Debt relief is a great equalizer that needs to include ALL student debt.
I think citizens younger than I should benefit from affordable higher education just as I did in the '60s and '70s. Prior to Reaganomics, most states helped fund higher education for their citizens. Back then, I could, with a part-time, minimum-wage job, afford to live and earn an engineering degree after five years of study with NO DEBT. Soon after I started my first job as an engineer, we were able to get our first mortgage and buy a new home.
As an example of how the cost of education has changed, let's consider the experience of my wife. She earned her computer science degree in the early '80s. When she started, her basic tuition was $200.00. By the time she graduated, this basic cost was $2,000.00 per semester. This compares to my basic tuition of $50.00 per semester decades earlier. Back then federal and state government subsidized higher education.
Biden's post-education debt relief is simply a replacement for those subsidies that Reaganomics obliterated.
That freedom I had then to build my wealth with a higher education is now only possible for the unfairly rewarded, extremely wealthy who can afford, as I did decades ago, to pay their own tuition, or have it paid by their excessively wealthy parents.
This growing and excessive inequality for debt-free higher education is immoral. Higher ed shouldn't be just for the wealthy! Forgiving that debt gives today's students the same freedom I had long before higher education was defunded and privatized to maximize economic inequality.
In our country of growing economic inequality, this debt forgiveness is a great equalizer. But those who believe in a social hierarchy, and thus in inequality, just can't agree. Forgiveness advances one's ranking in their imaginary social hierarchy and threatens their worldview and self-identity of superiority.
Those on the right who object to debt forgiveness are either wealthy OR have also experienced economic hardship, but are OK, in their worldview, with the suffering of those not like them? Fear of, and hate for, others by the right are enablers for such sadism. MoscowMitch is wealthy, sadistic and can't relate. Others on the right strapped with student debt want those lower in their social hierarchy to stay put and endure neoslavery while they enjoy relief of their own student debt.
(Article changed on Aug 28, 2022 at 12:51 AM EDT)
