Do we all think loan forgiveness is the cure for student loans?
Not at all, but loan forgiveness wasn’t mentioned in the comic. It’s just putting a bandaid on a capitalized educational system that should not be for making money but rather a societal investment into our betterment. Id keep my loans I have left and vote for free education any day of the week if we had the option. (Of course I wouldn’t say no to both) But I think some people were trying to use loan forgiveness to breach the doors of free education.
I mean I sold 4 years of my life to the military to not have to take loans out, so I get the gut reaction
The main cause of the student loan issue is the commodification of education. Everyone wanted to go to college and at first it was optional but then as more people did it it became a requirement, then they realized they can charge more and more for education that is worse and worse because a good chunk of people dont actually want to learn / be there. They’re just there for the paper that’ll let them get jobs and not be unemployed, or even just to say that they went.
I look around and people are playing damn Pokémon Showdown in class, there was that one scandal of an influencer girl who was the daughter of someone important that bought her admission to Stanford(?) and would stream literally about how she didn’t care about education she just wanted the college experience.
Hot take: Not everyone should be going to college, High School should just prepare people better. Even if we forgive all loans right now it doesn’t fix the issue. Instead of your problem it will just be your kids’ problem
Trades are a good option, but how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers?
how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers
That would be lit
What makes you think they aren’t already?
While I agree in theory, I’m not really sure there’s much that can be done in practice. The genie is out of the bottle here: jobs want the paper, so people get the paper, leading to jobs expecting people to have the paper. An employer is unlikely to deliberately “lower their standards” (in their view) if the pool of potential employees with a degree is large enough for their needs already. Since you can’t legislate that employers are not allowed to require a degree, and you can’t expect people to not get a degree and sacrifice their own potential future to break that cycle, we’re kind of at an impasse.
That’s why the only way forward that anyone’s figured out so far is government funded higher education.
Edit:typos
It also reinforces the class system. ‘elite’ employers won’t even look at you if you don’t come from an ivy or a top 5/10 school.
and there are fewer and fewer of these ‘elite’ jobs to go around, hence the paranoia among the upper middle classes that their children will have zero future if they don’t get into an ivy.
I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too
I think every one of them assumes they will never get a cent of that money back. They do live in America, after all, the land of “fuck you; got mine.”
Change the legislation to give every living person back every cent they ever paid towards student loans, and many opinions would change.
The Republican party would still be completely against it though, so we’d still have millions of boot lickers out there arguing to hurt their own financial situation in order to please their superiors.
What if Im against it because “fuck you, you took out the loan knowing full well what it meant”?
I would argue that people didn’t know what it meant, or were in a position where they could not refuse the loan.
Kids grow up being taught that they had to have a college education to have a good job, and that a good job is necessary to have a good life. Parents and counselors reinforce this, so they have no reasonable means believe otherwise.
Employers DO require college education more and more. Not all, true, but the competition for those jobs is higher, so expect lower pay and greater difficulties in getting hired. Often that pay is not even enough to make rent. For the rest, the number of people who have a degree is in increasing, so the competition for those jobs is increasing as well, with the same decrease in pay.
So out of the gate, children are put in a situation where, from everything they can see and are told, they need a degree. But most can’t afford one. Therefore, they are placed in a position where they must take a loan with no guarantee that the degree will get them a job that pays well enough for them to pay back loan.
So it’s a bit more than “you took a loan, you pay for it.” It better described as “you were cooreced into taking this loan on false pretences presented to you by all of society.” Society should take responsibility for that.
Don’t take out a loan that you cannot afford.
How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who’s never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?
Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you’ll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you’ll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that’s about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.
I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings
Student loans are the one type of loan you can’t simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There’s a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.
I was saving for college and aware of the costs from the age of 14. That’s why I got a job at 15.
It was pretty easy to understand. They showed me a piece of paper with all the numbers. Basic mathematics.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair. But… if you need a job after school that pays a certain amount… well you need to plan for that too.
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position. His lack of research is his own fault. Not anyone else’s. Nobody is owed a job inbiology just because they studied it, and most people who get those jobs go to top programs and are top performers.
Your friend needs to get a job in an office, pushing papers, like vast majority of us. Those are the jobs that are available. Take their bio dataset skills, and join a marketing firm, like the rest of us.
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them. FWIW I have a brother who is in this rut right now. He refuses to get jobs that are ‘below’ him so he has been unemployed for 3 years now. He’s a prideful idiot.
I went to an ivy league school and my first job was pushing papers because it was the first job I could get. And I built up my job skills and my career. I didn’t sit around living at home for months/years whining about how there are ‘no good jobs’. I got to work and started paying off my loans. I have zero empathy for the people who sit around and refuse to work because they feel it is ‘below’ them to work outside of a certain field/industry or income level.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair.
We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them.
Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build a world that’s less harsh to people who do so!
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position.
I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that’s setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!
Was it also sponsored by the “I want my kids to have a better life than me” crew who then complains about kids having it too easy these days?
I want them to have it better and easier. But an easier life, not just an easy childhood that doesn’t prepare them for their inevitable crushing adulthood.
I want the opposite tbh, kids just don’t appreciate it. Send them to the mines first, and then give them an easy adulthood.
As a Gen-X, if I was a kid these days I’d be pissed too. It seems as much grief as they’re given by adults, they understand early on they’ve been given the worst hand.
