How does OWS think this debt accumulated? Debt isn't some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street. You have to get yourself into debt. It used to be taboo, but it's acceptable to get into debt these days and worse yet, walk away from it. OWS, to me, represents an entitled generation.
"Debt isn't some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street."
Except debt can be exactly due to some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street and you don't have the insurance to pay for the medical bills.
I'm not saying that this is true for all of the OWS debts: probably not even the majority. I'm just saying that it's not as easy as "it's your fault you're in debt".
>Except debt can be exactly due to some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street and you don't have the insurance to pay for the medical bills.
That's why we have bankruptcy laws.
From what I heard at the time, the big hobby horse for the OWS people was student debt, which can't be forgiven in bankruptcy. And that kind of debt is entirely optional.
Yes - bankruptcy laws that were passed in 2005 which made it significantly harder to get debt forgiven in bankruptcy, and also removed some forms of debt from being able to be discharged in bankruptcy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...
It was widely claimed by advocates of BAPCPA that its
passage would reduce losses to creditors such as credit
card companies, and that those creditors would then pass
on the savings to other borrowers in the form of lower
interest rates. These claims turned out to be false.
After BAPCPA passed, although credit card company
losses decreased, prices charged to customers
increased, and credit card company profits soared.
>Not when the majority of jobs that create a vibrant middle class in the post-industrial United States require at least a college degree.
That's a self-refuting argument. If your degree was really the ticket to a "vibrant middle class" job you'd be able to pay off your student debt.
The reality is not all degrees are created equal, and people should think a little bit before they go $200k into debt for a degree that's going lead to a $40k job. Granted, 18 year olds aren't very good at this kind of reasoning, but that's what parents are for.
On top of that, for a lot of fields a degree from a public university is just as good as one from an Ivy. Nobody is entitled to a pricy private college education. Either you go on family money or you think very carefully about how those loans are going to get repaid.
>Not when the majority of jobs that create a vibrant middle class in the post-industrial United States require at least a college degree.
That's a self-refuting argument. If your degree was really the ticket to a "vibrant middle class" job you'd be able to pay off your student debt.
You just failed at basic logic.
Saying that jobs of type X require a degree IS NOT saying that getting a degree guarantees that you will get a job of type X. As an example, a law degree is required to become a lawyer. But only something like 70% of people graduating with law degrees will pass the bar, and be put on a track to a job where they can reasonably expect to pay back their debts.
I also see that you are happy to blame the victim. Yet many victims are not to blame. Let me take a real example, my wife. She got an MD. She went into residency. She got injured, had to take time off then leave residency. She is in another residency now. She still does not make enough to contribute towards her debts, I've been doing it instead.
She did nothing wrong. Yes, the degree was expensive, but an MD is generally a worthwhile investment. Yes, she got injured. But that was not her fault. There are no guarantees in life. Bad luck will happen to a certain fraction of people. It happened to her.
Now you have a lot to say about planning. Well back when she took on that debt, bankruptcy could discharge it. It was not until after she had the MD that the rules changed on her. Thanks to me, she's not in trouble. But when she took on the debt, the bank agreed to one set of risks, and then Congress changed the terms of the contract out from under her later. In what world is it fair that you sign one thing, and then because the right politicians got bribed, you're bound to a different thing?
>Saying that jobs of type X require a degree IS NOT saying that getting a degree guarantees that you will get a job of type X.
No, but he was talking about the majority of jobs. I understand people get unlucky. That's life. But there's a huge disconnect between what the population of college students is paying for degrees and what the job market is paying for labor. This isn't a question of some small percentage of people getting unlucky. It's a fundamental overestimation of the value of what they're buying.
>I also see that you are happy to blame the victim.
People who make dumb decisions are not victims. Like I said, not everyone is in that position because they made a dumb decision. But most of them are.
Dumb decisions like becoming a medical doctor? This isn't a matter of what decision someone's wife made. You just like blaming the victim by default and forcing them to defend themselves before your imagined seat of justice.
No, but he was talking about the majority of jobs.
You're making the exact same logic error, but this time talking about majorities, so in addition to failing at logic you're failing at statistics.
Let me point you again at the law student example. All jobs as a lawyer require law school. About 70% of people who get law degrees will successfully pass the bar, and get a high paying job they otherwise couldn't and be able to pay their debts. About 30% will fail to pass a bar, and be put on that track, with the result that their best available jobs are much lower paying and they are hosed.
Did that 30% make a bad decision to go to law school? If so, then so did a lot of the other 70%, because it is not obvious going in who will and won't succeed. Most of the time, law school is a good choice. Some of the time it is a terrible choice.
Complicating the issue even farther, very few people going into law school are aware of how high the odds are of getting into serious debt problems. Until recently there was little public awareness of it, and marketing materials from law schools certainly make no mention of the issue.
(I'm pulling up this particular example because unsuccessful law graduates make up a high portion of seriously distressed student debt, and there have been lawsuits about false advertising around this issue.)
>You're making the exact same logic error, but this time talking about majorities, so in addition to failing at logic you're failing at statistics.
One of us is being stupid, but I don't think it's me.
The assertion is college is necessary for a middle class lifestyle. What I'm saying is 1) it's not and 2) when you add up lost opportunity costs, direct costs, and interest on student debt many people (maybe even most) are losing money by going to college. Now, that's their choice, but I don't want to be on the hook for someone else's personal enrichment.
>Did that 30% make a bad decision to go to law school?
Yes. Anyone who goes to law school right now is an idiot, unless that law school is Harvard or Yale. The 70% in your example are either lucky or have been shunted into jobs that don't require a law degree or they're working as lawyers and making less than they would have made teaching Social Studies to the local second graders. The number of newly minted lawyers far, far exceeds the number of jobs for newly minted lawyers.
The exception, of course, being people who got in to the very, very top schools.
One of us is being stupid, but I don't think it's me.
You also have proven unable to parse English.
The assertion is college is necessary for a middle class lifestyle.
Your continued inability to parse English is getting old. Here, for the record, is the original assertion.
Not when the majority of jobs that create a vibrant middle class in the post-industrial United States require at least a college degree.
Now why do I say that you failed to parse this correctly? Because "majority" does not mean "all". So the majority these jobs could require a college degree but there could still be lots of them that don't require a college degree.
Going back to what you wrote...
Yes. Anyone who goes to law school right now is an idiot, unless that law school is Harvard or Yale. The 70% in your example are either lucky or have been shunted into jobs that don't require a law degree or they're working as lawyers and making less than they would have made teaching Social Studies to the local second graders. The number of newly minted lawyers far, far exceeds the number of jobs for newly minted lawyers.
Can you cite a source?
According to what I can find now, until 2009, law school had a fairly stable economic outlook. Then the bottom dropped out. Median starting income for newly graduated lawyers has dropped 35% since then. (See http://www.nalp.org/classof2011_salpressrel for a source.)
However stop and think for a second. Law school takes 3 years. People graduating this year into the dismal market entered in 2009, with decades of history of law being a good economic choice. The lifetime income for someone with a law degree averaged DOUBLE the lifetime income for someone with a bachelor's degree. In retrospect, the law degree was likely a mistake. But when they committed to it, based on the data that then existed, it looked like a good choice.
So, were all of the people who are walking around with useless newly minted law degrees demonstrating poor decision making abilities when they chose to do that? I don't really think so. They didn't spot the oncoming macro-economic train, but these things tend to be much clearer in hindsight than in advance. (I knew about the oncoming problem, but only because my brother was selling stuff to lawyers, and he told me how the financial crisis was impacting law firms.)
I give up. Instead of reading what I write you keep building straw men out of cherry picked sentences and then slap them down. It must be easier to "win" an argument that way, but you're just wasting my time and that of everyone else who reads what you write.
> 18 year olds aren't very good at this kind of reasoning, but that's what parents are for.
It is a dangerous assumption to think it is the place for a parent to judge if their children should incur the equivalent of half a decades debt when they themselves may have no comprehension of the value of a degree their kid is thinking of.
I'm not sure what you mean by "half a decades debt".
At some point people have to be treated as adults. If your parents aren't up to advising you on financial matters you have to get outside help. Or you figure it out yourself.
I refuse to accept the notion we should alter agreements freely entered into by adults in an effort to protect them from themselves.
I don't think so either, I just don't think its an excuse to say colleges and universities (especially since they are all federally funded) can practice extremely predatory financing expecting a kids parents to know better for them.
I agree you should not alter open agreements, but those agreements are already biased by federal dollars in the form of guaranteed stafford loans. We need to get rid of federal loan and grant guarantees that are not merit based limited funding that happens after acceptance (so that schools can't focus target anyone getting a federal scholarship).
I would get rid of GSLs. I would go further, too, and make the current financing process illegal.
Imagine if you went to the local car dealer and he told you "Every car on the lot is $200k. But give me a detailed listing of your assets and income and I'll adjust the price such that you can barely afford to buy one if you take out as much financing as possible."
That kind of price discrimination is illegal for your local car dealer, but it's exactly what happens when your kid goes off to college. Not only that, colleges collude so that you can't play one college off against another.
Of course what they say is they're just making sure they have a "diverse" student body by cutting the less well off students a deal. But the net effect is the college takes in the maximum amount of money in tuition.
It's the biggest driver of ever-rising tuition, and were I in Congress I'd go on the freakin' warpath against this industry.
It's threads like this that make me thank my parents, who prevented me, at the age society didn't even trust me with a beer, from signing on to most than a decades worth of debt in order to go to a trendy school.
I believe that the vast majority of student debt is not people going to an Ivy institution. The major concentration of serious debt issues has been in the private-education-as-big-business sector from companies like University of Phoneix and DeVry, whose business models depend on government backed student loans, or loans from private companies that are subsidized/guaranteed by the government (before President Obama signed a law that allowed the government to manage student loans without requiring a private company to act as an intermediary).
"Last winter, the Department of Veterans Affairs tasked its newly hired blogger, a cantankerous Iraq vet named Alex Horton, with investigating the website GIBill.com, one of many official-looking links that come up when you Google terms like "GI Bill schools." With names like ArmedForcesEDU.com and UseYourGIBill.us, these sites purport to inform military veterans how to best use their education benefits. In reality, Horton found, they're run by marketing firms hired by for-profit colleges to extol the virtues of high-priced online or evening courses. He concluded that GIBill.com "serves little purpose other than to funnel student veterans and convince them their options for education are limited to their advertisers."
"The for-profit higher education industry was the target of a bruising report issued last week. Based on a two-year effort, the report detailed high rates of loan default, aggressive recruiting, higher than average tuition, low retention rates, and little job placement assistance. It was spearheaded by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, a longtime critic of the industry. (ProPublica has written a number of pieces looking more closely at the explosive growth sector, including questionable recruiting and marketing.)"
"After federal regulators accused the University of Phoenix of systematic enrollment abuses in 2004, the school's parent company paid out nearly $10 million to resolve the allegations.
Phoenix allegedly had broken the law by tying recruiters' pay to enrollment numbers, U.S. Department of Education investigators found, creating pressure to sign up unqualified students.
In the years since, Phoenix cemented its stature as the nation's largest for-profit school and the single biggest recipient of federal student aid. But some of the school's recruiters have continued to use high-pressure, deceptive tactics, according to a dozen current and former students and two former recruiters who spoke to ProPublica and Marketplace as part of a joint investigation."
>I believe that the vast majority of student debt is not people going to an Ivy institution.
The difference is nobody goes into $200k debt studying at the University of Phoenix, whereas people who go to lower tier Ivies on student loans and get less marketable degrees have literally sold themselves into debt slavery.
Except you're the one who brought up $200k as a number to begin with. And those people who sold themselves into debt slavery, by going to an extremely good school, may actually still hold jobs that will allow them to repay their loans eventually. Ignoring your arbitrary choice of debt number, we're looking at many people in debt and many of them without any college degree whatsoever.
And talking about parents isn't helpful. Parents are the ones watching the State of the Union address where the President talks about higher education and competing with China and then go out in the town and talk to the other parents about where their children are going to college and what their children are doing with their degrees. Thinking that only 18-year-olds can be fooled into saddling themselves with excessive debt is nonsense.
>Except you're the one who brought up $200k as a number to begin with.
Yes.
>And those people who sold themselves into debt slavery, by going to an extremely good school, may actually still hold jobs that will allow them to repay their loans eventually.
Well then, there's no problem, is there?
>Thinking that only 18-year-olds can be fooled into saddling themselves with excessive debt is nonsense.
At some point people have to think for themselves.
Many jobs require a degree, but not every degree leads to a job. Unfortunately, easy access to huge loans and widespread confusion about the relationship between the degree and the paying jobs has lead to ever increasing number of people in huge debts with no way to repay it ever. It reminds me some recent history when people got into huge debt in order to get something that is sure to provide them huge value and make them rich - and then it turned out not to be so. We're heading into it again, full steam.
The problem is that not getting a university degree still makes you far more likely to end up poor. So people are still making the "rational" investment, which is to take a 40% chance of a good job over a 10% chance (numbers pulled from my ass, but you get the point).
Correlation != casuation. Degree in feminist basket weaving is not going to make you rich (unless you land a sinecure job in some Diversity Office, but these are severely limited in number) or even richer. It is almost guaranteed to make you significantly poorer unless you get some deal to get it for free. That's the part of the confusion - the fact that average college graduate now in his 40ies makes more than average non-graduate in his 40ies, does not mean getting into 100K debt would actually work out for you as a current college student.
It's like saying "stock market returns 8% annually long term, so I'll put all my life saving into Shady Gadgets Inc. that was touted to me by some guy I don't know on the phone". That's not how rational investment is made.
This. It's not at all clear people make more money as a result of college or if people who are generally more likely to make more money are also more likely to go to college. There are certainly some very famously high earning college dropouts.
While I'm not entirely disagreeing with your point, there is an element of dubious optionality wrt student debt when one systemically cannot find gainful employment without a college degree. College degrees are increasingly becoming the new high school diplomas—wherein they are, for all intents and purposes, of equal compulsory nature, without the defense of laws requiring all 18-21-year-olds to be there. Thus, for vast majorities of the population who wish to lead productive economic lives, the "option" isn't quite optional anymore.
The problem isn't that people are pursuing degrees, it's that some are pursuing economically unviable degrees. Here's a little anectdata from a friend. His daughter is in debt $60k for a degree in theater. Did well in college, but wants to "make it" in NYC.
Now obviously the theater industry is very competitive, especially in NYC. So while trying to do various theatrical activities to get her foot in the door, she's a dog walker. She doesn't make much money, so she's qualifying for assistance.
She could move back home, get a job in a different field (her dad has lined up several paying jobs), but she wants to stay in NYC. She's unable to make any payments on her loans, so those are going to build up quickly.
This is what drives fiscal conservatives crazy. And when groups are asking for student loan debt forgiveness/bailout, it's doubly frustrating. She's making multiple choices that are fiscally imprudent, and expecting to be subsidized both in assistance and loan forgiveness.
TLDR, basketweaving degrees aren't worth going into debt for, but an entitled generation wants to "pursue their dreams" on someone else's dime.
I really think you need to get your biases in check. Pursuing one's dreams is exactly what the last couple generations have been raised to do. They didn't exit the womb feeling entitled. They were told since near birth they could be whatever they wanted to be. They were told they needed to go to college. They did exactly as they were told and wound up with little to show for it and an overwhelmingly difficult job market. They have been following the cultural narrative.
Now, they're thinking, "What the fuck?" and society is acting like it didn't push them headlong into this. By the time they've realized the narrative failed them, it's too late.
I agree 100% with your reply, but I guess I've got a blind spot about my biases. In the case of my friend's daughter, she's aware of her options, realizes that she's not making any progress towards her dreams, but refuses to acknowledge the failed narrative. If she was thinking "WTF?" she'd be moving on and not dogwalking...
Again, biases. You might be thinking, "WTF?" and rapidly moving on. That doesn't extend to people generally. The stronger a narrative, the longer people tend to hit their face against the brick walls of failure, believing the part of the narrative that's been telling them if they work and try hard enough for long enough, their dreams will become reality.
I'm obviously just commentating from the outside, but are you sure she is aware of her options in the same way you feel you are? What exactly are the options of someone who is trying to pursue her dreams? Do you step in and crush them, telling her it's time to give up and get practical? She'll be bombarded with anecdotes from the narrative that tell her to never give up. It's all-consuming. That's what cultural narratives do.
The narrative tells people to become self-actualized. The economic realities of a capitalist marketplace don't really have much room for that. The narrative has placed her in the disheartening place of having followed it and wound up unable to realize her dreams. That can be a very difficult place to move on from.
Agreed. I do have far more experience with moving on. I've pursued two different "dream" careers, and am now in a third that seems to be the best fit for me.
She seems disheartened by her lack of success in the last five years, but I know from personal experience that it's hard to change direction without a huge outside catalyst.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to encourage people to follow their dreams, but I think that society in general and parents specifically should do a better job of raising kids with the ability to critically evaluate themselves. Parents are often blind to the flaws of their children (at least I am), and the business world loves to encourage the idea of following your dreams. Expecting teenagers to have this self-awareness isn't realistic though; some do, but the majority need to skin their knees a bit. Parents need to help with this.
It's a tough nut to crack; we glamorize sports and celebrity when the chances of succeeding in those arenas are miniscule. We celebrate working with our minds and denigrate those who work with their hands.
I disagree. There are all kinds of things you can do that don't require a college degree, including any kind of owner-operated business, a military career, or a skilled trade.
Even today only 40% of the population gets a college degree. That other 60% is doing something to make ends meet.
I think you miss the point. Systemically, exiting high school and entering college is the narrative. It is the path students are being presented as the way forward, not an option forward. Culturally, there is a very strong set of expectations placed on people wrt university education, and this narrative determines people's recognized option paths. There are strong social determinants in place, both positive and negative, to which people react and from which they draw their conclusions--even unknowingly.
Student debt has risen in tandem with the codification of the narrative. An entire industry of loan operations has exploited the inexperienced eighteen-year-olds of the last few decades, saddling them with lifelong debt in the pursuit of the supposed "dream" the American narrative has been selling them their whole lives.
Suffice to say, when one talks about options available to people, one should talk deeply of the real viability and potentiality of those options on a person and his/her life, and refrain from rattling off platitudes of the things someone could do other than follow the narrative. Those things typically aren't qualitatively better, and usually wind up being part of the greater narrative as how we ease our consciences and wash our hands of people we allow to systemically fail.
Then we need to change this narrative, because it doesn't fit the real requirements of the job world. Trade schools, apprentice programs etc are common all over the world, but not as well accepted in the US.
You know who I envy? The electrician who came out last week to install a whole home surge protector. He makes excellent money, in a relatively safe work environment, and has reasonable hours. There's a whole world of "skilled" trades that offer gainful employment without a four year degree, but as a society focused on bling, we don't give those careers our blessings.
>You know who I envy? The electrician who came out last week to install a whole home surge protector. He makes excellent money, in a relatively safe work environment, and has reasonable hours.
Not only that, nobody's going to send his job to China.
This may sound harsh, but medical attention isn't free, and crossing that street without medical insurance and getting hit by a car and accepting expensive treatment you can't pay for is still incurring debt which you are obligated to pay back. This is why insurance of all forms exists; to protect us from expensive, catastrophic events. So as far as fault goes, you are very much to blame if you take risks and choose not to pay for insurance, regardless how expensive it is.
It is totally false to assume that anyone with debt from medical bills must be uninsured.
I had an appendectomy when I was in college and I had insurance and I still received a bill for something like $8000 after the insurance paid out. I managed to have half of that removed due to my very low income, and I luckily was able to pay the rest of it, but this was literally the simplest possible ER visit and surgery you can have and I was lucky to have savings to cover it. If anything worse had happened to me (say, if I got hit by a car) then I could easily have ended up with more than $10k in debt after insurance and after the follow up negotiations with the hospital.
Some insurance would certainly have covered this better, but I had the more expensive of the 2 choices insurance plans that were offered to students at my school. Anyone who is buying their own insurance if it's not provided by their employer isn't going to do much better.
you are very much to blame if you take risks and choose
not to pay for insurance, regardless how expensive it is.
I think I understand where you're coming from. You must live in a society in which no one has ever been denied health insurance due to pre-existing conditions. If I lived in such a society, I might agree with you.
