Student loan forgiveness is being taken seriously right now by the bourgeoisie.
The Federal interest rate going near 0% has led to a massive boom in housing construction. Student loan deferment has led to many people saving up for a down payment on a house. The housing market is carrying the US economy right now.
If student loan deferment ends, this space that Capital found for expansion will disappear. There will be an immediate crisis.
Also, the effort to privatize student loans has been a failure. Betsy DeVos has been the Secretary of Education most dedicated to privatization. She killed the Perkins Loan, which has led many new students to private loans.
Although, after her reign, 92% of public student loan debt are still held by the Department of Education. It is unlikely that the Biden SoE will be more successful at speeding up the process. Capital is in crisis now.
Forgiving public debts is a method of privatization in America, where a culture of indebtedness exists. They want everyone with public student loans to take out private mortgages, owned by JPMorgan, Citigroup, etc.
I’m not saying student loan forgiveness is good or bad. It is good for me. But it serves a purpose that we should understand.
It’s the former, mostly. Like, it’d be full-on tinfoil hat level to claim everyone is in on it and just lying to us all and somehow no working-class person has ever heard this, so it seems a lot more likely to me that everyone at the top is actually very, very ignorant of how things work outside of their social sphere of other wealthy people.
Just look at how stock traders talk. “Historically, 6 out of 7 times [specific meaningless calculation that has no bearing on the real world] has given a positive result, the stock market’s given double-digit returns over the next three years!! It just happened again!! BUY BUY BUY” “jim we’re in a fucking pandemic no one has money and even if they did they cant go outside to spend it, i dont know how you expect history to repeat itself today” “But look, the line’s going up again anyway! Economy’s doing good!” “thats because you’re buying all the stocks because your program tells you to” “Yes! Because it’s going to go up! See, it just went up more!”
None of it has any actual bearing on people’s material realities, at all - but to people who view their bank account not as “how long I can stay alive if things go tits-up”, but rather as their high score, yeah, the entire field of economics suddenly… actually works, instead of being horoscopes for STEMlords.