Our gen made such a big deal about being cynical, yet life ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than even we imagined. Although it does show we were right to be cynical.
Ya, m gut tells me teenagers are much more aware of just how bad it is because of their generation’s social media. I was pretty unaware at that age. I think there was a bit of a shift in societal values and the youth reflect it more as well.
It has also steadily been getting worse and we keep telling them they are the ones who are going to get seriously shafted compared to the rest of us. That probably doesn’t help.
Honestly, I think we underestimate how much of an impact telling them that is. Realism isn’t bad, but kids’ only real point of reference is their past experience and what adults tell them. So if we set them up to think it’ll be terrible compared to us, while we complain that everything is bad, they’re gonna assume that’s truly awful to have to be told about it.
Note: not to say things are going great.
I wasn’t really aware of it as a kid either, but I don’t think I ever really heard about climate change stuff until Inconvenient Truth came out. It just wasn:t something that was talked about, because we weren’t really feeling the effects.
I’m amazed (in a bad way) at how far we’ve fallen in 25 years, and I fear for the life my child will have as an adult.
And what a righteous 15 years of uneducated adulthood it’ll be before they die of black lung.
yeah but think of all the pituitary glands we could harvest
The ones that survive will have it good. It’s like in the movie 300 when they send their kids into the forest. The mines is how you separate the wheat from the chaff
Chaff is responsible for all the faults in society. We need a wheats only country.
University years aren’t really “childhood”, but if their childhood at the grade school level was better that would both make it happier and prepare them better for adulthood. And college.
What a better way to achieve this, than putting education behind a paywall!
better and easy are not the same thing
You man as in expensive and more difficult aren’t the same thing?
my nephews have a better life than me. but their lives are way harder and stressful than mine was. they have zero free time apart from holidays. they do nothing creative or exploratory, every minute of everyday is scheduled.
their college educations are paid for. mine wasn’t. but they will work way harder to achieve less. but they eat way better food/healthcare, have better clothes, have better homes, etc than I ever did.
of course they are growing up this way and thus they don’t and never will appreciate how good they have it. they already are razor focused on the fact that someone else has it better than them and how unfair it is they aren’t traveling to europe for family vacations like their friends are.
I’m somewhat torn on this:
Yes, I totally agree that federal loans should be forgiven even if someone pays theirs off.
Private loans though? Not so much. That’s basically the same as a mortgage from a bank. Or a car loan even. That money ultimately ends up in the borrower’s possession after the school balance is paid. That? I am not so willing to share the cost of.
Debt itself has a history of forgiveness. Western Societies could benefit from being more forgiving imo. 30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal, but thats a lot of credit debt today.
My first car loan had a 26% interest rate. Over that 36 month loan I would have literally paid over twice the total value of the loan if I didn’t refinance it after 6 months.
I learned a lot through the mistakes I made that day and have endeavored to not repeat any of those mistakes (and so far I haven’t!)
I, somewhat, feel you. My hang up is federal loans are often s pittance
Maybe my FAFSA has the wrong code(at this point, for my oldest). Maybe I should have lied about my assets? I haven’t done my research, but it did not seem like my lack of home or non-beater factor in
Yeah I don’t think this covers the situation as much as it’s a nice feel good story.
Imagine for a second you are relatively poor, you go to a state school or community college in order to afford it. You have loans, but they are small.
Now imagine you’re upper middle class, you go to a private or out of state school and take loans out for a much much larger amount than the other person, with the expectation that you’re getting more value for your money (let’s ignore the labyrinth there for a second – this is something many people believe and believing it, for some, makes it true).
Now, both loans are forgiven
Youve succeeded in making the rich richer, giving them both the higher valued education and all of their money back.
Or imagine you’re that poor student but you’re smart: you got a grant or scholarship making your loans nonexistent, but only if you go to the state school.
Once again, forgiving loans makes the already wealthy person significantly more wealthy and does nothing to benefit the poorer person.
Yes, of course, there’s a wide range of reasons a person might go down either route, and I’m absolutely certain there are many millions of people who have gotten loans way above their wealth in order to go to a better school and jump out of poverty (or whatever). This comic ignores the nuance.
In the cancer analogy, this would be a poor person dying or otherwise experiencing terrible health problems because they couldn’t get the care they needed, then when a cure is developed, only administering it to the people who could afford care to begin with (ie american health care)
This is a great point. And yes, the system typically always rewards the rich far more than the poor.
If this is a one-time event it’s hardly the solution to the problem. Education should be free or close to free in general.
If that’s the case, things suddenly look different. Even only if e.g. state schools are free.
In my country the tuition fee for a state university is around €30 per semester, and that doesn’t even go to the university but to fund the student governing body (not sure what’s the right translation for the term).
This means, that everyone can get a quality education even if they are poor. In fact, most people I went to university with funded their flat/student accomodation and food with a part-time job while going to university. No debts or financial assistance needed.
This doesn’t cover private universities, but (a) the difference in quality and reputation isn’t relevant and (b) free public universities means that private universities are also somewhat price capped if they want to stay competitive.
Of course, but that’s never been a serious proposal in this country so I wasn’t responding to it.
It’s feasible to do this today in the US at some schools, but your parents have to really push you to get a lot of scholarships. It’s not common.
