Around here we’ve devoted a lot of page inches to sounding the alarm on the ticking economic time bomb that is the student debt crisis.
We’ve also spent years discussing reasonable, just, and workable solutions.
But no matter how often we demonstrate that lending at interest for consumption is immoral, said grave evil compounded by targeting people who’ve been psyoped into thinking it’s the only option, and who are given next to no way out, Mammon mobsters always come out out of the woodwork to defend usury. Because screw kids who got duped.
Identifying Mammon mobsters with Baby Boomers is kind of a stereotype. But then again, most stereotypes have a basis in reality. And experience has shown that the older and more Fox News consuming someone is, the likelier he is to freak out at the prospect of relieving victims of the sin of usury.
But what a lot of Mammon mobsters have missed is that a) economists have sounded dire warnings for years that student debt isn’t going away and b) time happens.
These two phenomena have now intersected at the point where the Mammon mob comes for retirees.
Albert Martinez, a former lineman living in Arizona, decided to take out a parent student loan in 2010. He was working at the time and wanted to help his two sons pay for college.
More than one decade later, the loans are a $96,000 weight on his and his wife Jil’s backs, especially as they live on fixed retirement incomes.
Albert initially retired in 2018 at the age of 58 after around 40 years of serving the AT&T company.
“It was a blessing since the work was taking a significant toll on him physically, but he never wanted to retire that early,” Jil told Newsweek. “Here we are in 2024, both retired on fixed incomes with an outstanding student loan of $96,000 at 8 percent interest.”
How can this be?
We’d been given to understand that student debtors are entitled brats so foolish as to study underwater basket weaving, while at the same time being rational adults 100 percent responsible for their decisions.
Yet here we have a pair of hard-working Jonesers who got caught in a debt trap without knowing what they were getting into.
“He didn’t expect the loan would’ve ballooned and will continue to balloon,” Jil said. “We don’t know what happened. We feel our country is just taking advantage of us.”
The Martinezes were able to get payments lowered from $1,000 a month to $638, but even that reduced payment is a hardship as the couple works to make their dollar stretch in the current economy.
Taking out a loan that can’t be recovered by repossessing the property bought with it because there is no such tangible property, while payments increase with your income as interest keeps piling up, ensuring you’ll never make a dent without degrading your qualify of life …
“Taking advantage” is a rather mild description of such a Kafka grift.
Today, both Jil and Albert have taken on part-time jobs just to stay on top of the payments, but they don’t have much hope it will ever be enough to get the near $100,000 loan down to zero.
“He will never be able to pay off this loan,” Jil said. “It just is not possible.”
No secular society concerned with its people’s well-being would let them come to this, much less a Christian civilization.
That kind of debt trap is why bankruptcy exists. Yet it’s almost impossible to get student loans discharged in bankruptcy. A friend of mine managed to get a chunk of his student debt cancelled, but he had to sue his parents, twice – once in state court and again in federal – and shell out huge legal fees.
That was a decade ago, and he’s still not debt-free, despite making six figures.
Anyone who thinks that’s not insane is either insane himself or so susceptible to media conditioning he shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Still, the Martinezes’ situation is not unique among retirees, who are increasingly finding their golden years might include monthly loan payments for their or their children’s student debt.
“Retirees with student debt are more common than most would believe and, unfortunately, it’s going to get even more frequent,” Alex Beene, a financial literary instructor for the state of Tennessee, told Newsweek.
The warnings were given but went unheeded.
Baby Boomers have the second-highest average student debt load of any generation.
Over the last 30 years, both young undergraduates and returning professionals saw the price of their degrees skyrocket, Beene added.
“The result is we are going to have record numbers of Americans entering retirement with student loan debt still owed,” Beene said.
Still, many can’t or don’t want to forego retirement even while student loan debt hangs over their shoulders. Part-time work is one option, but even that often can’t keep up with the interest rates.
How do people not get that the student loan racket – and most of higher education – is a huge con game?
