It’s a good thing I know better!!! When I actually do inherit money from my unknown great-uncle that I didn’t even know about in Nigeria, I will be much too smart to make this kind of mistake. For now, I am just glad to pay the “finders fee” for the guy who was able to track me down so I can get the wire transfer soon.
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Hey, just got my first one of these texts!
“I’m Olivia Ferrell and are you Jenifer the yoga instructor?”
I want to respond, “I watched ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’. Do you need help escaping?”
But I’ll probably just block the number. I cannot fuck with someone that long (I’m old. Get it??)
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I have been friend requested by my dead uncle on Facebook at least five times.
Once I accepted and started talking with them and let them think they were getting in deep, “Of course I can help, Uncle, what do you need?”
Only after stringing them along for a while did I hit the “By the way, I didn’t hear that you must have gotten better? You looked pretty rough at your funeral, I wish you’d told me sooner that you came back to life!”
Recent show highlights why you should refuse to fly on Boeing 737 Max planes:
The employees who built it don’t even want to fly on them.
Apparently, on Kayak you can filter flights based on what planes you don’t want to fly on, and that filter moved up on the left based on consumer use.
Even in death, Facebook addiction occurs!!
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Does the filter handle the model name changes?
I was unaware of North Carolina politician Mark Robinson so Oliver’s segment on him was quite eye-opening. Can’t believe this guy could become a governor.
I quite disliked the piece on student loan forgiveness.
I don’t want to fund a government bailout of people who borrowed themselves into oblivion
And while he made some good points about loan forgiveness programs not working, he again used his poorly founded argument style to show 6 sad cases of people struggling with their loans to imply the other 42,999,994 student loan borrowers in the US are also sad cases.
Some of the story displayed quite poor understanding of the math. If you borrow 80,000 and make interest only payments for 10 years, you have no right to complain that the principal hasn’t changed.
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He certainly knows his audience when he picked that topic though
I think your criticisms have validity, but
- The PSLF debacle affected a LOT of people and was some total bullshit, an embarrassment all around
- I find valid the argument that most 17-18 year olds signing up for loans and potentially expensive private colleges had no idea what they’re getting into.
Of course people should take their own education (including finances) into their own hands, but if you’re told “getting a college degree is immensely important” then you will of course take out loans and might not consider the difference between a $50k loan and a $120k loan, both of which were ludicrously unimaginable sums of money at 17 when I was making $7.25/hour. It should be up to the parents to have common sense, but too many don’t and their kids end up with crushing debt.
I feel the annoyance over potentially forgiving loans for somebody who took 7 years to cycle through 4 majors and ended up with Outdoor Recreation and now works at Home Depot. Something needs to be done proactively about this for future borrowers, whether or not we alleviate some of the debt for current payers.
Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, subject to some restrictions. Writing out those restrictions would be tricky, but I bet it could be done and land in a reasonable spot.
You don’t want the future lawyers & surgeons with upcoming 7 figure incomes to be able to discharge their student loans the second they finish med/law school and are in residency / working as associates with a temporarily low income. But the person who spent 3 years as a Communications major who never finished and now works at Starbucks has no realistic change of ever paying that loan off… and quite frankly probably shouldn’t have been permitted to rack up so much debt in the first place.
IMO, identifying ill-advised borrowing prospectively and retrospectively are two very different things.
So who wants to go on record crushing the hopes and dreams of that first-year Communications major, who’s the first person from his family ever to attend college?
ETA: I suppose prospective assessment could be done, but it would involve a lot of uncomfortable inferences. “You’re ______, and our data shows that ______ people rarely succeed in that industry, so no loan for you.”
If I was in charge, I would decree that the financing of higher education be revamped such that state-underwritten loans be on the basis of paying x% of all future income per credit of instruction, with x set such that reasonable costs would be covered, but without being so large as to be excessively burdensome.
The government would front the money and then collect from the student in future tax returns, or provide an out by performing a certain amount of national service.
The idea probably needs some refinement, as I’m not sure how to account for gender differences (specifically differences in the propensity to take maternity/paternity leave, or differences in the rate of eventually becoming a SAHM/SAHF).
If the government is underwriting then they DNGAF at all because it’s not their money.