For me, I do kind of think that if someone paid and then forgiveness happened, they ought to be at least partially compensated if they have any history of being low income. They could have put their loan payments into something else but they didn’t so they’d kind of end up screwed over by their slavishly responsible bill paying.
That said: its stupid to not want broad student loan forgiveness because the student loan crisis is literally damaging the economy. Its hurting everyone, even people who already paid their loans off.
Pretty much. It would be more broadly acceptable if it was like ‘if you had student loans in the past decade you get a $5000 tax credit’. Maybe more if your reported income for the past 10 years was below a certain threshold.
That would benefit everyone, including those who paid off their loans and they could then tax that money from the tax credit and spend it elsewhere.
This type of thing was huge beneficial for child care too. The Child Care Tax Credits during the pandemic were a huge benefit and halved the child poverty rate. It’s sheer stupidity they were cancelled.
Id be ok if there was some kind of reimbursement, but I wouldn’t stop student loan reform from happening if it didn’t include reimbursement.
I like that idea. Phase in tax credits based on the student loans you have paid in the last X years, with higher weight given to more recent payments.
To be clear, even though I’ve just about finished paying mine off, I’d vote for full forgiveness in a heartbeat with or without that provision, but I think it would make it much more pallatable for a large chunk of the population.
because it would be fair and equitable and it would avoid the moral hazard of giving someone with 90K in debt a free ride.
Not all student debt is the same either. There are different types of debt… and frankly some people literally took out 50K in loans and blew it on partying rather than studying/tuition. I knew several people who did this in both my undergrad and graduate schools. One of my ex girlfriends took out a 50K student loan and bought a 30K car with it as a ‘living expense’… and then later quit her program w/o the degree, sold the car, but then used the money from the car say to go travel for a few months. All while piling up interest on the loan. Her tutition, btw cost nothing, she was a grad student getting paid to go to this program. She had something like 80K in debt from this stupid selfish choice. But her getting a 5000 tax credit isn’t going to really absolve her of that debt.
She was also working a decent job making 50K a year… and still was not paying back her loans.
The goverment paying off student loans is like bucketing water out of your boat and ignoring the hole. Like sure, its gonna keep some people afloat for a little longer but the issue hasn’t really been addressed, the problem is still there and the cycle remains a perpetual shit storm. The cost of education is preposterous, the people taking these loans dont have jobs to support paying it back, and most of them are too young to have the experience informing them of what a monumental undertaking paying it back will be. If they tried to get the same loan for a house or business they would be denied. There are so many issues to tackle but paying off the loans rewards the groups who created the problem in the first place. It incentivizes them to continue the foul play and prey upon vulnerable youth. Without some systematic reform accompanying the loan payoffs to ensure this doesn’t continue we will end up in the same situation over and over again.
While I fully agree the issue is the underlying problem… that is some All Lives Matter shit.
Because basically anyone who brings that up as an excuse to not wipe the slate clean are in that same “We need to think really hard about how we do this and not do anything for another 30 years”. Same as most “Banning guns won’t stop gun violence” people. It is a bad faith argument that boils down to insisting that the perfect MUST be the enemy of the good.
Im not saying we shouldn’t pay off the loans or delay doing so. I’m saying that alone will not solve the problem. We must do both. I never hear discussion on that second part. Ignoring it is foolish.
And yes, the snails pace at which reform would occur is infuriating. It shouldn’t take 30 years because some asshats will continue to argue in the nature of “how dare we hurt these businesses?!” while people continue to suffer. It sucks that it likely will, but if we dont start now it will never happen instead of eventually.
My brother is a big fan of law and governance, and he said that American society was set up so that laws move at a snail’s pace.
The shit that the current turd in chief is doing by writing hundreds of executive orders to constantly shake things up and make people constantly have to keep adapting to changes until they don’t know from one day to the next what the laws are going to be are what they originally attempted to prevent by making it so slow and arduous to change the laws.
Dampnut issuing executive orders like they’re leftover wads of tissue on the toilet paper he has to wipe his gigantic, flabby ass with is destabilizing the country and also making it so that stupid people think that good laws can be made quickly.
The foul swine in a bad orange toupee is causing multiple levels of damage to the country, and one of the side effects of that is making it so that it feels like we can solve something like a $1 trillion student loan debt crisis by signing a couple of sheets of paper.
What a good law would be would be something more like making it so that the interest on student loans can no longer accrue interest, or reducing the interest on student loans to something reasonable, like 1% over the federal interest rates.
It could do things like allowing student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy, or by setting a maximum on how much can be paid off over the life of the loan before it is automatically forgiven, no matter how long that takes.
Right now, the issue with student loans are manifold.
Some of them are things like the interest accruing interest, which means that people can take out a loan for $60,000 or $70,000, pay back $120,000 over 15 years, and owe over $100,000 still on the student loans.
Some of the other issues are things like people taking out loans for careers that are interesting but that leave them bankrupt or like does not provide them income. I know somebody who went to a Mormon college in Utah and got her master’s degree in fucking pottery and ceramics.
Her student loans were like $90,000 so that she can make pots at home because there are no fucking jobs in America for potters.
Five years of education, and after student loans, well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and what she’s doing is the thing she was doing while she was going to college, which is working as a jewelry artist for a small jewelry firm, which is something she did not need the degree for, and that her degree does not apply to.
So there should be some limits or some hard rules on what colleges can charge based off of how well what you are learning gives you the ability to pay back the cost of the education.
