Commitment to generosity

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has a post nearly every weekday about what the candidates for president have been doing – at least those that make the news. McEwan won’t endorse for quite a while now (if at all) though she expresses what she likes and doesn’t like about the candidates. Since I’m looking for a candidate that will build community, I’m paying close attention to what she says (she’s for building community as I am). Here is one of her posts.

Though the reason why I’m talking about this one isn’t because of what McEwan said, but because of what is in the first comment. Aphra Behn, a leader in the Shakesville community, posted a long description of Elizabeth Warren’s plan for debt-free college. The money comes from her Ultra Millionaire tax. It goes to grants to pay 100% for students from households under $100,000, partially for households above that, to no assistance for households above $250,000, the 5%. The comment includes what Behn thinks are the good and bad points of such a plan.

Of course, there was pushback to Warren’s idea. A tweet from Philip Klein said:

Cancelling debt is tremendously unfair to those who paid theirs off.

Twitter user Prison Culture Returns replied:

I find this astonishing. It took me 20 years basically to pay off my loans. I would be more than happy to make sure that younger folks don't have to spend 20 years paying theirs off. I don't want to live in the same kind of selfish society that Klein wants.

There were, of course, a lot of other comments similar to Klein’s. That prompted McEwan to post about it:

It would change millions of people's lives for the better.

And yet, I have seen so many perplexingly bitter responses from people who have indebted themselves to attend college, rejecting Warren's proposal outright. Their argument is essentially: *Why should someone else get for free what I had to pay for?*

It's a familiar line of thinking, of course. It's conservatives' central grievance with the social safety net and their gripe with robustly funding government welfare of any sort.

To see self-identified progressives regurgitating this ungenerous, parsimonious crap is truly disappointing.

I will tell you why I think someone else should get for free what I did not: Because it's the right thing to do. Because there is no moral value in having to struggle. Because it does not build character; it just makes life harder and limits opportunities.
...
We have decisions to make about our national priorities, and those decisions start with a commitment to generosity. We can't leave the world better than we found it if we are too stingy to allow the next generation to have anything we didn't.

There were a lot of comments to McEwan’s post. A few of them.

From Lady Blanchester

To me, saying that everyone should have to pay off their student loans because I had to pay off mine is akin to saying drowning people shouldn't get live preservers because I somehow managed to stay afloat without one. Throw out the live preservers!

Alittletiefling described a cousin who lives in Ontario, which is also cutting social services for the poor. He lost jobs and his loans are being called in. Now he can’t retrain, can’t move out of a nasty rooming house, can’t get government assistance because it’s been slashed, can’t afford to eat.

Verucaamish explained some tax policy. The GOP tax cut = $2.3 trillion. For about 2% of that we can double the budget for Department of Education and Department of Housing and Urban Development. We spent $700 billion on bailing out banks in 2009. For only $300 billion more we could have bailed out every single person whose mortgage was under water.

Consistently, the federal government has chosen to spend vast amounts more on supporting billionaires than keep people in their homes and ensuring quality education.

Marissa123 said she has massive student loans and there is no way she can pay them off. She worked her way through grad school doing 2-3 jobs, but still made only $10K a year. That doesn’t cover living expenses.

Heather T added:

Oh, and that whole "Struggle = Morality" thing? Is also often rooted in Christian supremacy and its related concepts of martyrdom.

Lady Robusta added:

There are so many things we have government pay for that end up benefiting some individuals more directly, but nevertheless benefit society as a whole enough to make it worthwhile. Student debt relief would be one of these. Public education is the classic example: I don't have children, but I don't mind AT ALL paying taxes for public schools, because I want an educated society. Another example: About half of long-term elder care is paid for by Medicaid, yet it would be absurd to say that this is "unfair" to people who die suddenly and don't get the "benefit" of living in a nursing home at the end of their lives.

Loan forgiveness would benefit the entire economy, and would be a massive economic equalizer between people who had parents who could pay for their college or pay off their loans for them, and people who did not have parents who could do those things.

mcbender wrote:

There are times when I really think that sentiments like "I've got mine, fuck you" and "misery loves company/suffering builds character" may be the key dividing line in today's politics (versus, say, "I suffered and want nobody else to go through that").

FloraFlora added:

I said this on Twitter the other day: look, the NATURE of fixing problems, except when you happen to magically be prescient enough to see every problem coming and avert it (which is never) is that the problem happened at least one time. Every time we fix a pothole, someone probably bumped through it, and maybe their axle was damaged. Every time we make a new rule about lettuce safety, it's likely because we realized there was an e-coli problem, and likely that was because a bunch of people got sick. Every time we abate asbestos from buildings, we do so knowing that we want no MORE people to die of cancer from a known carcinogen, but some people already did.

We know student loan debt is a problem for individuals and for the society as a whole. Now that we know that, let’s fix it.