And if someone else is underwriting… someone who does GAF, then doctors and lawyers can borrow all they want but teachers and social workers cannot.
So I think that idea needs some refinement.
If the loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy, subject to some carefully crafted restrictions, and someone other than the government is holding the bag, then I think that’s a better outcome. Teachers and social workers may struggle to pay off student loans to attend Sarah Lawrence (which has been cited as one of the worst buys in education and is thusly picked on by me) but they should be able to pay off loans to attend Local State U. And if you want to be a social worker and attend Sarah Lawrence… that’s just something you’re going to have to fund up front. 
The carefully crafted restrictions will force the surgeon (who is earning a pittance in residency but looking forward to a 7-figure income down the road) to pay. But they will let off the hook the person who put in 3 years at expensive no-name private college and is now working as a Starbucks barista.
I didn’t communicate the idea in the best way, I think. So let me try again.
The basic concept under my notion is that: you go to school for x years, and then you pay x% of all future income to repay your education.
That relationship holds regardless of what you study. You go to school for four years and get an actuarial science degree, you pay 4% of actuary money. You go to school for four years and get an underwater basketweaving degree, you pay 4% of Walmart greeter money.
I’m not certain that a one-for-one x years of study = x% of income is the correct relationship. When I had envisioned it, I had thought it would be a constant relationship across all schools. However, with further reflection, maybe there is something to be said for allowing that to vary by school. Maybe a high-priced private college would ask for 2x% of income for x years of education, while a non-flagship state school might go for an 0.5x% of income for x years of education.
But any variance would be on a by-school basis, not varying by major.
This would break the problem of college costs becoming inflated because of easy access to loans. Universities would have an incentive to do more to help their students and alums capitalize on their education. And there would be an incentive to steer students towards fields of study where they actually could be successful with their degrees.
Where I stumble with the idea is that if you ran with it as-is, schools would have an incentive to be biased towards admitting men, given gender pay disparities, etc.
Yes, I understand, and I strongly strongly dislike it. What percentage of current teachers and social workers finance their education through student loans? Why on earth would a lender bother to lend $10,000 to someone studying to become a teacher when they can instead loan the same $10,000 to someone studying to be an actuary and get a much higher ROI? The college is charging them both the same, or pretty close to it.
Do we want to continue to have teachers and social workers in the future? How will that happen? (Please don’t say “pay them more”. That’s certainly NOT going to realistically happen.)
I think either a teacher or an actuary is capable of repaying a $10,000 loan, with interest. So make them both pay.
But if the lender is stupid enough to lend $200,000 to someone who barely got C’s in high school and wants to become a social worker and then drops out three years in… the lender has to eat that under my plan.
Which means the really egregious abuses won’t happen. Lenders will be forced to actually evaluate a student’s creditworthiness… which is a good thing. But it’s still possible to borrow state school money to go into a median-income job if you got decent grades and show realistic hope of actually graduating and paying back the loan.
The scheme is predicated on the federal government underwriting the loan programs. The government program would take all comers, doing no underwriting; it just provides the mechanism to collect a portion of the student’s income (new line item on one’s 1040), and provides cash to the schools equivalent to the NPV of (future income shares minus servicing costs).
There’s still the problem of such a system creating incentives for schools to more aggressively recruit future actuaries than future social workers. Perhaps it would need to be augmented with other government programs along the lines of “teach in this community where there is a need for teachers for n years, and you don’t have to share your future income”. Certain programs might need to be supplemented by outside contributions…but that sort of happens today, if I’m not mistaken.
It’s definitely not a perfect system. But I don’t like the current system where easy access to money reduces pressure for schools to resist inflating tuition, or where my tax dollars even indirectly support the mediocre student dropping out after 5 years of pursuing, but not obtaining, their degree in underwater basketweaving, leaving them to service a mountain of debt with a job in fast food.
I’d like to see schools have a little more skin in the game when it comes to helping their students and grads capitalize on their degrees, and perhaps be a little more savvy about making financial decisions.
I’d be open to better ideas that achieve these results.
Well as a taxpayer I don’t want to fund that. WAY too many people screw around and don’t study and I don’t want to pay for that.
So, sorry, but I continue to strongly dislike your plan.
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