I’ll keep this simple.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and other respected Democrats in Congress continue to call for the cancelation of college loan debts. Is this an admission that the promise of a good paying job with a college degree is not a reality? If a college degree truly did lift ones earnings $32K a year more than those with only a high school degree, shouldn’t those with the extra $2,600 a month be able to pay off a $400 a month loan?
What am I missing? Or, is the press for college loan forgiveness an admission that a college degree is not the solution to wide and widening wage gaps in the USA?
Please share widely!
Or is this another way for JTM to disparage getting a college education? It’s an acknowledgement that college, the ticket to better paying and highly skilled jobs, is way too expensive and has drastically outpaced inflation.
Nope, just an honest question. If a college degree nets a student $2,600 in additional income over a high school grad, why do we need to use taxpayer funds, including those paid by the high school grad, to pay off a $400 a month loan?
Or is this a way for you to disparage so called “low skilled” yet essential workers who lack a college degree?
You do understand that those who favor cancelling student debt also tend to favor the very wealthy (not high school only grads) paying a lot more, right? I really wish you would stop sounding like a you’re-on-your-own Republican on these matters. There are a lot of things that happen in life which are unexpected. I’m a perfect example of someone whose income does NOT match expectations for the level of education I have, but that does not negate the fact that overall one tends to have more opportunities with more formal education. Ideally, college would be cheaper to begin with (possibly even free at public institutions just like K-12 is and for the same reasons), and this discussion of loan forgiveness would be largely moot.
I still don’t get the math. If a kid takes out a loan that results in him or her making $2,600 a month more than if he or she did not take the loan, why do they need help paying $400? The kid is AHEAD $2,200 a month.
Further, why does the kid who chose to not take the loan and instead, take on an essential job that pays $2,600 less than the college kid have to pay taxes to support that subsidy?
You’re being way too simplistic with your arithmetic. Some of us WANT the opportunities that college affords rather than an “essential job”, but at the same time we are not automatically as much richer as a result as you assume. No person should be denied the opportunity to attend post-secondary education on account of inability to pay – PERIOD!
The truth is simple. Your refusal to respect the essential workers on the grounds that they do not have a college degree is part of the reason why the Democrats are losing in rural areas and frankly, meets the definition of the “Liberal Elite”.
Is this a “greatest hits” thread of your canards?
Nobody is refusing to respect anybody — except perhaps this rude response to Christopher.
Come on, John, you know better than that.
Can we let the late Rush Limbaugh rest in peace? 🙂
The economic suffering of essential workers in today’s economy has everything to do with predatory banking and economic practices and nothing to do with education policy.
Where did I say I disrespected essential workers? I know they are called essential for a reason. I personally just don’t have any interest in doing those jobs myself.
I suppose the same logic would apply to home owners (heavily subsidized) versus renters, where it at least would make some sense.
Why should everyone be taxed to pay for someone to go all the way through high school when high school graduates make more money than dropouts? Unless you think that the work that people with high school diplomas do is more “essential” than the work dropouts do.
Home ownership is open to anyone who through hard work and frugality can come up with a down payment. A friend who left school in the 6th grade to work on the family farm now owns homes worth close to a million.(He was born in Alabama and is Black so his truancy was never pursued.)
He would never be accepted into a community college let alone a State University so the subsidy of free college is useless to him.
If someone saw the movie Moana and became inspired to study Polynesian literature, then graduates with a doctorate in that field, finds the marketplace doesn’t reward their studies should their poor choice guarantee them a job?
Education up to and including high school provides society with citizens who have a basic ability to make decisions (or they should be able to). Decisions made after that level should have their own rewards or penalties and not be dependent on the government acting like a “helicopter” parent.
Nobody guarantees anything.
A person with a PhD in ANYTHING is statistically likely to receive higher wages than a dropout. Getting any kind of PhD requires a certain level of personal discipline and rigor, and many employers value that — even if they don’t care about Polynesian Literature.
The world around us is full of evidence that this was far more true in 1940 than in 2021.
The American electorate of today is unable to make basic decisions about crucial issues facing us. To wit:
I share your implied belief that government has an obligation to provide people (not just citizens) with the basic ability to make (correct) decisions.
In the 1930s, a high school degree was sufficient. In 2021, a college degree is required.
Since the beginning we’ve always basically allowed 18 year olds to go and kill and be killed for our existence. I guess that’s about as good a dividing line as we need for people’s ability to make their own decisions. Would you change the age to sign legal contracts?
That’s a red herring and a distraction.
What age for legal contracts?
Reminds me of the stupid kids who signed for credit cards and ran up bills they then didn’t want to pay.
Irrelevant and immaterial.
Being legally allowed to sign a legal contract has nothing to do with understanding it.
I suggest that a substantial portion — more than 80% — of today’s Americans of legal age have no ability AT ALL to read, never mind understand, a legal contract.
Just kind of wondering if you really want the Democrats to continue down the elitist path. To QUOTE you “
The American electorate of today is unable to make basic decisions about crucial issues facing us. To wit:
I share your implied belief that government has an obligation to provide people (not just citizens) with the basic ability to make (correct) decisions.
In the 1930s, a high school degree was sufficient. In 2021, a college degree is required.”
So an intelligent electorate is only made up of college educated people and let’s make everyone pay so the college educated aren’t burdened with debt. Could we at least make journeyman electrician and plumbing licenses free, maybe truck driver licenses free also?
Intelligence is different from literate and educated.
Do you disagree with any of my points?
