President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I don’t have a dog in this fight
My mother paid off my loan with some of the insurance $$$ she got from a car accident
But after Trump told his buddies: “I just made you guys a lot of $$$” after his tax cut passed I don’t care if this is inflationary
It helps people
I look at it as Joe Biden doing for millions of people what my mother did for me

 

How far do you extend this philosophy? Because I could have a lot of fun depending on your answer.

 

Article I saw today said roughly half the people in this state with student loan debt are 35 or older. That’s a lot different picture than the memes about “damn lazy kids today.”

 

That's not a philosophy at all (in the context of my post) ... that's a fact I'm simply recognizing. If 15 years ago you chose dear old community college rather than pricey-as-hell elite college, it is a fact that even today you live with the consequences of that decision.

 

It won't affect me either way.

 

So it's not something you adhere to personally?

 

I take it only to just before the point at which you could start to make fun of me.

 

That made me legit guffaw.

 

When I went back to school as an adult, I did three semesters at the Community College (about $2k a semester), and four regular semesters at the local non-elite Uni ($6k-ish per), plus two summer sessions (another $1500 each). I earned academic scholarships that covered about half of my last two regular semesters. Throughout: I was still working full time in my last newspaper gig, but most of that money paid for living expenses.

I finished with about $25,000 in Federal student loans, without which I would not have been able to pay for it all. I'm uncertain of a way I could have done it any cheaper.

 

And those of us in the biz understand that and why that is. And also why the biz needs to radically change. Enjoy your right place-right time windfall. Credit to you for not pretending to be liberal (although I have no idea how you are in the office), unlike the vast majority of your peers, whose escalating salaries are among the things making education unaffordable, yet who won't sacrifice a dime to help, while those not sheltered by tenure get RIFfed.

 

I do like the "but the trades!!!" pushback I see a lot on FB now, whenever something like this is approved - as if being an electrician or a car mechanic ISN'T a job that practically requires the skills needed to get through college anyway. Most of the dumb asses I went to HS with didn't magically get jobs in the trades - they just got people pregnant, and do menial jobs between prison stints. The people who are now working as electricians, or the guy who has a successful boating and oyster farming operation, were hard workers that still had an interest in what they were doing. (That's ultimately something that high schools could be doing more of - exposing kids to a wider variety of work experiences, and seeing what "clicks" - but we've kind of incentivized education funding at all levels around the few things we can easily measure, like performance on tests and college acceptance.)