lydia-gastrell:
pinkcheesegreenghost:
rtrixie:
The way I see it, America will eventually have the choice between forgiving student debt or facing the massive destabilization caused by an entire generation being unable to build any wealth.
By destabilization I mean that the millennial generation will eventually become aware of the fact that they will be enslaved by their student debt for most of, if not their entire lives.
Many in this generation still had parents that were able to save and contribute financially to their children’s college education, but that’s also going to be a thing of the past when everyone has their own debt burden to carry well into adulthood – meaning the problem will become unimaginably worse for the next generation.
Once people realize this, you’ve got a social powder keg unheard of since the social question poised by the industrial revolution.
The entire student loan system is little more than a scheme meant to extract every last bit of present and future wealth from society’s youngest members, and the longer it continues, the uglier its inevitable end is going to be.
and so many millennials are choosing not to get married, or have kids because of all the debts they owe.
its having much more severe consequences than people want to admit.
Oh, it’s even worse than you think, because many millennials are making the conscious decision to default. There are no real legal penalties for defaulting (debtors prison, for now, is still not a thing). You’ll get letters threatening to sue you and garnish your wages, but they are almost always empty threats. It doesn’t happen. Your credit will be destroyed, but it is technically possible to live life without anything requiring a good credit score. These are the people who will never own property, never take out a car loan, or make any other large purchases requiring financing, but they were already so strapped paying student loan payments, they couldn’t afford those things anyway!
So where does it get “even worse”? The only real penalty for not paying those loans is that the government can, and will, withhold your social security when you reach retirement age. So 25 years from now we’re going to have a generation full of retirement age people who will not be able to retire for one of two big reasons: 1) they spent their youth living on the fringe paying massive student loans debts, and therefore own nothing to keep them afloat (like a paid off house) and they have to keep working to pay rent and survive, or 2) they chose to default so they could actually live some semblance of a life, but now they can’t stop working because no Social Security checks are coming.
Either way, it’s a massive disaster that the government WILL end up holding the bag for. They will either forgive the loans, or they will have to take the weight of all those old millennials dropping into the safety net. They will also have to deal with the high umemployment of generation Z, which will be a direct result of the Millennials not leaving the workforce to make room for them.
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 