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.
I don’t know if bourgeoise are just really bad at understanding how the economy really works or if they just hate the poor that much.
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.
Joke’s on them, forgiving my student loans would give me enough money to buy 2 shipping containers and a small plot of unincorporated land in Maine or Montana. See ya later housing market, I’m gonna go be starving and homeless before you can even touch me.
Real Australian economy hours, who up?
but on a much larger and more fucked scale
Y’all at giving capital too much credit. All of that is true and they will still cut off their nose to spite their face.
Like letting people pay rent with Credit Cards. That is going crater the whole fucking thing
Real and bout to be a massive problem.
yeah lmao
my apartment complex is offering a “”“special”“” deal during the pandemic where they dont charge you the extra 3% fee they usually charge you if you do it. wow thanks not leeching even more money off me than you already do if i end up in a situation where i have to do something as risky as putting rent onto a credit card, what a generous deal
I’m not holding my breath but Biden is filling his cabinet with diehard ideological neoliberals that exist to serve the interests of finance capital. Student debt forgiveness makes sense from a neoliberal perspective in the same way that corporate bailouts or the ACA does. It puts money into the hands of capitalists, more specifically finance capitalists. Who knows though. The right, which is increasingly representing industrial capital over finance capital, might browbeat them into giving up. We know how Dems love giving up.
These are very different scenarios though. Student payments are money being extracted from the economy and getting funneled to the DOE, whereas in 2008, it was money that was flowing to finance capital that was interrupted. Also the bailouts were a lump sum to restore liquidity. We are talking about eliminating the extraction of a large amount of money from the economy, much of which will go to servicing new long term loans from private banks (hypothetically). A mortgage is most likely multiple times the amount that student loans are and having millions of new mortgages could increase the overall hold finance capital has over the greater economy. On the individual level it’s the difference between being on unemployment until work picks back up vs getting a permanent salary bump.