I’m not smart enough to figure out what those are, but I am smart enough to say that it is a problem to charge someone six figures of their total lifetime income for something that they are passionate about, but that is ultimately incapable of paying back the original cost, and that also saps the happiness out of their life.
I don’t disagree with you, but at the same time… the government can’t stop being from making bad life choices if they decide to make them. Your friend made an awful choice and will now pay the consequences of it for the rest of her life. And the onus is on her to correct that. It is her choice to stay and work in that jewelry shop instead of move or try to apply he skills elsewhere or to another industry. I know art grads who took their skills and moved them into machining and other industrial areas where there are plenty of good jobs and demand for them. But cleraly your friend doesn’t sound like they would be interested in that, so much as staying in the same place doing the same thing forever, which is weird why they even got a masters anyway.
Well, I only brought them up because it was a relevant event that I am aware of. While I also agree that getting a master’s degree in pottery is not exactly an ideal career path for most people.
It’s not like she’s given up on pottery, it’s just that it’s no longer 1300 BC and there are no viziers that pay excellent money for ceramics.
She is also running a business in her spare time and working on developing a name for herself and forming an art studio and collective with other people, and it’s possible that the knowledge and experience that she has gained will not only help her be successful, but will also help her help her friends be successful in this because there is money to be made in custom artwork and tchotchskis.
I also know a truck driver that got a law degree, and they worked their ass off, they got burned out on law, and now they just sit on their butt and drive a truck back and forth from California to Atlanta, 48 weeks out of the year.
What I mean to say is that a one-size-fits-all system of student loans and college fees is not really an appropriate way to handle the task, the obligation, the opportunity of educating Americans.
I want people, if they so choose, to be truck drivers and ceramists and beauticians and anything else. I- but I also want the price to fit the education and for the system to allow for artists. I want there to be artists and “non-financially viable” education and life paths that still make financial sense when it comes to education fees.
And I also want there to be a pressure release valve for when a person makes a mistake, so that their lives, their potential future, are not destroyed by the consequences of their mistake.
We treat education as if it actually is a functioning part of our capitalistic society that can operate under the same rules that profit-driven businesses do, instead of treating it as a social good that benefits us regardless of what kind of society we live in.
Education should be treated more like libraries and fire departments instead of banks and bookstores.
I dated someone who makes bank making ceramics for rich people. But they live in a city full of rich people who will pay $5000 for someone to make them 20 custom ceramic coffee mugs. I doubt Utah has that type of customer base.
i also have another friend who wants to work in the art world… but they refuse to understand that their degree from no name university means they will never get hired in that field but they keep naively applying to jobs that require ivy league degrees to get an interview.
Who is going to pay for that valve though? someone has to eat those costs. I mean, also even if education was cheap, plenty of people would also still waste it and screw up their lives.
Yeah, I mean, you are right, it has to be paid for, and that payment is a pain, and it’s $1.6 trillion dollars, and as prosperous as America is, we can’t casually brush aside $1.6 trillion dollars worth of outstanding debt.
But at the same time, I feel like if the financial constraint was not the defining factor that after people go through a process of self-discovery and attempting, you know, underwater basket weaving, or ceramics or whatever, and finding out that it’s a dead end for them, they might end up going back to college and getting a degree in law, or going to a trade school, or finding some other path to where their capabilities and the needs of society interact in a financially successful way.
I want people to have more choices, more options, and the more choices they make, the higher likelihood that they will find something that is wildly successful for them.
I want people to succeed.
Iwant people to do something that is wildly successful for them, and when they do they will generate tax revenues for the country far in excess of what it cost for them to make that mistake.
That’s the purpose of social programs and society itself, in my opinion.
At no point does the comment say your government shouldn’t pay off loans. It sounds more like they want the perfect and the good.
The OP is a comic about people being opposed to student loans for the most stupid and selfish of reasons.
Screen Shatter proceeds to, at best, make a non sequitor about why student loan forgiveness is actually not a good thing. I then point out that while there are many arguments in favor of focusing on the root cause (that I agree should be the goal), people who bring that up in response to “should we forgive student loans” are almost always arguing in bad faith.
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and more about an actual conversation and why someone would say X in response to Y. Because Context. It’s a B.
In conversations I find it’s best to operate with a positive view of the person I’m talking to. Rather than assuming intent, I go with what they’ve said and hope for the best until I know otherwise.
You assumed Screen_Shatter disagreed with loan forgiveness, even though they didn’t say that in their comment. Happily, the Screen_Shatter replied to you, and they agreed with it! It turns out you have something in common! Just because they have other ideas doesn’t mean they disagree on this one.
Assuming Screen_Shatter disagreed was a mistake and it made the conversation less pleasant. Just like telling someone:
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and …
Lemmy is a small community. Assume the best about folks on here and help make it more welcoming. Hopefully it’ll grow.
Yeah. I prefer to operate under the assumption that people are at least trying to have a conversation. Rather than just walking around spewing non sequitors. If someone feels they were misinterpreted, they can reply and clarify… rather than get angry that people interpreted what they wrote rather than what they were thinking. That is, again, how you have a conversation.
Lemmy is a small community.
STRONG disagree. Lemmy is a small (for the modern internet) userbase. Not a community. A community is one where you regularly get to know others and… communicate. Lemmy, like basically all modern social media, is people shouting into a void. Hell, Lemmy is on the worse end of that since so many of us came from reddit where all that matters is looking for keywords and writing the right canned/meme response to get the most updoots.
