Cancelling up to 20k is a good start. Limiting interest rates to 5% is even better.
i paid off 100k in student debt yrs ago. 40k of the total was added debt after I graduated b/c the minimum payments were actually not enough to keep up with interest rates. And just b/c I paid off almost double what I owed doesn't mean other should have to suffer the same fate.
I'm also wondering about medical debt. Ppl who go broke b/c they got sick. I'm here in Oslo and in a lot of the countries I visited this summer these problems are unfathomable. They're dumbfounded by the idea that you end up with crippling debt from trying to get an education or that getting sick could result in financial ruin. Someone asked me 'why do Americans tolerate this system? It makes no sense.' I tried to explain things in terms of cave men and clans: about half the country is fueled by hair-trigger, Pavlovian ill will based in ethno-tribalism. They vote for policies that harm everyone over universal policies that might help someone from a different tribe. This bias is exploited by corporations who buy off politicians who then use tribalism to rob their own clan. Politicians and policy makers promise that this policy 'will ensure that the other tribe doesn't get ahead.' What they don't say is that the policy actually ensures that no one gets ahead and everyone gets punished.
After my dad had his first stroke, he was totally confused by how unhelpful the medical industry was during his time of need. He had been a loyal and consistent contributor to all the 'right pensions and insurances' for these emergencies and now found himself stuck in a corporate maze that seemed designed to make him give up. I was driving him to a doctor's appointment when he was running over all the confusing, contradictory, unhelpful things that had been thrown in his path. Frustrated (not by him but by the circumstances) I yelled " THE MEDICAL BUREAUCRACY DOES NOT CARE ABOUT MEDICINE. IT IS DOING EXACTLY WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO."
My dad sat there stunned by my poisoned fortune cookie pronouncement. I calmed down and explained that bureaucracy has no concerns for him or any humans. Bureaucracy is designed for the proliferation of itself. It exists to expand and create more bureaucracy. So if a system is simple and easy for humans and works then that is a very bad system for...systems.
Education bureaucracy of standardized tests, confusing loan schemes, varying interests rates has nothing to do with a better education. It exists to create confusion and thus require more bureaucracy. Then that bloating bureaucracy needs money to support itself and dilutes its services to save money and creates rules so convoluted that they seemed to have been create from a school bus game of Uno (double reverse, skip, you draw two, and the color is red, etc.)
The student and medical debt system is so illogical and heinous that we don't even examine that we are negotiating with a system that is not designed to make life better. It is only designed to expand and grow itself through confusion.
So our schools and healthcare make ppl sick and stupid and saddled with crippling debt.
But 20k in forgiveness is a good start b/c it's at least trying to do SOMETHING for human beings and not for bureaucracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment