Gentle reminder that this is against the guidelines, it comes across somewhat as sneering and dismissive (which i don’t think was the intent, but is there none the less).
The issue, in this case, isn't opinions nor the other discourse in the thread. Rather, it is the account's comments over a long stretch of time.
The question "has an account been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle?" is one of the most important criteria we use in HN moderation. When it is the case, we ask an account to stop and/or end up banning it.
This rule has many advantages. One is that it's a reasonably objective call to make (and for readers to verify) regardless of the specific views a user is arguing for or against. Another is that it allows for a certain amount of political and ideological discussion (as long as it doesn't break the site guidelines in other ways, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I have read the guide, although i appreciate reaffirming it as the source of truth. What’s hard is from a glance at the posters history their comments don’t seem to break the guidelines, but instead fall into the camp of spirited (albeit strongly so) opinions. Are there specific comments made that weren’t in the spirit of the guidelines? It feels “primarily for ideological purposes” is hard to counter in a discussion because “ideological” itself is a murky term at best.
The point is the pattern (I think the person you are responding to is incorrect about flamebait), you'd go look at the topic of their most recent comments - if the vast majority of interactions are to argue X then that seems to fall under 'idealogical battle'.
I understand that this sort of thing can be taken as "inflammatory", but if you're one of these groups, your _existence is political and flamebaity_; You can't escape it. That's why people are bringing it up, because they're the ones that have to live with the consequences.
Because that’s just forces colleges to accept rich white kids who will be the less risky in regards to paying off their loans. Guys, y’all are supposed to be smart, really? You all can’t see through this bullshit?
Why stoop to baseless insults? Even if you don't want colleges to be accountable, surely you can't deny that transparency regarding student outcomes would be useful.
Do you REALLY think an executive order had any chance of succeeding? Think about it for a minute. You think the SC would be ok with the president having the ability to forgive loans on a whim?
I read maybe a quarter of the paper and I guess I'm saying both.
It's robbing Peter to pay Paul. Someone with student debt gets relief and greater spending capacity and everyone else just get some more national debt and higher interest rates.
It is all upside for one party and all downside for the other. As the paper states, GDP goes up, but less than the total cost over a 10 year horizon.
Forgiving 1.4 Trillion debt is predicted "Over the
10-year forecast, the policy generates between $861 billion
and $1,083 billion in real GDP.
Now GDP doesn't equal federal revenue so you are really looking at adding $1.4T debt for a fraction of $1T in returns.
To address these other concerns, checkout out podcasts like pitchfork economics or freakanonics. There’s no reason to think interest would go up. That’s just concern trolling from republicans
Unfortunately it would require knowledge of the future. My concern with the policy is that I believe it creates perverse incentives that encourage a continuing spiral of more costly higher education, resulting in more debt, and unpredictable periodic political battles over "one-time" forgiveness.
If you could come back from the future and say "that didn't happen, instead it gave college graduates the breathing room they needed to become politically engaged and they successfully pushed for permanent solutions to the problem of increasing costs and debt", then I'd be happy to take the L!
Or perhaps if you could find an analogous country where a one-time blanket forgiveness led to more foundational improvements to the financing of higher education in that country, that would help alleviate my concerns.
But barring that analogous country that already did this (which I don't think exists because, as you've noted, our current system is weird and different than how it works elsewhere), I don't think there's a quantitative answer to this question, because that's just not where my concern lies.
Ok so here's the belief I think you must be saying you believe the opposite of:
> I believe it creates perverse incentives that encourage a continuing spiral of more costly higher education, resulting in more debt, and unpredictable periodic political battles over "one-time" forgiveness.
So you believe that forgiving loans will instead create good incentives that lead to lower costs for higher education. Can you explain the mechanism by which you think that would happen? I've described how I predict people would behave, but I'm curious how you think it would shake out.