A LITERATE — not “intelligent” — electorate is required to make good — or even acceptable — decisions on crucial matters of public interest.
One thing we might do is reverse the four-decade dismantling of our once world-leading public education system — a dismantling led and championed by the GOP.
In their decades-long dishonest pandering to the most base elements of racism and sexism in our society, the GOP wrecked a first-class education system. Citing “states rights” and “religious freedom” (dog-whistles for anti-black and anti-women), the GOP stripped the federal government of control over curricula and standards and replaced it with subsidies delivered to individual states and administered as those states see fit.
Not surprisingly, the quality of public education across the US — but especially in the “Red” states of our heartland — was destroyed.
I suggest that average journeyman electrician and plumber of 2021 has a fraction of the literacy of the average electrician and plumber of 1936.
The results of four decades of GOP vandalism against public education is apparent in the literacy level of high-school graduates today. You do understand, I hope, that nearly every credentialed four-year college has been forced to offer courses to freshmen so that those incoming first-year students are prepared for college-level academic work.
High school graduates for at least the last ten years are often unable to write complete sentences. They are often unable to solve 9th grade algebra problems. They are often ignorant of basic principles of physics, such as energy conservation or of the behavior of falling objects in the earth’s gravitational field.
There is nothing “elitist” about describing the requirements of correct decision-making in 2021.
Is it “elitist” to observe that voters must be able to perform basic risk analysis to make informed choices about public health policy during a pandemic?
Is it “elitist” to observe that voters must understand basic physics and chemistry to make informed choices about policy regarding climate change?
You do understand that the physics and chemistry of how human fossil fuel consumption drives the upcoming climate change catastrophe have been known since the 19th century, and were taught in High School physics and chemistry classes in the 1950s and 1960s, right?
You are repeating the GOP canard that “Elitist” is a synonym for “Democrat”. That’s a lie, and I hope you know that.
I wish I thought of that!
In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a Master (not Journeyman) Plumber’s License costs $78 ever two years (https://licensing.reg.state.ma.us/public/dpl_fees/dpl_fees_results.asp?board_code=PL). That’s about a half-hour of billable time, every two years.
Plumbing programs are already available and free at any Massachusetts vocational high school.
What is your point (besides trolling)?
Okay, how about forgiving the loan the kid takes out for his van that he bought to start his plumbing business? Or should only the rich be able to get free vans from their wealthy families?
It feels as though you’re arguing for the sake of arguing. You’re also creating a false dilemma. There is no tradeoff between helping small businesses and making higher education affordable for everyone — in spite of your best efforts to manufacture one.
Every kid needs help with starting a small business. Let’s call your kid “Amy”. That’s why we need a UBI and similar programs. FWIW, raising the minimum wage has ZERO effect on Amy because Amy works for herself and pays herself whatever she can afford to pull out of her business.
There actually IS a tradeoff among various ways to provide economic support to Amy and her peers. A consequence of a substantially increased minimum wage is that Amy and people like her who start their own businesses cannot benefit from it. A consequence of raising the minimum wage is that it tends to lock its recipients into jobs that pay wages.
A different way to support Amy and her peers is to help them with zero- or low-interest loans in order to launch their contemplated businesses. A reality of that approach is that most of those attempts will fail — the investment community assumes a failure rate of at least 9 failures out of 10 deals. Some investment firms assume 99 failures out of 100 deals. That means that any entity that funds startups must recover its outflows from the relative handful of deals that succeed. That leads to absolutely CUT-THROAT pressure on would-be entrepreneurs. Do we want the government in that business? I don’t know.
Another way to support Amy and her peers is to provide a UBI that covers her basic needs so that she is better able fund her startup herself.
Democrats have ALWAYS supported programs for making funds available to people who want to start small businesses. That’s what the SBA is all about (among others). It is worth noting that the GOP has fought SBA programs for decades. Government is bad, you know, so government funding of small business is bad. I suppose you have to be a Halliburton in order for a government loan, grant, or subsidy to be ok.
I enthusiastically agree that federal and state assistance for young people who want to start their own business is a good thing. So does every elected Democrat — including Joe Manchin (https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/in-the-news/resources-key-for-west-virginias-small-businesses-times-west-virginian).
This does, however, lead to the necessary next step. A handful of those young entrepreneurs will make enormous gains as a result of their government assistance. They will want to pay their employees as little as possible — I suspect that a proposed minimum wage of $23/hour will tend to alienate them. Where do our political loyalties lie?
Do we, for example, demand an equity share of their business in exchange for government help? There be dragons there!
So the first part of my answer is to remind you that Democrats already do this, have been doing this for generations, and have been opposed by the GOP at every step of the way.
We Democrats have some difficult and important work to do in understanding the tradeoffs — including economic, legal, social and political — of how we help small businesses.
Next, the fact remains that Amy will benefit from at least some college-level coursework. It will help her to know how legal contracts work. It will help her to know some basic accounting. It will help her to know some basic micro-economics. It will help her to know something about marketing communications. And so on.
“Amy’s Plumbing Supply” is very likely to be more successful if Amy is able to apply the learnings, wisdom, and experience of a college education — just as you gained from your BA in History.
I have always shared your passion to help “regular” people attain economic prosperity (I define “prosperity” to mean “the absence of anxiety about my economic future”).
I equally strongly reject your equally passionate attacks on providing ANY sort of educational assistance those who need it.
Again, the idea is to make the wealthy, who are usually also very formally educated, pay more. Why is this basic point not getting through?
