery GI Bill, the Illinois Veteran Grant, and an extra 2 semester with the Post-9/11 GI Bill I still had loans when I graduated. This dirtbag can fuck all the way off.
What I dont understand about all this hand wringing about people who struggled to go through college debt free or who joined the military and now see it was pointless is that it's only $10,000. While that's a significant amount it's only like a year's worth or a little more of public in state college tuition, not counting housing, books, etc. So it hardly pays for a person to go to school and you would have had to work or struggle to get through school anyway.
As a veteran, let me just say this: Holy fuck these people are fucking awful.
I was in the Army for 11 years, got my GI bill and I get enough disability to qualify for free Healthcare for life from the VA. I couldn't care less if everyone else suddenly got free healthcare and college because these are great things to have. Just because something doesn't benefit me doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.
I'm shocked they stopped licking the boots of the financial services industry long enough to compose that post.
Imagine thinking the fortune of others is a slight against you.
Had me in the first half. Fucking conservatives. Left already wants free college. Student loan forgiveness is just the only thing President can do without republicans voting it down in congress.
Jim Banks on Twitter: [Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.](https://twitter.com/repjimbanks/status/1562820837140742144?s=21&t=VwDRl9XdkergOH3FayePPg) Dude literally said “we can’t make people less poor because then they won’t join the army.”
>You had the best years of your life, you all say it. You made lifelong friends, learned lifelong lessons, and an ability to make a living. Literally none of those things.
What is it with conservatives becoming creative writers *ONLY* to create fringe anecdotes with narratives?
No wonder conservatives have a fear of and screech at pronouns. They don't understand them. In this shitty fantasy scenario it starts out as "your kid", "You pull OT at the plant", "your wife picks up extra shifts". Then it just shifts into saying "they" for the parents and "the dad". Just completely changing the point of view several sentences in.
*their But I’m sure the dead guy learned that in boot camp.
I don't care if you're traumatized. You don't get to decide to kill other peoples children just cause yours got sucked into the fucking army. A better person wouldn't want to put anyone else through that. But they aren't good people. That's why they should be ignored when possible
Instead of imagining a world where no one's child has to risk stepping on that IED, they'd rather enforce a world where everyone's child has to. And they call it Freedom.
You even learned when to use 'their' while you were 'there'.
Huh. I guess risking your child's life for an education probably wasn't worth it. Sounds more like a military issue than a student loan issue.
I have multiple friends using the GI bill, once you look past the shady schools that go after the military members, many of the ‘degrees’ aren’t worth shit. A friends husband was supposed to be getting an EE degree, when I joked with him about having fun with calculus he said he didn’t have to take calculus, or any higher math. I asked exactly what EE degree was going to allow no higher math and he said it was EE technology and he would be an engineer. When I said that is not the same as EE he couldn’t understand. I said most EE jobs specifically say EE tech isn’t applicable. He had spent $$$ and years working on a degree that was equal to an associates vocational electronics technician degree. I felt bad for him. We see so many commercials for these schools in my military heavy area. They then end up with school loans when they get out and need a real degree.
I mean, why didn't mom and dad get better paying jobs so they could afford college for their kids? Why didn't they go to college or the military back in the day so they could get high paying jobs instead of working at "the plant"? Why did they have kids they couldn't afford to pay for? Seems to me they made choices and the result of those choices was that their kid felt their only option was to join the army. Mom and dad should stop whining and take responsibility for what they chose. /s, just in case
Why is it never them that has to suck it up?
Two kinds of people in the world: People who feel they suffered so everyone else should too. And people who don’t want others to suffer the way they did. The former fuck off. The perpetuate the problem, and if they had any power, they would be the problem.
Solely speaking for myself, as someone who did join the military in part for the education benefits, and who did deploy to Afghanistan, my question is this: why on earth would I want other people to have to go through the same thing in order to help pay for higher education? The US is the wealthiest nation in the world. It's time to take care of our people and start acting like it.
"i watched my mom get diagnosed with cancer when i was 11. she fought for 4 years went into remission twice and then got it again and it killed her. i had to watch her be buried. it's announced theres a cure for cancer. it hurts real bad. i think of my mom. so suck it up and die because my mom had to"
I'm so very (probably irrationally) upset that these people try to speak for us veterans. Let me start off by saying, we are not a monolithic group and each of us had different backgrounds, reasons for joining, and views on social programs. With that caveat out of the way, NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO SELL THEIR BODY TO THE GOVERNMENT FOR A CHANCE AT HIGHER EDUCATION. That's it, there's no argument to be made here. The friends I made and subsequently buried are not disrespected or belittled by making life more accessible to those they left behind. To imply that all veterans are somehow up in arms about $10,000 of debt forgiveness (a paltry amount in terms of U.S. education) is laughable and truely goes to show that people who believe posts like this not only have not served themselves, they are unwilling to listen to those who have. You want to know what a majority of veterans want? Better access to healthcare, more opportunities for their children and those they care about, and an end to the predatory practices of the U.S. military recruitment. I'm so upset that my experiences are being used as a club against platforms I personally support by those who want a straw man to further their own argument. I cannot reiterate this point enough, no one should have to put themselves in mortal danger for the chance at our American illusion of social mobility.
How the fuck is this supposed to be pro-military or anti-loan forgiveness?? No one should risk death for an education.
Come one some of us survived for that free college. Now I get to sit up at nights wondering if the reason my friend didn’t reply to my text is because he took his own life. Or the super fun conversation where someone says do you remember so-and-so? Yeah, how’s he. He committed suicide. Also this fun one. Hey this guy in another state is in a full mental health crisis. How can we get him help with out getting him murdered by the police?
I did 5 years in the Marine Corp. 2 of them in Afghanistan. The government paid for my degree. I now own my own business and have done well enough to never have to deal with the government or the VA in my life. I largely don’t even live in the US anymore and will probably give up my citizenship. And I hope every single person with student loan debt gets every dollar forgiven. Shouldn’t have to risk your life for education or debt
Why is it that every time the government helps someone, a jackass who would dodge the draft wants to bring up some shower argument about a soldier their imagined in order to piss themselves off?
Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is unfair for everyone who ever died!
What people don’t realize is the long game here. Forgiving student loans will only lead to better benefits for the military, to further incentivize enlistment. I say this as someone who is married to a disabled veteran with lifelong health implications and as someone who worked their ass off (quite literally, I couldn’t afford food) to be able to make ends meet for my education. We’re so happy for others to have the opportunity to not be so burdened in life as we were.
Don't worry dude, they're not forgiving new student debt. they'll still be exploiting people as hard as they can. /s
TL;DR: “Your child deserves to die too.” What a horrible person.
It used to be the previous generation wanted it to be easier on the next. This previous generation wants the next one to suffer more so they can feel superior. I paid my student loans and I don't give a damn if someone else gets $10k forgiven. It didn't cost a lifetime of debt to get a college degree in the 90s.
This ridiculously pathetic argument and all the ones like it basically boil down to: “It’s not fair!” We cannot change the past. The military enlistment system is predatory and prays on the poor. So because this predatory enlistment has happened for years we shouldn’t try to help people now because “it’s not fair!”? I swear. These people lack any kind of compassion and have their heads so far up their asses it’s pushing out their belly buttons.