Think about it this way: How often have you actually interacted with someone and thought “I want to get to know that person better” or even “Hey, it is so and so. I wonder how the event they were talking about went?”. I personally have a few new internet friends from Mastodon funny enough. But Lemmy? We reddit up in here.
And… you know a great way to never make those connections? By assuming nobody is communicating or responding to anyone else and considering every comment to be made in a void.
I’ll also refrain from pointing out the difference between clarifying intent and doubling down or how often chuds have used this very same “assume the best of everyone” to spread hate over the decades of the modern internet.
Same as most “Banning guns won’t stop gun violence” people.
This one doesn’t fit your argument. It might affect gun violence, but you’re ignoring the fact that people have access to a ton of ways of killing others.
The main driver of violent crime is poverty and income inequality. The solution is to tax the rich, give everyone fair wages, provide universal healthcare, properly fund schools, etc. All things that are already part of the core liberals stance, and none of those involve introducing unpopular legislation that stomps all over constitutional rights.
But heaven forbid we talk about actually fixing the root causes of violent crime. No, some people just want to ban guns to own the conservatives, and get mad when anyone pokes holes in the plan.
Being pro-gun control is the liberal equivalent of being “pro-life”.
Not really. You can have a huge range of levels of control and regulation on guns. You can’t really have anything between life and not life.
2nd Amendment is pretty clear: shall not be infringed
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a “well-armed and regulated militia”
Don’t get me wrong, I own guns, I like guns, I believe that guns can be owned safely, and I also believe that there should be more controls on who owns guns and what kinds of guns they own under which circumstances.
I feel like hunting equipment and 22s and stuff like that, semi-automatic handguns, perfectly fine for home ownership, home defense, etc…
But sniper rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers and everything above that basic home gun ownership tier should be placed in a sort of library-type militia system where people can join that militia, be trained in its proper and effective use, and be like a volunteer reserve national guard-type thing.
Kind of like we have volunteer fire departments where tax payers and donations provide them with the tools, but they go through the training so that they can back up the actual paid fire department.
Of course, we should have a gun-owner license.
A licensing system where you have to attend a basic safety course, possibly register for some sort of gun-owner insurance to pay for possible injuries to other people through negligent gun ownership usage, things like that would massively increase the safety factor of guns and massively increase the number of people that are qualified to use a gun in case of emergency and have the training needed to do so effectively.
Further, it’s not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they’re used in committing a crime, the weapon itself can help identify the criminal that committed a crime with the weapon, even if they stole the weapon from you to commit the crime.
I’m all for gun ownership. I just want more responsibility, more accountability, and more maturity about it.
It’s not really cool that any 18-year-old can pop down to a local Walmart and get enough ammunition to blow away a supermarket full of children.
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a “well-armed and regulated militia”
Except that’s not the case. Here is the full text:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If you go through writings from that era you’ll notice that while the vocabulary changes (I’ll get to that), the grammar is virtually identical to modern English.
If you reread the amendment with that in mind, you’ll notice that the first clause doesn’t actually say anything actionable. It’s just an explanation. Isolating the second clause of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” doesn’t change the meaning of what’s being said.
Now, why did the Framers decide to include an explanation into the 2nd Amendment, but not the others? That’s hard to say. But I can at least expand on the context of the first clause.
Remembered how I said that vocabulary has changed? That’s unfortunately what happened with the first clause a bit At the time, the term “regulated” actually referred to being trained and equipped.
The term “militia” has also been distorted over time in common vernacular. What most people commonly think of as a “militia” like the National Guard is more precisely called an “organized militia”. In contrast, an “unorganized militia” refers to all able-bodied men of military age, at the time considered to be ages 16-45. Basically anyone that could be drafted in war.
This is important when you consider US military doctrine up until WWII. In times of peace, the US Army kept a small corp of professional officers, with the intent to draft men into the Army as needed whenever war is declared. Then once war was over, all the drafted men were sent back and the Army was shrunk back down.
This doctrine present a major logistics problem: when war breaks out, you need a lot of fighting men in a short amount of time. To alleviate this problem, you want the draftees (aka the unorganized militia) to already have much of the skills and equipment needed to fight, with one of these critical skills being marksmanship. Hence why the Framers found it necessary to national defense for the populous to be able to have their own weapons.
To change gears, there’s another argument I want to make: gutting and/or removing one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights sets a dangerous precedent. While the 21st amendment exists to nullify the 18th, we’ve never done that to any of the original 10 amendments. If the 2nd is abolished, why why not abolish the 4th, or the 5th, or even the 1st? That’s a dangerous precedent.
And while there’s the stereotypical argument of “you can’t take on jets and tanks with AR15’s”, the US lost Vietnam and Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq too. And that’s with the coffers and supply lines protected by an entire ocean. While a civil war would be horrifying, having that proverbial nuclear button pressures the government into somewhat caring what the populous thinks.
Further, it’s not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they’re used in committing a crime
Unfortunately, with the particular “administration” in charge at the moment I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them having a list of who has weapons. That’d make it easier for them to go after potential armed resistance early, allowing them to go full authoritarian.