“ Home ownership is open to anyone who through hard work and frugality can come up with a down payment.”
There are several things problematic about this statement and the little story that goes with it.
First of all is the loading of this statement with the emotional terms “hard work and frugality”. Home ownership is actually open to anyone who can come up with the down payment, period. It doesn’t matter how you come up with it–whether you come up with it through hard work, or connections, frugality or fraud. People come up with down payments the same way people come up the rent every month.
Second, you haven’t given any argument why taxpayers should subsidize this guy. He has already demonstrated that he doesn’t need help.
Is there an argument that as a society we are better off with his owning property? Maybe. But I think there is a much stronger argument that society is better off the more educated the population is.
So when are people responsible for their own decisions? Since you want to retroactively pay off loans that educated adults (?) now feel they can’t afford where does it stop? If they buy a car they don’t like can they get their money back?
Free college for future students is a different argument but paying off loans that people already signed for is ridiculous. I’m also fine NOT subsidizing home ownership, price of real estate will come down.
At what age are people responsible for decisions they make?
At what age to people develop an infallible ability to predict the future? Many people make decisions that are as informed as possible regarding these things then their life is turned upside down my external and uncontrollable forces.
No one is ever infallible. But after the age of 18 you grow a pair, realize what you’re responsible for and learn your lesson. Even earlier if you’re parents taught you well or if you screwed up so bad that you can and should be tried as an adult.
If you made a decision it’s YOUR decision.
Yes, thank you. I put myself through college, worked nights & weekends. No one forgave my loans. Both of my children went to college, took out loans and paid those loans off in under six years.
Of course this is a complex issue but “forgive the loans” is too simple of an answer.
What responsibility do colleges have in selling these degrees to students without a complete and frank discussion of what sort of occupation they are most likely to get, what that occupation pays, and how long it will take to pay off the loan?
When I worked in retail for five years before my retirement, I met dozens of kids with college degrees who worked beside me, making less than $20 an hour. These kids all had what I viewed as very questionable degrees in areas of study that I could not see as a viable career path. None of them were able to land a job in their field of study. All had significant loans.
Yes, I graduated with a BA in History. I do not regret it. It has increased my appreciation of life, but no, it was never a paycheck. Still, I paid my loans.
How about this: How about an audit of schools with high loan rates for graduates who are not employed in their field of study and have those schools issue a partial refund to the students? Get the taxpayers out of the loop?
By this standard, you would also end funding for public high school.
Is that what you intend?
Not at all. While the vast majority of jobs require a high school education, most jobs, many of them essential, do not require a college degree.
And how can you ask me to accept your claim that kids with college loans are saddled with a lifetime of debt in the same world where you claim that the path to prosperity and higher wages is with a college degree?
If the degrees paid off as promised, the loans would be easily paid off by the borrowers. So which side of this argument do you want to take Tom?
Are college degrees a good investment with an acceptable ROI or are they an inefficient use of time and money that require subsidy and cannot sustain themselves?
There you go again. You’re lying about what I’ve written, even here on this thread.
You’re just trolling. Please stop trolling, and please stop lying about what I’ve said.
They increase, but do not guarantee, your chances to be better compensated – what is so hard to understand about this?
Based on what I read in the news and from Democrats in office, far too many with college degrees are not making a salary to cover the costs.
As Christopher said — a college degree increases your chances of being better compensated.
Lots of tall people will never be NBA players. Lots of people with college degrees will not make a salary to cover their costs.
That, in fact, is a good reason to make college public — so that nobody has to cover their costs of getting a college degree.
Which is exactly why they need help.
How are we helping them? Timmy has a job that will not allow him to buy a house, start a family, live comfortably. It is a job that we have deemed “essential” but it does not require a college degree or skills that those with a college degree place any value on.
Democrats tell Timmy, “Son, you need a college degree to live a middle class life in the USA!” and that 13 years of school is no longer sufficient to prepare our students for success in today’s economy. – despite the reality unearthed during the recent pandemic that a majority of essential jobs do not require more than 13 years of school.
Timmy takes the advice of the Democrats and takes out a loan, goes to college, and then finds himself in a job where he still can’t buy a house, start a family, or pay back his college loan. The Democrats solution? Pay off the loan. Now Timmy has no loan to pay off but still has a job here he still can’t buy a house, start a family,
The only ones making out on this deal are the colleges.
Timmy still needs to have the option of going to college without financial barriers. Plus if his loan is paid off that’s one less expense so that he can put his own income toward things like a house and family. You are still putting words into Democrats’ mouths! Not every policy is going to help everybody. You make it sound as though we think that cancelling debt is the only policy we advocate and if we do just that one thing everything else will fall into place on its own. Nobody has ever suggested that. We don’t even think free college (which is advocated by people I thought you like) solves all the problems. There are other policies we ALSO need to assist those who do not attend post-secondary institutions.
Okay, yes, Timmy gets free college. I appreciate higher learning. I appreciate life long learning.
However, if Timmy is looking at the option of a college degree primarily on the hope that it will lead to economic security and it does not, who benefits from the system other than the colleges?
No, I am not putting words into Democrats mouths. I pulled the quote from the White House web page.
You willfully refuse to admit the difference between “prepare for” and “guarantee”.
In fact, you ARE. There is nothing on the page you pulled the “quote” from that says anything like “[college] will lead to economic security”.
Here is the actual text from that page:
There is NO promise that this college will “lead to economic security” — that is your own strawman.
I’m sorry, but you most certainly ARE putting words into Democrat’s mouths.
Concerning this issue, you’ve been putting these lies into their mouths for years.
Tom, look back to 2020 and the long list of essential jobs that did not require more than 13 years of schooling. Then tell me why they are not getting paid enough today. Why does our president ignore this reality? Why do you? Why are they seen as failures, failures who need to “gain the skills they need to succeed”?
Nobody is ignoring anything, for crying out loud.
The Joe Biden administration has just passed the largest infrastructure package since Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway program. The second piece has been passed by the House and will hopefully become law by early January.
That legislation does MAJOR things to address the needs of working class men and women.
Nobody sees these workers as “failures” — except perhaps you yourself.
You refuse to admit the fundamental error of your interpretation of the stance towards higher education taken by Democrats, and you then use that fundamental error as a basis for your endless flaming about college.
Increasing access to higher education is a huge win for every worker. It is especially important for working class families suffering the most in today’s broken economy.
Meanwhile, armed civil war is breaking out this weekend. The economic suffering caused by decades of increasing wealth concentration has caused those suffering the most to take to the streets. The unfortunate verdict in Wisconsin will send right wing extremists armed with assault rifles to the streets. The left wing extremists — especially angry blacks — will respond in kind.
This armed civil war is caused by wealth concentration.
In my view, we should be doing everything in our power to address the economic suffering that is causing all this.
These two initiatives do just that. Your dishonest attacks on the provisions about higher education are both incorrect and dangerous. Incorrect because they are based on logical fallacies. Dangerous because they only inflame passions against the ONLY government officials that currently trying to do the right thing — even if imperfectly.
The Democrats are the only sane voices in government right now. I’m weary of your hostility towards them.
As frustrated as I am that even a masters degree has not led to higher compensation in my case, I do not for a moment regret earning the degree.
That has nothing to do with it. I went to school to learn, to widen my world view. I do not regret any of it. I was angered at times when I was making more than many of my friends with a masters degree or law degree as a car salesman in the 80’s – and heard them say it was unjust because “they have a masters” and I’m selling Corollas.
Again, in my fifty years in the work force, never, ever, did I need a college degree and I was able to support a family. I have a degree and I encouraged my children to get a degree. I paid 100% of the cost of my degree my children paid for their own college degrees, including one with a masters.
Then why have you consistently sounded like this is only about money? Your commentary suggests that the only reason to go to college is to make money and that people who might go to college would skip it in favor of essential work not requiring a degree if only those jobs paid more.
Repeating the lie only worsens it. Democrats tell “Timmy” nothing of the sort.
You are willfully lying about the party — as egregiously as any Trumpist.
This seems to be typical of your generation who doesn’t seem to remember that college also flat out cost less in both relative and absolute terms back then.
“At what age are people responsible for decisions they make?”
College loans, are much harder to discharge through bankruptcy than the loans we take out by running up our credit card. The moralistic tone of Scott12’s argument is a little hard to take.
Yes, this entire structure needs to be addressed, including an audit of private and public schools that have a high number of graduates unable to pay back their loans.
Private student loans were largely stripped of bankruptcy protections in 2005 in a congressional move that had the devastating impact of tripling such debt over a decade and locking in millions of Americans to years of grueling repayments.
The Republican-led bill tightened the bankruptcy code, unleashing a huge giveaway to lenders at the expense of indebted student borrowers. At the time it faced vociferous opposition from 25 Democrats in the US Senate.
But it passed anyway, with 18 Democratic senators breaking ranks and casting their vote in favor of the bill. Of those 18, one politician stood out as an especially enthusiastic champion of the credit companies who, as it happens, had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions – Joe Biden.
@ scott12mass: I’m glad to see that you agree with us that the draconian and predatory student loan provisions were put there by the GOP in the face of stiff opposition from Democrats.
The passion to strip the weak and vulnerable of every red cent is a core characteristic of the GOP and always has been.
Unlike credit card debt, student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.
That is obscene.
“stiff opposition” ?
In 2002, during an earlier version of the legislation, Warren, who was a Harvard bankruptcy law professor at the time, singled out Biden for his push to make it harder for struggling people to file for bankruptcy — arguing the change would be particularly harmful to women.
“The point is simply that family economics should not be left to giant corporations and paid lobbyists, and senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening,” she wrote in her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap.” “Middle-class women need help, and right now no one is putting their economic interests first.”
Maybe if Joe had really led some opposition it wouldn’t have passed and become what it is. The GOP ain’t perfect but the Dems can be their own worst enemy. That’s why I’m neither. Maybe Harvard (and other schools) should run their own loan programs and keep the government out of it.
Are you the same person today that you were twenty years ago?
Joe Biden — and the Senate Democrats who voted for the bill — was wrong. Elizabeth Warren was right. That all happened before an 18 year old voter of 2022 was born.
“Ain’t perfect” is an understatement. The GOP is silent when one of its House members threatens to kill another member of Congress and the President.
At one time in my life I supported the death penalty. I was wrong. As I gained life experience — and as I heard compelling arguments grounded in fact and shared values — I changed my opinion.
Ms. Warren was my first choice in the primary, in no small part because of Mr. Biden’s long support for the worst excesses of the banking industry.
Mr. Biden won and Ms. Warren lost. That issue was addressed, and Mr. Biden acknowledged that his position on those matters has “evolved”.
In my view, that evolution is a strength — not a weakness.
Meanwhile, you continue to show that you agree that student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. I appreciate your support for that.
