student loan forgiveness is a legal bribe

I write this as someone that went to college and that also took out student loans.

I can agree with the people that say that these loans are predatory and encourages colleges to not compete in a real competitive environment that would normally be dictated by supply and demand. Anyone that tries to suggest that higher education in the US is not overpriced is being ignorant because all you have to do is look up a chart that shows how the cost of college just happens to coincide with the exact moment that the government started guaranteeing low-interest loans in order to see the problem here.

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I went to college, I took out loans, I took very little in the way or anything financially related as far as my coursework is concerned and I, as a stupid redneck can still see what is and always has been going on here: The university system took advantage of the fact that everyone all of a sudden had financial access to higher education and adjusted their prices, probably in concert with one another, accordingly.

The recent announcement that student loan debt was going to be eliminated by the government is NOT a solution to this big problem. From my perspectives this is simply an easy way for the US government to pay off defaulted debts to their biggest political contributors while also gaining a few votes from people who have been duped by the system.

If you look at this realistically, I don't really see how anyone can come to the conclusion that this, on its own, is a solution to the problem at all. The problem is that the education system is, by design, overpriced. The government forgiving loans only transfers the cost to people that never took advantage of this program to begin with and doesn't even address what the REAL problem was to begin with.

The real problem is that university education wouldn't cost this much if the industry was subjected to actual economics of supply vs. demand. They have been kept afloat and making tons of money by the addition of guaranteed loans to start with. "Forgiving" this debt only benefits the banks that made the government-assured loans to begin with.

I probably couldn't have gone to college to begin with had it not been for the existence of these loans... this much I am aware of. On the other hand though if these loans had never existed in the first place the various universities that I qualified to attend would have been forced to compete with one another based on cost as well as the quality of education that they had to offer. Because of the existence of these loans they didn't have to do either of these things.

I truly feel as though my college degree, and the classes that came along with them were a waste of time and 30,000 dollars and when I speak to people today I just advise that they do not go to college at all but instead to just say that they did and wait to get busted.

This forgiveness of loan debt is in my mind, simply a "legal bribe" to get people to vote a certain way and will in no way change the root of the problem. The problem being that education shouldn't have ever been as expensive as it was in the first place. Paying people for bad behavior is never going to solve anything.