Maybe they find it easy to laugh at a tattooed studies major named Keyeleigh working at Starbucks to split rent on a 500 square foot flat with two roommates.
That makes a cruel kind of sense.
But once upon a time in this country, we were sympathetic to accounts of retired linemen having to pawn their dogs’ party hats to pay the light bill.
(Editor’s note: I do not know for sure if the Martinezes had to pawn their dog’s party hat. They probably should, though.)
Regardless, those kinds of hard luck stories always had back stories involving credit card theft, investment fraud, or real estate swindles.
And society responded by having laws against those kinds of con games and using them to prosecute the con artists and get their victims’ money back.
Yet usury victims are the only con game marks not allowed relief under the law.
Why is that?
Mammon mobsters love to parrot the line “These kids (retirees?) are adults who willingly entered into voluntary agreements. They’re responsible for repaying that money.”
OK.
But all fraud victims make willing yet fraudulent agreements.
They do it because they’re deceived into expecting returns on their investments that never materialize, and the fraudsters know are unlikely to materialize.
Deception, not coercion; that’s what makes it fraud.
Arguing “These kids (Boomers?) knew what they were getting into!” assumes they were aware of being victims of usury that would leave them in five to six-figure debt, financially crippling them for life. Anyone who would knowingly and willingly enter that kind of agreement is too immature, stupid, or self-destructive to make sound decisions, which undercuts the whole argument.
Those are the two choices. Either student debtors were deceived, therefore defrauded, so they have no obligation to repay; or they’re not competent to make their own decisions, so they have no obligation to repay.
Saying “They voluntarily took on crippling debt because they were misled or too stupid to realize it, so they don’t deserve help,” is just dumb.
Do Mammon mobsters think they’re championing some sacred principle by holding chumps and simpletons to unrepayable, civilization-destroying debt on behalf of the state?
Who knows what they’re thinking. On the evidence, I doubt they even are.
Enough already.
The long con has got to end.
And it will end, the easy way or the hard way – the choice is ours.
We should pray somebody in charge opts for the easy way.
Get first access to my works in progress each month. Join my elite neopatrons now to read the prologue of my next dark fantasy novel The Burned Book.
Join on Patreon or SubscribeStar now.
I didn’t comment then, because by that time it was a years-old article, but your words on the student debt crisis (along with a few other blogs) helped open my eyes on what student debt really was (victims of a con, subsidized by the government) and how zeroing that debt, contrary to the blackpilled narrative, hurts nobody of importance, and improves quality of life for over 10% of the populace.
There is no downside for anyone who wasn’t complicit on the con, and pardon my french but fuck those guys.
Absolvo te.
I think the hard part is that it really does cost them nothing. We paid off our student loans. Praise God our two oldest seem to be getting through college debt free. I can’t think of a better day or use of tax payer money then forgiving those student loans.
Yet, we’ll get nothing “out of it” as responsible couple who pays taxes. So? It’s certainly better funding for military industries. How much do I get out of any of my taxes? How hard is it be generous here and be happy for other people? I am constantly told to feel guilty about a sort of slavery that on the balance might have not been that bad, only to have my current society at large insist that young people with ambitions should remain in chains for 20 years or more.
It feels that the PTB are using the natural envy that is one of the hallmarks of the Boomer generation to keep the status quo. Certainly that it involves young people they like to scoff at doesn’t help.
You’ve put your finger on what a lot of folks seem to be missing: there is no need to “pay it off” with tax dollars to clear this debt. Now that the Feds are the primary lender in education, it would be as simple as the Dept of Education writing off all that bad debt. It would disappear as an asset on the FedGov’s balance sheet, disappear as a liability for everyone else, and that’s it. The schools already got paid. No private bank is still on the hook for this anymore. There’s no downside to the Feds forgiving the loans and cancelling the debt.
The Japanese figured out a similar fiscal magic trick years ago, only they used it on their entire national debt. If memory serves, the legislature sold the debt to the national bank, which turned it into financial instruments that the Diet bought back. Then they just wrote down the debt. Presto! It’s gone.