Repeating the same logical blunder does not correct it.
No kid should have take on a lifetime of debt in order to get a college degree. No kid who was forced to take on a lifetime of debt should be forced to continue being saddled with that debt.
Anyone who cares about the victims of the college loan scam would be better served by focusing on who PROFITS from these obscene and predatory loans.
Nobody asserts that “a college degree nets a student $2,600 in additional income over a high school grad”. The assertion is, instead, that NOT having a college degree COSTS a high-school grad $2,600 in income — for the rest of their lives.
This is not a value judgement — it is a statistical fact. Workers with only a high-school degree are paid less than workers with a college degree. Nobody is disparaging anybody.
Do you also object to government funding of public high school? Why not cut off public education funding at 8th grade?
The more honest question is why anybody opposes making college as accessible to every American in 2022 as high school has been for decades.
Asked and answered a countably infinite number of times here at BMG.
I was looking forward to your joining this thread, since you always explain this better than I can.
Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard | Journal of Labor Economics (uchicago.edu)
More stuff here about college perpetuating racial and economic inequality.
The thread-starter is just another question-shaped strawman.
No Democrat says that a college degree is the solution to wide and widening wage gaps in the USA.
Responsible Democrats say, instead, that the LACK of a college degree virtually guarantees a wide and widening wage gap for the rest of the person’s life. That is a different statement.
Being tall does not guarantee a future as an NBA star. Being short precludes that career path. Having large hands does not guarantee a career as a pianist. Having small hands that cannot span an octave is a serious impediment.
Higher education allows a person to enter the arena. It does not guarantee that the person will win or that the game is fair.
This kind of relentless and deceptive rhetoric against making higher education available to every American who seeks it belongs in GOP campaign literature. It has no place in any discussion of Democratic party policies and platforms.
I really like your basketball and piano metaphors. I think that gets the point across well.
If the higher education leads to greatly increased earnings, why do the lower educated and no less essential workers but poorly paid workers need to subsidize it for those who gain the benefit?
Let’s say I have two sons. I have $100K in liquid funds. One son wants to work at a profession that will pay him $68K a year and all he needs is a high school diploma and four years on a job, working his way up the ladder. The other wants to work at a job that will pay him $100K a year but requires a four year college degree that will cost him $100K.
Is it morally just for me to give the $100K to the son who wants to go to college and nothing to the other?
I don’t understand why you repeat this canard.
That is NOT what anybody is saying.
The statement is “Higher education is prerequisite for greatly increased earnings”.
That is DIFFERENT from “Higher education leads to greatly increased earnins”
Buying a lottery ticket is a prerequisite for winning the lottery. Buying a lottery does NOT lead to winning the lottery.
Your “question” presupposes its answer.
When the two children (is there a reason why you specified “sons”?) are 17 and choosing what to do after graduation, nobody knows what professions will hire whom and what they will pay.
The statistics are clear and compelling and have been for generations. The career paths that do not require a college degree are few, their lifetime wages are lower, their opportunities for wage growth are lower, and the number of their practitioners are smaller than the career paths that do require a college degree.
Most children at 17 do not know what they will want to do at 25. A 25 year old with a college degree — any college degree — has dramatically more choices than a 25 year old without a college degree. Your two hypothetical children, at 17, only think they know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. If one of them chooses to skip college, he or she locks themselves into a MUCH narrower path. A narrower path that also offers MUCH lower lifetime earnings.
That is a market judgement, not a value judgement. It is a factual statement about the lived experience of millions of Americans.
When you look back at your working life, you are surely able to identify some periods when you were happiest. What was your profession in those periods?
Did you know, at 17, what that profession would be?
It also must be said that your life was lived as white male with BA in History. Your life experiences have little or nothing to do with the choices made by people without those advantages.
In comparison to a black woman with no ability to “put [themselves] through college”, your commentary epitomizes those were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
Why are you against helping raise the wages of a black woman preforming an essential job that does not require a college degree? Why is your reply to the room service workers, mostly black women in many areas of the country, that in order for them to have a decent life, with respect, they need to get a college degree and a “good paying job”. Who then cleans your hotel room?
I’m not against that. Never have been, never will be. That’s not what I wrote — it isn’t even CLOSE to what I wrote.
John, I didn’t write ANY of this. Not one bit. You’re putting words in my mouth! Words that I haven’t said or implied.
I’ve said, instead, that our economy values room service workers less than it values professions that require a college degree. That has nothing to do with “respect”, decency, or any other value judgement. It is statement of fact.
Whoever is willing to clean hotel rooms at the offered wages.
Is it really this hard for you to recognized the logical fallacy that your commentary is so attached to?
That room service worker lives in a different universe from you. Another aspect that is absolutely clear from opinion polling — and has been for generations — is that those black women OVERWHELMINGLY support the proposals to:
Those have been fundamental planks in the Democratic Party platform for generations. That, in turn, is why that demographic segment is so overwhelmingly Democratic.
Your commentary here consistently opposes the first two. It does so by falsely attempting to conflate support for college to alleged lack of support for wages. None of that is true.
Democrats want college to be available at minimal or no cost to every American. Democrats believe that doing so is good for the country, good for the party, and good for the individual.
Support your sons however you’d like. I for one would try to support both in whatever their chosen path is. The plan would be to have the very wealthy pay more taxes to support this, not the poorly paid and less formally educated.
In other words, have society give a boost to the highly paid college educated work force and lip service to the workers whose essential jobs do not require a college degree.
