The issue isn’t about tax dollars paying off student loans. If federal tax dollars can bail out big business, they can help kids’ futures as well. It’s about repairing economic opportunities stymied by a system that the government broke by starving educational institutions of direct subsidies – thus shifting the absurd systemic cost to participating students, and overfinancing institutional demands without regulatory caps.

Folks deep in debt can’t buy – well – much of anything. Does college guarantee a job that could pay back that debt? Nope.

The educational system (inclusive of financiers), profiteering off unbridled, easy-flowing government-secured loans, saddled students with monumental economic anchors. It is right to fix hindsight mistakes by reasonably restoring economic opportunities for those hamstrung by the cost of a system that government neglect abandoned to privateers – and employing government to restore some indemnity in recompense. Yet paying off a modicum of debt is merely applying a tourniquet to gangrenous limbs to prevent spread. It alleviates and helps. It doesn’t cure.

The next step is to revamp the financing of higher education in order to avoid the institutional vampirism endemic to the current system. That is the root of this poisonous tree, and though I applaud the slight antidote given to those made poorer by the government itself, it’s the least that can be done.

Kevin White
Harpswell

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