It’s fascinating how people still hold “pulling up your bootstraps” as a viable option at this point. People have been doing that for longer than 2006 and the debt only rises. For people who claim to be based on logic and reason, this irrefutable truth blindsides them like a freight train, even worse, they refuse to admit it, because the words “excuses” and “can’t” aren’t part of their vocabulary. That pride will bite them in the butt when the Bootstrap Bomb finally detonates.
The other day, I spoke with one of our older students, a retired gentleman who takes some classes for fun. We were shooting the breeze before the first morning classes started and briefly talked about economics. In passing, he mentioned how he doesn’t understand the hoopla about student loan debt because back in his day, they lived like paupers to afford school (a guy I used to work for slighter younger bragged how he could pay for schooling with a summer job, but I digress). To him, everyone needing a house, a car, and other basic amenities was seen as an excess to him. I don’t know his exact age, but I’d wager close to my father’s who was born in 1947.
His logic falls on many swords: For starters, the economy and social norms are different now compared to back then. Back in his day, crime and poverty weren’t as bloated as they are today. Back then being a pauper meant you could still afford a flat in an area that wouldn’t get you killed. My father lived in a poor white area of New Orleans growing up and it was safer than poor areas of any ethnic demographic in 2024. Today, being a pauper means being homeless or being in the ghetto where drug deals and shootings are the norm.
Secondly, many of the things listed to me like “people don’t need like cars. . . ” is nonsense. Living is expensive and any job nearby doesn’t pay enough to live there and by necessity you need things like cars to get to jobs to afford living where you do. Living closer to the job that pays isn’t affordable either. Let’s also not forget that the promise of “get a degree, you get the job”. Not all universities are a 5 minute walk from someone’s home. People have to drive if they can’t afford campus living which is equally as expensive as tuition. On top of that our infrastructure doesn’t accommodate localize living, because we are so mobile, things are spread out which means higher costs due to transportation. Compared to living situations back then before the interstate system of created (in the 50’s).
I don’t wish financial slavery upon anyone, but humoring my vindictive demon a little, it’s savoring to see people in a generation get their just deserts after patronizing others over student loan debt for so long and cruelly. As I read in a book recently “A burnt hand is the best teacher” and some boomers are finally getting their hand burned after forcing the rest of us to keep our hands on a burning stove.
When this whole things collapses, I pray it’s a collapse back to sanity.
His position’s biggest failing is that poverty is evil. Catholic social teaching states that each man has the right to a living wage sufficient to fund, on a frugal budget, the necessities of life for a family of five, including housing, along with occasional leisure activities like vacations – the latter of which requires dependable transportation.
We are not made to just scrape by. The glory of God is man fully alive. Being poor hinders man’s ability to flourish.
Sadly, Catholic social teaching doesn’t hold sway in a secular at worst, protestant at best, country.
This attitude, as I understand it came about at the turn of the century through some stupid pseudoscience experiment turned philosophy turned cultural truth that if you were poor, it’s because you were lazy. However, your genetics determined if you were lazy or not. So imagine the conversation like this:
“You’re poor because you’re lazy.”
“How do I stop being lazy?”
“That’s just it, you can’t! If you didn’t have the gene for laziness, you’d be filthy rich like me! HAHA, enjoy living in a straw hut, peasant!”
It took about 100 years, but we finally reached the end of the road on that worldview.
This video tells more of the tale: https://youtu.be/tp4FGAv2gks?si=UcJNHP5ih0da00RH
This was something that surprised me greatly when I learned about it. While my home country of Ireland has sadly gone down the tubes in the last two decades, it was a very Catholic country for a very long time. Thus it was a surprise to me that people had such great contempt for the poor. Sure, I’m not going to claim that everyone here was always warm and loving to the destitute, but I never heard anyone express openly negative opinions on the poor, and collections for groups like the St. Vincent de Paul Society are pretty much always significant. Nobody would ever speak against the idea of charity, and I find the notion that anyone could do so hard to believe.
The conservative case for usury:
– “Not going to college isn’t an option. You have to surrender yourself to gay campus groups and Democrat professors if you want a future, because the Boomers and Jonesers in upper management said so.”
– “You took out this loan of your own accord, you snowflake! I never strapped you down and made you sign for it.”
– “Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is beneath you? I never told you that—did I?”
– “Son, I want you to meet Emilio and Mohit. They work harder than you and practice cooler religions than you, and I am adopting them as my new sons.”
Don’t forget the real conservative argument made that student loan debt is an important tool that military recruiters use in coering 18 year olds to sign up.
I am for writing off the student loans. Profiteering by the universities must end and this could start that process if no further usury is permitted.
And now, re: the 2017 entry linked above, “Lost Generations,” for which comments are closed—-
B. 1955
Woodstock:
Entered junior high school (7th grade in those days) an aspiring rock fan, newly gifted with a transistor radio.
Finished junior high school (9th grade) a confirmed classical fan.
Learned of Woodstock from December 1969 issue of Life Magazine, “Looking Back at the Sixties.” It even had a short article about Bob Dylan, whom I’d never heard of. I thought his last name was pronounced with a long ‘i’ y-sound. Later in 9th grade I read Gordon Rattray Taylor’s book “The Biological Time Bomb” which examined the impacts of biotechnology, including the stopping of the aging process. I was at first giddy at the possibility of having a centuries-long lifespan, but then thought, “No. Let this generation age. They have it coming for their attitudes about older people and the past.”
BTW, for a real hoot look up the next “Life” issue “Into the ’70s.”
Sorry so much of this was off topic. I couldn’t resist a chance to rib Woodstock in my own way.
I’ll allow it!
Many long years ago, when I dropped out of my junior year of college, this was one of the calculations I made. I had 3/4ths of an English degree. I had run out of the money I’d saved up. My family wasn’t funding me. To finish, I’d need to take on debt (which I’d so far avoided by using savings and working fulltime). What if I got sick and couldn’t work? What if I wanted to get married? What if I wanted to get out and see the world?
I looked ahead, and asked myself: what kind of job can this English degree get me, that’ll let me pay off the debt? The answer: nothing I actually wanted to do– and most particularly, nothing I wanted to be locked into until the loan was paid. I never went back, and I don’t regret it.
Student loans are a way of locking the above-average kids into horrible rat-find-cheese cubicle jobs for so many years they will then mostly feel like they are unable to change careers (this is why we have so many burnout teachers in the school system). They have sold off their chance at getting married and having a family (particularly women) at a reasonable age, to get “an education” that locks them into a job they hate. Because let’s face it: the vast majority of us don’t get any kind of happiness or fulfillment out of our jobs. They’re jobs, not vocations.
It would be a wonderful thing if the debt-fairy came by tonight, waved her magic wand, made student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, and ended federal student loans. It’d force schools to pare down their admin costs and lower tuition, which would benefit everyone. The only reason they get to charge so much in the first place is because any idiot can get a loan to go to college, and so very many do. My mom paid her way through a masters’ degree waiting tables in the 70s while raising two young children. I don’t think that’s possible anymore.
“My mom paid her way through a masters’ degree waiting tables in the 70s while raising two young children. I don’t think that’s possible anymore.”
Based on my conversations with Boomers on this subject, that’s the part they’ll latch onto, not the “not possible anymore.” They remember how little they paid for school. The skyrocketing price and plummeting value of a college education should be part of their math, but aren’t, just like Brian’s more fundamental point about fraud.
Yeah, it was tough for them to understand at the time, but they get it now– particularly after seeing my degree-holding husband go back to school for two years of vocational training to get a real job.
Normies and NPCs exist to serve the system (as well as themselves and the ruling elite). The boomers hypocritical arguments make more sense when one realizes they will simply say whatever is necessary to distract and divert back within the safe confines of the cultural/ social system.