Unless you're lucky enough to live in a country (like where I live) where public health care will cover your expenses. :) In any case you could argue that the driver of the vehicle is responsible for your expenses since they hit you. Unfortunately that's possibly not so easy to do though since people have been conditioned to believe that cars have absolute right of way on the road.
The difference in opinion usually winds up being, one party believes medical attention is a basic human right and should be free for everyone. The other party does not.
Well, it's beside the point. For now, medical care costs money, and people rely on that money for their livelihood, and simply walking away from that debt is wrong.
The cost of medical care in the US is structured to account for bankruptcies - the hospitals get paid in aggregate. The real suckers here are people who actually pay for the care, because they've now paid several multiples of the real cost of the care to account for the people who couldn't afford this ridiculous number and went bankrupt.
The morality behind medical finance in the US is not nearly as clear cut as you think it is.
> "Well, it's beside the point."
It really isn't. It comes down to the core of the issue.
What we have is an industry that collectively charges many times the actual cost of delivering their service and have a monopoly on performing a critical service (licensing, certification). Whether or not this is acceptable hinges hugely on whether or not you believe access to this service is a fundamental right.
There is no way, for example, that we would accept a similar situation if the product in question was fresh water or air.
This is a vast oversimplification of a very complicated problem.
The common public loves to simplify problems, as it makes things easier to comprehend. I think this leads us to this huge partisan gaps in beliefs in this country. Both sides are guilty of boiling down complex problems to a level where people think they "understand" the problem. Unfortunately, there are many more actors, causes, and effect behind the scenes that must be accounted for. It's not a simple cause and effect, Doctors must get paid, argument.
Sure, I'm with you on this, but not everyone agrees, so you can argue with some people about this stuff until you are blue in the face, and never get anywhere, because you are operating on different assumptions. That's my point here.
I sure hope they are going to apply some sort of means test. Having known quite a few people who have discharged their debts in court or are currently mocking the system I certainly don't think all of them deserve the help.
If this group would focus on debt incurred from medical cases then I would be all for it. I want something where I feel good contributing, there are far too many dead beats out there who have hands out but never have a helping hand out for others.
So what if the shoe's on the other foot? A driver hits someone. The driver doesn't have insurance. He's now liable for the other person's medical bills, but can't afford them. He's now massively in debt over some random accident.
No matter the moral judgment ("he shouldn't be driving without insurance"), the underlying point was that random debt does happen :).
Not only should he not be driving without insurance, but he's almost certainly at fault for hitting the pedestrian. We put some debtors into prison for lesser forms of irresponsibility.
That's great, unless he needs to drive to get to work in order to get a paycheck and keep his head above water for another week. Do people really not understand that there are people who do not have the luxury of a risk-free life?
Teaching someone to measure risk is part of parenting, and a good sign of maturity. Driving without insurance is strike one in that calculus, and then hitting a pedestrian is strike two. Helping them out of debt is merely enabling strike three in this scenario.
Take a look at your local newspapers mugshot section. Ours publishes them online, and when bored, it's a fun diversion. The majority of the arrests are for DUI, or driving on a suspended license from a prior DUI. A great cross section of people who don't even care about their impact upon others.
Not sure what DUIs have to do with this. I'm thinking about the guy who lost his job, and the closest position he could find was 50 miles away from his home, which he can't move out of without losing a lot of money. He's exhausted from the long commute each day and the stress of being up to his neck in debt, which is what he's distracted by when he doesn't see the pedestrian step out from behind a parked car. It's got nothing to do with maturity or whatever, it's about doing what is necessary to survive and provide for your family. It's pretty callous and insulting to tell someone in this situation that they deserve to be crushed under debt because you don't want to "enable" their behavior.
Funny. I was thinking of the guy who lost his job, lost his wife to leukemia and has all of her medical bills left over, had his car repossessed and his house foreclosed upon, and was just crossing the street to stay the night at his cousin's house when an uninsured driver puts him into the hospital by crushing his body with 2000 pounds of speeding steel.
As a society, we expect people to follow norms of behavior; we usually call them laws. Driving without insurance is breaking the law. Driving impaired in the case of alcohol is against the law. Driving impaired because you're tired and exhausted and stressed about life and then striking a pedestrian is usually going to result in either criminal charges or civil charges at the minimum. You might even have to wear a sign...