Honestly, it’s in our best bet to stop pushing for gun control. That’d get rid of one of the big reasons that more moderate conservatives don’t vote for Democrats. Especially since we could instead put that effort into education, healthcare, labor rights, etc. which would do a much better job of reducing violent crime while making everyone’s lives better. There’s only so much political capital that a candidate and party can have, and it’s best spent where it would do the most good.
I’m not in favor of abolishing any rights accorded to the people by the Constitution.
If anything, I feel like we should have more rights and that the government itself should have fewer rights.
That being said, I also believe that we should open the doors and allow more people to have guns, but we should also attach educational requirements, location requirements, insurance requirements, and third-party checks on who has what gun when because, as you know the unbelievable spate of school shootings has shown, irresponsible gun ownership is one of the primary causes of death in what should be the richest and safest country in the world.
Implementing these checks would not infringe upon the rights of gun owners, it would expand them, it would allow bump stocks, silencers, fully automatic machine guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, landmines, tanks, surface-to-air missiles…
I literally could not give the first fuck over who has what weaponry as long as there is a reasonable, sane, and balanced check on how that weaponry can be used, and who has oversight on it.
The bigger issue is that we have irresponsible gun ownership and because of one clause in the Bill of Rights and how it is interpreted, these continued escalations of murders and travesties are happening so often that a school shooting is barely even front page news at this point.
That is incredibly terrifying, and sad.
We should do something about it because we are a sane society, and one of the best things that we can do about it is to institute licensing, registration, insurance, education, and taking weaponry above the level of self-defense and placing them in places where people can responsibly monitor their access, where they can actually be used and enjoyed for what they are, but they are not casually lying around unguarded by negligent parents and made available to disgruntled teenagers.
limiting mag capacity or bump stocks isn’t an infringement on your right to own a gun. it just makes it so you have a gun that can’t shoot as fast or as much. or do you think automatic weapons should be purchasable? what about heavy weapons like autocannons? should i be able to throw a .50 BMG on the back of my pickup and drive around with it?
limiting mag capacity or bump stocks isn’t an infringement on your right to own a gun.
And those limits do little to protect anyone that would be victims of a crime. Swapping magazines can be done faster than you think, and full auto is difficult ro control. Banning them does nothing to actually help people, it’s just security theater.
Also, the states that ban larger magazines also are more likely to ban suppressors, which is ridiculous because suppressors are personal protective equipment. Pretty much every other country leaves suppressors unregulated, because there’s no point to regulating them.
Going with the other stuff I was saying, I definitely think you should be able to purchase 50 cals and machine guns and everything else, but like, you shouldn’t be allowed to keep them at your house.
They should have to go to a public storage facility where they are kept under lock and key, and only let out to the registered owner or to the people that the registered owner permits, like a gun bank that also serves as a volunteer militia registration and training center.
I’m totally okay with people having their cake and eating it too, as long as that is done with the overall safety and happiness of society in mind.
Blowing shit up is a hell of a lot of fun, and if you have the money to do it, you should be allowed to do it. It’s a great stress reliever, it’s an excellent opportunity to hang out with your boys or your girls or your pals of indeterminate gender.
You are describing the national guard. It’s a public service you join up, get training, and have service obligations.
If you want to blow shit up become an explosives engineer or work in demolition. Just because you have a personal fetish for high calibre guns is a pretty bad reason to claim everyone should do it too.
I think the comic strip in the OP was already a sufficient example of a bad faith argument but thanks for adding another one, I guess?
Ah, yes, more snarky comments that don’t actually address any points. Congrats on being a stereotypical pro-gun control pundit.
It’s pretty clear that you aren’t worth bothering with
Way too many jobs require degrees to apply as well. Yeah, if you’re a doctor, scientist, engineer, or other specialist that really does require advanced education, you need that level of education.
But I’m hiring a new permit tech to process contractor registrations, take permit payments, and answer the phone. It’s ludicrous that the city wants them to have a degree in “Public Administration, Fiance, Construction Science, or a related field.”
The solution, as always, is a land value tax and UBI. Don’t need to fret over needing an education to live comfortably if you can already afford and place to live and food.
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You don’t need to cure cancer, you need to be able to prevent it in the first place.
Ofc this is following the metaphor, for actual cancer you need both.
For student loans you need to fix the system, higher education in Europe is free, but it really isn’t, you pay for your education over your lifetime by earning more money with your higher education and thus paying more in taxes and social security.
Ofc it’s not a perfect system, but much better than having young idiots be purposely exposed to predatory lending.
european education system is very different than american one. from top to bottom and from birth to death.
american system treats education as a privilege, not a right. and higher education as a private luxury good rather than a public good.
If you follow the analogy, then you want everyone else to go through chemo to beat your cancer… Kinda weird.
Dude.
Fuck cancer, AND fuck people that have that logic about school loans or anything else.
Don’t take out a loan that you cannot afford, that is on you.
Totally! If I got cancer free and then a simple and quick cure for cancer came out, I’d obviously wish that that came out earlier, but one would have to be a royal asshole to with that others suffered and died because one had to suffer as well.
I mean I wouldn’t want it to not exist but if I just nearly died of chemo + cancer I’d be a little mad if they found an EASIER way to cure cancer…
Cancer survivor here. Nothing would make me more happy to see a simple cure for what almost killed me, the sooner the better. Even if it was just after I finished chemo; perhaps even especially right after it to be honest. Remember that there’s always the 5-year time where the danger of the cancer coming back is constantly lingering (especially during the first 12 months). Even if you just finished chemo, that new drug means you won’t have to go through chemo again for that cancer no matter what happens from now on. Nothing, and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing, would’ve given me more peace of mind at that time.