The irony that this hyperbole comes from a white man with a BA in History is striking.
No “other words” are needed, and yours are WAY off the mark.
Unless you propose a government that regulates all wages of all professions, the market will always set wages for a given occupation. Always.
The association between higher education and higher wages is a reality of the economy. It is an association that has always existed. In today’s economy, there are MUCH fewer jobs for workers without education, job-specific training, or job-specific experience.
Some of that is because there are many more workers chasing many fewer jobs. Competition for each of those jobs is fierce, and employers use whatever legal criteria they like to select their workers. Employers prefer a worker who has done the job before. They prefer a worker with job-specific vocational training. They prefer a worker with a college degree over one without — regardless of its relevance.
That’s how a free market works.
We also live in a society with rampant systemic racism and sexism. It should not be surprising, then, that those choices I just enumerated are colored by employer prejudices (often unconscious) about race, gender, and (for that matter) age.
That’s reality.
The most immediate thing ANY government can do in the short-run is moot those choices by breaking the association between race and higher education and between gender and higher education.
That, in turn, means making higher education available to any American who wants it — regardless of race, gender, or economic status.
That doesn’t harm anybody. That’s not giving “lip service” to anybody.
It sounds as though you’re seeking a scapegoat for the decline in wages for workers without higher education, job-related training, and job-related experience. That scapegoat doesn’t exist.
The decline is not because somebody in government made it so. It exists because the role of labor — as in the human effort required to produce a product or service — is different in today’s economy than it has ever been.
The only solution to the economic suffering that we each want the government to address is to REPLACE a labor-driven mechanism of wealth distribution with a different mechanism.
No matter what the minimum wage, no matter what limits are imposed on the ratio of the highest paid to lowest paid employee, no matter what regulations the government attempts to impose, it will not solve the problem we’re talking about.
The overwhelming majority of new wealth created in the US each day lands in the hands of the handful of ultra-wealthy that already own the mechanisms for creating that new wealth.
That has nothing to do with college, minimum wages, or even income.
Until we change how we distribute newly-generated wealth, the problem will get worse and worse.
This is NOT a zero sum game! I DO want society to lift up both those who cannot afford college AND those who have jobs not requiring college. What about this is so difficult to understand?
This sounds like argument for argument’s sake on a Sunday afternoon.
There is no “there” here.
The average college debt among student loan borrowers in America is $32,731, according to the Federal Reserve.
If, for example, we allow 50% forgiveness, what do we give to the non-college workers to “lift” them up?
Another false dichotomy. The federal government does NOT have to cut one service in order to fund another — in spite of decades of GOP lies to the contrary.
The premise that any person’s gain MUST come at the expense of another person’s loss is at or near the heart of the definition of “selfishness” and “greed” in most spiritual traditions.
I remind you of the parable of the workers in the vineyard as one relevant example.
I’m pretty sure everyone here has agreed with your calls to make sure everyone can earn a living wage, and expand access to basic needs.
I still think John is wrong about college debt, but here is something that supports his larger point. The Trucker Shortage: Why Don’t We Let the Market Work? – Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net)
To clarify, I am not opposed to helping those in need with their college debt and I encourage anyone who wishes to go to college to do so. I believe that one of the primary causes of college debt is the lack of wage justice in the essential jobs in this nation that do not require a college degree and so, the only avenue for this population of essential workers is to go to college and try to escape their future occupation probability. This creates a high demand for the minority of jobs and that drives up the price that students are willing to pay.
It is my opinion that if the essential jobs that do not require a college degree paid wages that could support what we know of as a Middle Class life, the demand and thereby the price of a college degree would lower and along with that, the debt assumed by those going to college.
As far as the trucker “shortage”, yes. There is NO Labor Shortage. We do seem to have a shortage of journalists who understand economics. We have a labor market and for the first time in a very long time, probably before some journalists were born, we are in a “seller’s market”. Any employer (buyer) willing to pay fair market prices for an employee (seller) will not experience any shortage.
Democrats need to stop using the term “low skilled” when it comes to those jobs that do not require a college degree, or even a trade school, and begin to admit that these are essential jobs that deserve wage justice.
Great. Fabulous. Perhaps you might then offer commentary describing how government can enable that. It will be refreshing to hear and see passion for these things that matches your well-targeted passion for addressing the economic suffering of all of working-class people.
I know that I’m dating myself in the comment that follows. I remember when government collectively recognized that we have an obligation to make our infrastructure accessible to those who are unable to navigate steps and stairs. Over the span of several years, we tried and discarded one name after another — “crippled”, “special needs”, “handicapped”, “physically challenged”, and so on.
I agree with you about wage justice, as far as that goes. The phrase still, however, misses the more important point. ANYONE dependent on wages — “high” or “low”, “skilled” or “unskilled”, “essential”, whatever — is facing a lifetime of ever-increasing economic suffering. There will never be a good name, because whatever word we choose will quickly attain the connotations that are ascribed to “low-skilled” today. Whatever term we choose, society has an obligation to provide the necessities of life to every person.
It is our collective dependence on wages and wage slavery that is creating the economic suffering we see. The job of our government is to create a path out of this industrial-age dead-end into a future of shared wealth — a future where the economic well-being of any person does NOT depend on what they do with their time on any given day.
The US economic generates more new wealth than any economy in human history. That part of the economic engine is working just fine.
The issue is that those wealth generators are currently owned, by and large, by the already wealthy. All of the new wealth created by those wealth generators therefore ends up in the hands of the owners of those wealth generators.