Patronizing someone and linking to fox news to support a nonsense narrative isn't helping your case.
Edit on your edit: Selecting a single extraordinary instance to support your case isn't helping your case. This is no different from someone looking at the idiotic things on Fox News' prime time shows and saying they represent all conservatives.
I know many decent conservatives who think Fox News is for idiots, just as I know many poor people who are completely responsible and still struggle.
You linked that in response to elemenohpee arguing that debt is not always, or even often, a result of irresponsibility. What exactly are you arguing? What was your goal in linking to that?
Elemenohpee was trying to argue that someone who drives without insurance and hits someone wasn't responsible for their actions. If that's an argument you want to back, have at it.
That's what you want my argument to be, because it would be much easier to dismiss. In reality what I'm saying is that I don't think it's right to have a society that puts crazy amounts of pressure on people and simultaneously refuses to acknowledge the negative influence that those pressures have on behavior.
I'm not dismissing the point that people have hard choices to make in life, but I am refusing to acknowledge that they lack responsibility for those choices.
Society puts a lot of pressure on me to live up to its standards. It's my choice as to whether I let that pressure influence me against my values.
Sometimes all the choices and options suck. Not denying that at all. But if I ran over someone while driving in a tired state, or otherwise impaired, it would be ridiculous to not assume the blame for it. Yeah, my fatigue would be a slightly mitigating factor that might garner some sympathy, but compared to the poor schmuck I just hit? Not so much.
You can't really control the amounts of pressure and negative influence you get in life. But you can control how you react and respond to it.
Unless they don't (Or if you were in fact liable). Depending on the numbers you look at 1 in 7 drivers in uninsured or underinsured[1]. This is why you should have uninsured/underinsured coverage as part of your auto policy (on my policy it's $12 per year for $50,000 of coverage).
I'm not much of an OWS supporter, but a lot of the criticism of it really bothers me. Just a lot of hypocrisy to be frank.
- This entitlement thing. I don't see what's entitled about giving one's own time or money to a cause you believe in, to go camp out for weeks or whatever. It seems like a lot of criticism of OWS centers on them acting like they deserve to be given jobs, but I have trouble taking this seriously when the same pundits complain about slow growth in their stocks/financials due to decreased consumer spending and unemployment, and want to know what the government's going to do about it.
- Civil liberties and free speech are supposed to be the cornerstone of American democracy and yada yada, but people suddenly feel extremely threatened when people want to exercise them. Who cares, let the hippies have their say and their signs. Why let it bother you?
- Loan forgiveness, bank bailouts. This is the one that really annoys me because criticisms of OWS on this front tend to be so inconsistent. If a student gets over their head in debt trying to earn a degree, we shouldn't think of helping her out because that's a terrible case of moral hazard, and we'll only encourage that sort of risk-taking behavior. But if bank executives commit fraud and bet against their customers, then get multi-billion bailouts for their companies and multi-million severance checks for themselves, well, you know how business is, these things just happen, there's no help for it.
Anyway sorry for the rant, but I just think if you disagree with what OWS proposes, you should make an argument against it (or even better, just ignore it) rather than resorting to personal attacks or condescending catchphrases like "entitlement".
> Civil liberties and free speech are supposed to be the cornerstone of American democracy and yada yada, but people suddenly feel extremely threatened when people want to exercise them.
Notice the government doesn't get their panties in a bunch over the Westboro church, or Tea Party townhalls, but turn your attention towards the plutocrats and suddenly there's riot police in the street. The fact that the government feels threatened lends credence to their critique.
With a straight face, you're going to tell me that the reason there was such a brutal crackdown on OWS was that people were smoking pot and there were isolated incidents of rape?
Also keep in mind that the Tea Partiers were carrying around assault rifles.
You're saying something doesn't exist on one side of a thing and implying it does on another without explicitly stating it. What do you hope to achieve with this?
When I said entitlement, I should have been more specific. I was referring to the growing belief that all student debt should be forgiven and that things like medical care should be free for everybody. Whether the word "entitlement" sounds dirty or not is entirely up to the reader but that's exactly what these things are. One person's "entitlement" is another person's "right". I just happen to disagree that these things should be rights.