That would actually kind of be funny in retrospect. Like, if you survived it, and it was the most horrible, painful year of your life, and then the day the doctor gave you the all-clear, the FDA released a drug that takes care of it in seven days with minimum side effects.
Like any time anybody said anything to me, I would be whipping out my cancer photos and then using that to explain that the universe hates me, and so therefore I am absolved of all sin.
Plot twist, he actually beat up every single kid in the paediatric cancer ward at his local hospital.
False equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, but some people chose poorly and took out loans they could not afford; that is on them.
What a horrible, uninformed and ignorant hot take.
Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn’t need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.
If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.
Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we’ll call it a deal. You don’t mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn’t take out a mortgage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be responsible for mine, right?
I honestly have no problem with that. I think housing is actually more critical than student loan forgiveness. A debt driven payment to every American under a certain income threshold would go a long way towards repairing the dwindling middle class, and 99% of that money would go towards big businesses anyway.
That said, your individual experience is based on your socioeconomic upbringing and yours alone. You had opportunities others did not, even if they don’t feel like opportunities to you. Student loans were sold on a lie to every American high school age child, that the money would work itself out after college. Something no reasonable adult could actually believe to be true but no high school age child had the worldly awareness to doubt.
You buy a house knowing what your monthly payments are going to be. You buy a house on credit you spent a decade or more building. Multiple people have to sign off on you being able to repay that debt and even those are thrown around like candy. Giving 100,000 dollars to a teenager with no credit history who’s probably never had a job is irresponsible and crazy. It should fall on the debtors to write that money off because they were crazy ignorant or stupid to expect it to be repaid in the first place.
To be clear, I don’t just want debt forgiveness. I want the college lending system rewritten entirely. I want debt forgiveness to those that need it even if that means my debts aren’t wiped out.
To be extra clear, I should not have been given that loan, 90% of the literal children signing for those loans should not be able to access them. But there is no other path to college for almost all of those kids, because college has become so unreasonably expensive.
I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?
Then I’m happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.
are you happy for them if they had the ability to pay off their loans and refused to do so so they could travel, eat out, and buy luxury goods? should their luxury lifestyle subsidized by the government?
Because i’ve met plenty of people who have done that instead of pay back their loans. not everyone involved in this is some noble actor who is struggling… many are just assholes who refuse to pay their debts w/ the expectation that is someone else’s job. not that different than kids who go to school and party and then end up dropping out. should their loans be forgiven too?
I paid down my debts too. I lived cheap and prioritized paying them back early and haven’t had any debt for almost 10 years now. at one point I was paying 30-40% of my income to my debt but I knocked down almost 40K in loans in 5 years by doing that and paying down the high interest debt ASAP. I really little empathy for people who have student loans who are traveling, partying, and spending 40% of their paycheck on luxuries while they make minimum or no payment son their debts because they expect someone else to pay it back for them.
Honestly, why would you even care?
In America student loans cannot be discharged unless you have a fatal disease or you die, and sometimes not even death causes your student loans to go away.
If they would rather sacrifice their late 30s and 40s to paying off debt the hard way that they could have paid off the easy way in their 20s, then what does it matter to you?
They’re going to actually pay more back because the interest is going to keep accruing on their debts for all of those years.
You’ve saved yourself a lot of money, you’ve opened the door for yourself to have a higher quality retirement or possibly even an earlier retirement because you’re being financially smart and that’s good on you.
Why would you take the thing that is good on you and make it a bad on somebody else?
because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn’t have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don’t whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not ‘unfair and cruel’ because you made bad choices.
this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because ‘it’s not your fault’. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else’s. But by a lot of lemmy logic it’s the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.
personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i’d have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn’t what I ‘truly’ wanted.
But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can’t afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it’s cool be a bicycle hipster and ‘uncool’ to work a computer programming job.
Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.
If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.
your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something… there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.
I feel like that’s an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don’t really think it’s appropriate.
It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don’t want to pay their student loans.
I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn’t take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.
i’m not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.
but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?
FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I’m not talking analogies here, I’m talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many ‘assistance’ programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.
and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people… don’t need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.
Eh, you can’t let the bastards drag you down.
I know there’s a lot of bastards out there. I’m related to half of them. Like, I know how it is.
That doesn’t mean that I have to abandon my optimism, or to intentionally choose to see the evil in people.
These resources would not be handed out carte blanche, and I am not the person who is arguing for them to be handed out carte blanche.
I am saying that we should change the way the interest is counted so that there is no interest being charged on the interest that has been charged.
Doing that one thing would change the debt structure of student loans so that when people make consistent payments over a decade, it will almost always, in and of itself, completely pay off their student loans, and that would be the money they borrowed, plus the interest on the money that was borrowed.
It would give people who are struggling a light at the end of the tunnel that they can strive towards and that they can know for a fact will not be taken away from them, and that is powerful.
I would also argue that student loans should be able to be discharged through bankruptcy with maybe a moderate justification adjudicated by a judge, so that for the people at the very bottom of the scale who are most oppressed by their bad choices, they can wreck their credit and completely and totally wipe the slate clean and be able to start over.