THAT is the fundamental immorality — and Americans must break it.
Some low-skilled jobs are essential. Many essential jobs are high-skilled. High-skilled usually means more education to acquire said skills, and yes, people should be compensated accordingly. You seem to think that if only these jobs paid a lot more people would flock to them and forgo college. Many of the jobs you are talking about I would not WANT to do no matter how much they paid me. I for one am always going to find a professional career for which a degree is likely essential more fulfilling than the jobs you mention. In short, I want to work with my brain, not my hands.
Have you ever worked at a “low skilled” job?
Do you think that working over a hot greasy stove for eight hours a day making the same five recipes and listening to the din of a busy kitchen – and living with the knowledge that your job as a “burger flipper” is used as an insult does not require skills?
Do you think that sitting in traffic all day in van delivering brown boxes to homes you will never afford as you live with two roommates in a tiny apartment does not require “skills”?
And for the record, I never had a “career”, but I would appreciate it if you did not look down on me for not having one.
I drove a delivery truck in Boston for a year, making sure that the “career” people had frozen pizzas at the market each day. I lifted the equivalent of a car each day, one twenty pound box after another. I had to navigate streets during the Big Dig. It was hard work. And like my burger flipping pals, it takes brains. ….and we wonder why ordinary working class voters reject Democrats as “liberal elites” when we hear them say, about us : , I want to work with my brain, not my hands.
I feel your pain.
It has nothing to do with Democrats or the Democratic Party.
I have worked jobs that don’t require a degree and the jobs you refer to are exactly the ones I’m not interested in. If others are, that’s great, and I’ve always said all should be able to live off their wages. Those jobs objectively require fewer and more common skills than the professions. Not everyone needs to go to college and take a job that requires such, but everyone SHOULD have that option without financial barriers if they so choose.
Should someone who works with their hands be paid enough to live reasonably well in the same neighborhood as those who work with their brains?
And are the only skills of value those taught at institutes of higher learning?
OK, cards on the table time – are you really suggesting that the blue collar worker should be making in the same range as the doctor or lawyer, because if so I would emphatically disagree? Whether they live in the same neighborhood or not is a question for the zoning board. There are skills that don’t require a degree which have value – auto mechanic comes to mind – but that doesn’t require nearly the education that it takes to become a doctor, lawyer, teacher inter alia.
Same range? That would depend on the range, eh? Same town with kids going to same public schools? Yes.
By the way, doctors are not making nearly what they made back in 1970 when the average inflation adjusted income was $185,000 and by 2010, it was at $161,000 with doctors seeing twice as many patients. I have several friends who are doctors and none of them have encouraged their children to go to medical school. This is an overall trend in the USA to disrespect all labor, in my humble opinion. If one wants to make a lot of money in medical, one starts a hedge fund and buys medical practices….but I digress.
Blue collar workers, that is to say, non-college educated workers who are employed in essential jobs should be able to afford, on one income, a lifestyle than anyone in the community would find suitable for a family of four.
Sure, maybe a three bedroom ranch with a one car garage while the wealthier folks in town have a five bedroom three bath two car garage with a pool.
DFTT
You’re repeating yourself.
In the absence of draconian governmental regulation, there will always be a distribution of skills and compensation. Some workers will have more skills and some less. Some workers will be paid more — even for the same skills — and some less.
That’s how a free market works.
There is a similar distribution of neighborhoods in any state, and a similar distribution of property values within any state. Some workers will be able to buy into neighborhoods that others will not, and some workers will be able to buy properties that are unavailable to others.
My wife and I bought our two-family because I happened to be shoveling snow at the same time as the former owner in the winter of 2011-2012. A casual conversation between us revealed that we wanted to buy in the neighborhood and they wanted to sell. We readily agreed on a price. We readily agreed that we didn’t need a realtor and agreed to split the commission (usually paid by the seller) between us. The property never went on the market. The sellers inherited the property, so far as I know none of them had a college degree. We were in a position to buy the property — my wife has a PhD and I have BSEE. All parties involved were VERY happy with agreed-on price.
FWIW, my wife’s degree is from Germany and was entirely paid for by the German government. My degree was paid for by my family and I. I had no student loans.
Of course not. Nobody but you has ever asserted that –it’s another of your many college-related strawmen.
Your relentless hammering at this only hardens our respective positions.
I’m starting to think we are in DFTT territory.
Paying the “burger flipper” — or any other line chef — $25/hr is not going to make the job any different. The stove will still be as hot and greasy, the noise will still be as loud, the insults will still sting.
My oldest child and her husband chose that path because they love cooking for people — that’s their passion. They work as hard, or harder, as owners of their restaurant as they ever did as line chefs. The work is demanding, exhausting, and dangerous. Increasing the pay will be greatly appreciated. It won’t change the nature of the job.
During the long hot summer that I worked on the maintenance crew of a public golf course in Montgomery County, MD, my brain was a hindrance to my job. My job was to do what my supervisor ordered, when my supervisor ordered it, and in the exact manner that my super directed. My super was quite explicit about the unnatural act I could perform if I continued to offer thoughts or ideas.
I worked as a janitor the next summer in a Montgomery Wards department store in a shopping mall. My brain was similarly a hindrance.
The suspended ceiling tiles of the ceiling were moving over the menswear department — the AC was lifting them up. The floor team complained that it made the store look “cheap” and demanded that “maintenance” fix the problem.