Yeah, medical bills just happen sometimes, for the un-insured or under-insured. And you can easily rack up 10k in debt for a weekend stay at the local hospital for something you could have never helped (accident, disease, or otherwise). Crazy part is, you would never even know what hit you till you got the bill 3 weeks later. It's not like they tell you upfront, "ok, each IV you get is gonna be $550, each blood lab $230, and each vital check is gonna run u $55." I don't think they are bailing out loans on BMWs or mc-mansions...
Yeah I can get behind that people should have known.
But in the case of the Mortgage Market prior to the crash I can't - simply because it wasn't an equal/level playing field.
In brief
1) CDOs => Mortgage Origniators no longer held back by their risk levels. CDOs can just offset it.
2) MOs incentives are now drastically different - Incentive now entirely to generate as many mortgages as possible, whatever the risk profile.
3) With no incentive to care who was signing, as long as they signed - MOs sold to people they knew were incapable of understanding the terms, nor ever meet the conditions, creating things like NINJA mortgages/loans.
The MOs held the information advantage, and then abused it (look at the marketing material of the time) while now including people that they KNEW were out of their depth.
Politicians and citizens alike were pounding on the banks to lower their standards before the crash. Everywhere there was rhetoric about home ownership being a right, and that the evil banks were standing in the way. It's not like this was an evil scheme that the banks cooked up.
Erm - The politicians were being funded by banks and focus groups?
Heck de facto end/death of Glass Steagal was when Citi went ahead and merged with Travelers, even when they knew it would precipitate in a court case and most likely an end to the regulation
I was thinking the same thing... To make this a better program they should buy someones debt, in the example they bought a $14,000 debt for $500. The person that had the debt removed should pay $1,000 back to OWS. Then OWS can buy 2 more... and so on. Unfortunately, the person that had the debt removed will probably just create more debt for themselves
I'm interested in knowing if there is a business model in an "eBay or SecondMarket for personal debt" where anyone could buy and sell the debt of other people.
I get the feeling that there is disruption possible in this industry but I don't know enough about it to speculate how it could be disrupted.
In shock revelation, OWS blames all ills of world on "the 1%". Film at, you guessed it, 11.
One of the reasons OWS isn't more popular is that 99% of the 99% understands that the vast majority of personal debt was and is incurred by regular people living beyond their means, and not by nefarious schemes by nefarious monocle-wearing capitalists. Unsympathetic as it might be, they merely provided the rope.
62% of all bankruptcies in the US have a direct medical cause, a sharp rise from only 8% in 1980.
"Vast majority" of debt incurred by lavish living indeed!
It must be a surreal world for you, one where it's okay to heap blame upon tens of millions of Americans without seeing one single shred of evidence against them.
$1 trillion of student debt. 64% of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt. 5 million homes foreclosed already, another 5 million in default or foreclosure. Credit card debt is $800 billion, generating an average 16.24% interest on money banks borrow at 3.25%.
First, they seem to fail to understand that the reason credit card debt is marked up from bank debt is that there's a fairly significant risk it's not getting paid back. Later on the same page, they state that 10% is written off as irrecoverable.
Second, "Vast majority" might have been artistic license, and I meant to refer to distressed debt - plenty of people use credit for completely reasonable things and service those loans, or have them restructured in good faith. Student debt is also mostly in that category. In other words, those loans will never be available for OWS to purchase for cents on the dollar.
That said, I'm not at all sure bankruptcies are a meaningful proxy for what kinds of debts are outstanding. Certainly, loans bankrupted on aren't included in this project, as they will already have been "forgiven". I couldn't find a good source (indeed, any source), but I would be very surprised if various bits of consumer credit (credit cards, car loans, store credit etc) aren't a very major chunk of the debt available for OWS to buy.
If OWS singled out medical debt and perhaps even some student loans, or made some other effort to review them to make sure they fit a moral prerequisite for having been screwed by "the 1%", I'd be sympathetic to the project. Instead, they are paying off random strangers credit card bill, while honest people who pay off their credit cards, even when it hurts, are passed over.
