Forgiveness

I just read a news article about Joseph R. Biden’s plan to forgive more student loans being both offered and withdrawn on the same day.  The dollar figure mentioned is 250 billion.  To so casually offer to write off, and then not write off this amount of imaginary money is astounding to me.  To put that into my mind and be able to grasp the immensity of it is difficult at best.  So I looked up a few more things.  One that stuck out was that writing off that much debt is roughly equivalent to 5X the actual physical printed cash and coin that this country allows on the street. 

I’m going to throw my rough math at you so feel free to correct me or add to my knowledge base by contacting me.  The article I read stated 180 billion has already been forgiven to 4.9 million former borrowers.  So 4.9 million Americans basically got cut a check for an average of 36k person.   There are roughly 160 million taxpayers in this country.  About the bottom half pay very little to none and many get back as a refund more than they pay in.  This equates to about 1/90th of the population getting forgiveness. 

I don’t know exactly how I feel about it.  I am very conflicted and don’t know enough about the potential good or bad outcomes for the country.  I find myself in the position of being a bare minimum government believer and also hopeful that someday I get my own student debt fixed. 

It very much is a broken system.  I started out owing about 6 thousand dollars over 20 years ago.  I now owe about 54 thousand.  So yeah that happens.  Who do I owe that money to?  Not the school, not the lender because the one I had is now defunct, the government backed my loan but do I owe them or we the people.  I didn’t get a degree, that’s my fault or strength what I did get was a constant source of stress and drain on me all this time.  I got behind early and the resulting credit score has cost me untold thousands over the years in higher interest rates etc.   I’m probably never going to be able to catch up, nor do I want to.  I made years of payments to no avail.   Forgive me or not, I don’t care.  Id gladly pay the taxpayers back but I’m a little hesitant on paying any  to a multi billion dollar loan service company that didn’t even exist when I was in school.  I don’t believe they create anything or educate anyone.  Those are my boring thoughts about.  Aimless rant over.