When my super ordered me to put weights on the ceiling tiles, I observed that that would probably only make the problem worse. The intake of the air handler for half of the entire floor was above the suspended ceiling and provided negative air pressure on space above the ceiling. The right solution was to replace more solid panels with grates, so that the air handler could move more air from the store up into the space above the ceiling.
My super threatened to fire me if I continued to “sass” him. After coils of romex and bx cable and similar weights were positioned on the tiles above an ever-increasing area of the store, the panels of the entire ceiling all popped up simultaneously one morning when the AC was turned on for the day. Dozens of various heavy objects crashed at least twelve feet to the floor, some damaging displays. Fortunately the store was still closed and nobody was hurt. At the direction of an engineer consulted by store management, additional grates were added as I had originally suggested.
I did not receive an apology and my super was not fired or disciplined. It was just “one of those things”.
You may not like to admit it, but there ARE some jobs that demand working with hands rather than brains.
The bottom line remains that the issues you describe here have nothing to with government funding of higher education.
Nothing.
But it will tell the worker he or she us a valued and respected member of society who deserves a fair wage.
If we are going to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize the added education needed for some jobs, if we wanted to be fair and just, we would use taxpayer dollars to subsidize the added costs of all of those entering a particular field. Most mechanics require tools costing up to $50,000. If a high school grad wants to work in auto repair or similar field, tell me why he or she should not get a check from Uncle Sam if their neighbor is getting $50,000 to attend college for their accounting degree?
The Democratic Party has been telling workers this for generations.
That’s got nothing to do with public funding for education. Nothing.
I don’t want the government attempting to micromanage lives this way. I also suspect that you haven’t thought the implications of this.
If the mechanic bought tools with a government grant, who owns them? Does the mechanic have an obligation to perform government work for free with the tools that the government bought? If the government doesn’t like the work product of the mechanic, can the government restrict what the mechanic does with those tools?
Higher education is NOT a “tool” nor a collection of tools.
You insist on imposing a false dichotomy. Anybody who wants higher education should have access to it, just as every American is already entitled to a high school education.
Yup, we call this lip service.
And I call this trolling.
I feel bad about people who are working at jobs and feeling undervalued but if you don’t like your job quit. Want a better job, get some training, vocational or academic. Maybe adjust your expectations about where you can live or what you drive.
A nephew graduated from UMass with a business degree, found he didn’t want to work in the office environment and became an electrician, but he paid his loans off. He did it within the last 10 years, so arguments about “it’s so much harder to pay nowadays” don’t mean much to me. If you’re going to work with your hands, find work that has lasting value. “Flippy 2” the burger flipping machine has made its debut in Calif and McDonalds will never be the same. I used to go to cashiers at Walmart and Burger King to encourage corporations to keep the human interaction in business, now I find using kiosks and self-check more efficient and if a mistake is made it’s my mistake, not some “undervalued” low skilled clerk. Think about it, I became a “check-out” clerk with 5 minutes of training by running a bar coder. RFID chips in packages will soon take over inventory control and I won’t have to even scan my purchases.
Current college graduates knew or should have known what they were getting into. We shouldn’t infantilize young adults who made a decision to sign a legal contract in expectation of “taking on the world” and bail them out when things didn’t turn out the way they expected. Maybe we need some institutions of higher learning to go out of business so the ones that are left begin to drop their prices in order to survive. If teachers are currently graduating kids from high school who are illiterate then we need to fire the teachers who have been enabling them all along, passing them onto the next grade so they don’t have to deal with the paperwork of failure.
College being free for future students is a different argument than “forgiving” the debt of ones who already signed on the dotted line.
I really resent this attitude. Things worked out for your nephew – they don’t for everybody. Lots of variables, including a fair amount of luck, are in play. I followed all of life’s expectations and rules, worked hard, got good grades, got a master’s degree, had privileges in my upbringing many don’t have, became an Eagle Scout. Except for being slightly disabled in ways that would not really impact my ability to do jobs that interest me I belong to all of society’s historically advantaged groups (while, straight, male, Christian). I have not done anything disastrous like abuse substances, develop a criminal record, or father a child I can’t support. Yet here I am in my 40s having spent the vast majority of my adult life substitute teaching and rarely been employed in my chosen field or paid very well. Life is not fair; IMO it is a role of government to try to ameliorate that.
So who does the undervalued valued jobs that are no less essential than the high paid one?
If you don’t like it, quit….is not an option for many people.
Nearly 67% of minimum wage workers are women, according to BLS data. More than one-third of workers who earn the federal minimum wage are women age 25 or older.
My hunch is that these women are trying to support a family.
Yes, when I was in my 20’s and single, I’d quit a job whenever I felt like it. Once I had a family depending on me, it’s a different story.
How do they find this out?
There has never been an honest argument for having taxpayers pay off the voluntarily acquired debt of others.
Then you haven’t been paying attention. It was front and center for pretty much the entire 2020 Democratic primary season.
Nobody is proposing to “pay off” that debt. The proposal is to instead write off that debt. Nobody is proposing to pay the outstanding principle balance of these loans.
Did you also support the entire predatory banking industry during the Great Recession when millions of homeowners lost everything in the collapse of the real estate market?
Do you think bankruptcy laws towards holders of credit card debt are too lenient?
The facts of the situation have, in fact, been published and widely discussed for years. Elizabeth Warren has been advocating for writing off this debt for years. Do you oppose her as well?
I’ve actually heard honest arguments for writing off these debts for years. The only dishonest arguments I’ve heard are from those who oppose doing that.