Do you disagree with either of those two premises?
I’m a bit confused. If they choose to pay “the hard way” in their 40s but get the payments discharged by the government, they get both an easier 20s, 30s, and 40s then you, and would then be actively competing with you for other cost item, like housing. I’m all for forgiveness honestly, but your argument doesn’t seem entirely honest.
I mean, I’m arguing under this supposition that actual complete student loan forgiveness will not happen in America in our lifetimes.
Even well-meaning people are radically opposed to it because they feel like it’s giving some random person a one up in life that they did not get and their own greed and world viewpoints won’t allow them to support that.
A very small select group of people that provide a crucial good for society do get that, and people are still mad about it, like underpaid teachers who work in the teaching field for ten years, and pay their student loans for ten years, and owe more on the student loans after ten years of paying it in a job they’re underpaid for, that they worked their asses off to get, and had to fight tooth and nail to keep, and we still have asshole politicians who work their asses off night and day to trying to find a way to prevent them from getting their student loans forgiven.
And those assholes are elected by other assholes who are electing them specifically because they’re the kind of assholes that would try to make sure that the teachers that trained their children how to be educated adults remain in poverty.
That being said, I do reiterate that if all student loans were forgiven, even though I literally this year alone paid $32,000 of my own money towards my student loans to finish paying them off, because you know your boy be ballin’ like that, then I will not be mad or sad or upset that somebody else got a one up in life.
Instead, I will join in the celebration with all of my other peeps who now have that tiny couple of hundred extra dollars a month to spend on more important things like uber eats and facials and massages.
‘I don’t want my tax dollars paying for people who are irresponsible with their debt.’
“Honestly, why would you even care?”
Why would they care how their tax money is spent? Is that a serious question?
Yes, it is. And the reason why we have taxes in the first place is because we are a society. And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
That is the social contract. The helping of other people is why we pay taxes.
That help comes in many forms. That help pays for police departments so that the victims of criminals have defenders to either stop the crime from happening or to capture and punish the person that committed the crime.
That pays for fire departments, for hospitals, for roads, for public services, for parks, for electricity lines to be installed, for data lines, for the internet. It pays for social programs, and it pays the salaries of the people that put the work in to make all of these things happen.
If instead of, a couple of extra bombers for our military every year, that money was used to alleviate the financial burden of student loans that were taken on by people who tried to get training to do a job, to earn more money, to then themselves pay more taxes, to contribute more to society, I’m perfectly fine with that outcome.
It’s kind of concerning that you’re not seeing the bigger picture.
I’m sure other people in your life have explained this exact same scenario to you. I don’t believe that I am unveiling new knowledge or a new viewpoint.
Why would you not want your tax money to go to help people?
What is it about that scenario that galls you?
because we want to help the right people. i want to help an immigrant mom who gets a degree to be a nurse.
i don’t want to help some entitled kid who got an art degree and refuses to get a job because it’s not cool for their ‘brand’ to have a job. If the loan forgiveness was contingent on this person getting a productive job then it would be different.
Incentives need to be structured and targeted to be effective. Throwing money arbitrarily at a problem and hoping for the best is not effective.
Well yes, I also agree, like anybody that’s just saying “throw away $1.6 trillion so that everyone can sing “Tra-la-La” all the way to the bank” should be put into a straight jacket and not listened to until they are heavily medicated.
But at the same time, I feel like the current system is too rigid, and too unforgiving, and too based in capitalism to actually be something that our society should continue using as-is.
I believe there should be changes in the interest structure of our student loan debts so that compound interest is not a portion of them, and that they should be charged in such a way that making 120 appropriate payments equals the debt is paid even if there is a small balance remaining.
I believe there should be release valves for the people who are so financially oppressed by the burden of their student loans that they cannot function at their optimum in society, and that using that release valve should be akin to declaring bankruptcy, it should have massive consequences that ultimately are lesser than the consequences of continuing to struggle to pay onerous student loan debt.
And finally, I believe that implementing these social resources, this restructuring of the way we handle student loans, would make America a happier place for the people like me and you who have paid off our student loans, or are successfully paying off our student loans.
We would have fewer, sad, upset, miserable people to interact with because of the student loan debt crisis, and that happier society would be our reward for the small percentage of our taxes that go towards covering over the mistakes of others. Not a blank slate, not us going into debt to help assholes, just making the world a better place for people that made stupid mistakes.
And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
And this is exactly why taxpayers without college educations shouldn’t be subsidizing those who do. The lion’s share of the “strength” is in the latter category.
You write “help people”, but you specifically want to help the (educational) demographic of people who least need it, statistically.
I never can quite understand the concept of casting aspersions on a person you’re having a debate with.
Accusing me of being educationally elitist does not serve your side of the conversation.
It only increases the divide between us, and it makes me not like you as a person.
If your goal is to be disliked, you’re very, very close to your goal.
But if your goal is instead to argue, which is what my assumption was, that people who make financially bad decisions regarding their education should suffer the consequences of those decisions… Well, I mean, it’s not like I was going to like you for your stance anyway, but at least you wouldn’t be attacking me for no reason.
for some people there is no morality or moral hazard. or apparently it only applies above a certain economic class.
and yet these people rail against the immorality of billionaires and how they shouldn’t exist because they exploit people and the government.
but if you make 50K and you exploit the government and other people… well then there is nothing wrong with that!
