@Axtremus said in The Resident's Financial Problem:
@Mik said in The Resident's Financial Problem:
Have you ever known, in nigh on 20 years, of George citing scripture to buttress his argument?
Reading this thread inspired me to ask “What Would Jesus Do”, so I looked it up. (Of course Deuteronomy is OT so if you really want to and don’t mind overlooking the Trinity idea you can claim that Deuteronomy predates Biblical Jesus and thus disqualify it from answering any WWJD question. But I digress.)
With regards to “student debt” and it’s funding via the public purse, I am still trying to sort through a few things:
Is all higher education a public good?
The implication is that if it’s a public good, then maybe there is a rationale to fund it via the public purse.
Is some higher education a public good but some other higher education is not? If so, who gets to decide what higher education is a public good and what other education isn’t?
If you’re going to allow the public purse to fund some higher education but not some other higher education, who do you let decide which portions of higher education to fund via the public purse? An agency of the (people’s democratically elected) government using criteria set forth by the same government, or individuals (such as private schools’ financial aid officers and private banks’ loan officers) making these decisions using the private schools and private banks’ respective criteria?
The ship to not use any public funds to finance higher education has long sailed, pretty much very state has a public university system that’s supported by public funds.
Then you have folks who like to draw a line separating “federal funding” and “state funding.” This federal vs. state split isn’t very practical either because all states take federal money.
Maybe it’s fine to use the public purse to fund only the sort of public education that satisfies government criteria. (Sounds like the status quo.) And we are left to argue over what those criteria should be. (Also sounds like the status quo.)
Maybe we publicly fund only the institutions but never the individuals. E.g. give public money to public universities (so they keep tuition low for all students) but don’t give any public money to any individual student. (Will wreak havoc to well understood concepts like school funded “work study”, “research assistantship,” “teaching assistantship,” etc.)
Maybe we let private lenders do whatever they want with regards to “student loans,” and resist the urge to not treat private “student loans” any different from other private loans. (The private lenders themselves do not want this, though, they lobbied hard to make “student loans” ineligible for discharge through bankruptcies. Heck, they also want the government to guarantee the loans too if they can get it.)
Still left with the status quo.
Alpha and Omega.
Period.
