Well, you and I just have differences on what the American dream is. Having a house is nice, but I was thinking more about opportunities. The biggest and strongest component for the American Dream to me is the land of opportunities, where you have the socioeconomic mobility. I'd say home ownership would be a core evidence of that socioeconomic mobility. But material gain to that extent wasn't something I cared about at all. On the strawman, here's your highlight of my quote: I'm beginning to think you and everyone else wants every individual worker should earn enough to own their own place, no matter how menial the required skills are for those jobs. You asked me if those bolded words are the American Dream. It includes the words "no matter how menial the required skills are for those jobs." If you work a job that is low in demand, high in supply, with little skill required, and yet you can buy a house with the wages, you'd think this is enough to convince you someone else has to pay for that house. I get the point that it used to be a great wage to flip burgers, and things were cheap enough that you can afford the housing. But like I said, these menial jobs are highly saturated today. And I've argued with others here to show they can put in the hard work to make it there, and the economic realities of a 33K job is difficult to work with but not impossible to build on.
In the back drop of all this we haven't even talked about climate change or the massive wealth disparity between races causing all sorts of more cascading problems.
Whatever you believe the reasons are, understand this has been the direction we've been heading for decades, and there is really no reason why we should assume these trends reverse in a decade or two given our current state. So whatever the reasons you think they are, understand this will have effects on our society and culture regardless if you want them or not.
It also stimulates the economy. You have more people who can afford newer cars which means that will help with climate change as it's going to increase the electric car adoption rate.
Considering that you're still talking about wages vs housing costs, I've given you quite a bit of information on how there's some misconceptions about the wages/taxes. I'm not denying there's a problem with housing cost. But this long set of posts were on the topic of should we up the minimum wage on the federal level, and I think I also covered the negative downstream implications of that as well. Ultimately globalization and lack of support for locally-produced/sourced economies is going to be central to the debate on the federal level. If people really care, you shop at farmer's markets and support your local economies, and it'll circle back the proper way. Not many people do this as it is expensive as hell. I try my best but I'm splitting the cost of my honey at home between Randalls and Farmer's Markets because it's basically double the price. Major supermarkets do try to support local, but nevertheless it's hard to keep multibillion-dollar businessmen from violating conflicts of interest in multitude of ways.
I mean, empathy can be there, and maybe people make wrong decisions at a young age due to lack of direction. Trying to solve these types of problems on the federal level is extreme to me, and it's a patch job masking the real underlying issue, which is mostly education.
I never said student debt was held by the top 1%, I was responding to this. "UBI is the only way to benefit everyone but we are just not going to get there anytime soon. Student loan forgiveness doesn’t benefit everyone but there is positive momentum to address it, it would benefit a ton of people, and most importantly it’s benefiting the 99% who actually spend their money and grow the economy. " Where are you coming up with that 99% number? Only 14% of adults have student loans, so are you saying those 14% are the ones who actually spend their money and grow the economy? What are the other 85% percent of adults doing? Maybe I am just reading this wrong?
You still did not address the straw man because nobody has ever argued that every individual worker should earn enough to own their own place. And this was your original strawman. "I mean, just go into what I'm dodging. I have a very deep mental image of the American dream, but it isn't just doing nothing and getting a ton of money." Wow 2 strawmen for the price of one, well done sir, I have no idea why you thought the dodge was better than the original. I guess even you realized the absurdity of the original.
I haven't had the chance to read through this thread but I think these proposals are good. I think blanket forgiveness is a bad idea and could cause more problems than it solves but tying to debt forgiveness to public service is a great idea.
The quote is a vastly overgeneralized summary of my original thought. I think you know what I meant, and if you didn't, I don't care. If this is all you're going to post, I think we're done here.
I don't think you realize how many people have student loans in this country. If you cancelled all of the student loan debt and then had a new administration re-instate the loan, that would effectively be a tax increase. Do the Republicans want to be the party of increased taxes? I think not.
This has been a great thread for the most part, a lot of great ideas being exchanged, I hope this is an example of threads going forward post T, i have learned a lot. I will try and stop being snarky.
How would it be a tax increase? Since when is repaying a loan considered a "tax"? Also, you don't understand what executive orders are.
It would be a fee given to people if the loan was cancelled. I understand what an executive order is, all I said was that it would be incredibly dumb to give everyone their loans back if they had already been cancelled. The Republican party would have a lot of angry voters that would vote their ass out if they re-instated the loans. As someone said before it would be political suicide.
It wouldn't be a fee. It would be a repayment of a loan. Not a fee and not a tax. Also, I disagree about the angry voters. I think most people would be against loan cancellation and would support it's reinstatement. In fact, I think loan cancellation would anger a lot of the liberal base.
Of course that's not how it works. I don't think many college students spend time thinking about the debt of their education when they're still in school. But when you remove the variable of debt, it should (theoretically) be a positive for the student, rather than a negative.
You’re reading it wrong. I didn’t mean that 99% of all Americans have student loan debt. I meant that 100% of all student loan debt is held by the bottom 99% of income earners.
People being told their loans are gone and then a new administration comes in and says you gotta pay them. If you don't think that will piss people off you are living in a fantasy world. I'm not even gonna get into the is it a fee/tax or repayment argument because you are not living in reality.
Also, here's a link that polls your question in regards to eliminating student debt. https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/4...support-free-college-eliminating-student-debt