You can hear a conservative pundit on talk radio rail on about how student loans must not be messed with because they were a voluntary contract, and if one party got screwed over then that’s just a lesson to research things more before agreeing to something.
Then it’s time for an ad, so the pundit will shill for a time share cancellation firm.
That line of thinking puts their Mammon mobbery on full display. We’re supposed to support a system that allows no mercy for honest errors when one mistake can ruin someone for life? Really?
At that point, we’re not talking about Christendom. We are talking about turning civilization into Thunderdome and tossing our kids into it. Shown for what it is, the monstrous immorality is impossible to miss.
It makes sense if the highest goal in your life is to never have to see your neighbor’s face a single time in a day.
Conservatives in 2004: “You kids aren’t poor. You’re just broke for now. Why, I was living in a one-room apartment when I graduated! Get back to me in 10 years – that degree will have paid for itself and then some!”
Conservatives in 2014: “It’s not my fault you’re still unmarried and renting because you’re too indebted to buy a house. Take some responsibility, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and chalk it up as a learning experience. You’ll be glad you did 10 years from now.”
Conservatives in 2024: “Look, you wouldn’t be pushing 40 and deeper in debt than you were 20 years ago if you’d played it smart and gone into the trades. Sure it’s academic since you’ll die a pauper, taking your family line with you. The market makes no promises and them’s the breaks.”
It’s classic Presbyterian schtick: prosperity is a sign of God’s favor. If you fail to prosper you probably did something to deserve it. No sense in obscuring that by artificially closing the gap, eh?
It is one of the relentless failings of US protestantism, that it rigidly self-sorts by income, and the prosperous never really have to come face-to-face with the poor, as equals in the sight of God.
It’s hard to decide which has been more of a disaster: the Prosperity Gospel or the Protestant Work Ethic; the former for the reasons you gave. The latter for greatly contributing to epidemic sleep deprivation and diabetes (no lie!) in children.
I would argue that the Protestant Work Ethic is an outgrowth of that same Protestant idea; that if you are poor then it can only be a judgment on you and thus it would be wrong to lift you up. Ironically, this puts them on the same level as the Brahmins.
It’s sad to say because I know many good, decent Protestants. Nevertheless, fidelity to truth bids me divulge the observation I’ve made that Protestantism as an idea is a generational disease of the spirit that ends in insanity.
Not in the first generation, but on a long enough timeline, you either get witches or some form of Christian-flavored heathenry.
So, I was looking into some numbers for this post and found what my parents could expect to pay for the average under grad degree in 1973 according to here: https://archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/penn-history/tuition/tuition-1970-1979/.
Tuition: $2,850
General Fee: $315
Room and board:$ 1,535
books: $150
Personal expenses: $500
Now, granted it would be variable by school status and career track, but he average undergrad total expense is $5,350 dollars per semester. Assume a student does 8 semesters (4 years) $42,800 dollars for four years.
However, the average Middle class income in in 1973 $12,050. A summer job (3 Months) would be about 4,016 dollars. Multiply that by 4 (work 3 months every year)16,066 dollars. Almost half of the undergrad degree is paid for by the bootstrap method in 1973. Thats if you don’t work part time all year as well.
This is from the same website but with the price of college today, without housing.
Undergraduate Schools:
Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Nursing, Wharton:
Tuition: $54,652
General Fee: $5,510**
Technology Fee: $900
per semester $61,062
with housing add on:
Average room rate in the University’s residence halls: $11,358
Average meal plan: $5,946
$78,366 per semester.
How is anyone supposed to go to college and begin life after acquiring 4 year degree…. for the sum of $313,464 dollars in loans for a degree that acquires yearly interest and have a job to pay it off. Keep in mind, this is undergrad and does not include post grad programs. So unless your going to college and are smart enough to be an elite doctor. Why go into debt for college?
Thanks for crunching the numbers. For the folks playing along at home, that’s three times inflation, with no correspondence to any kind of consumer price index.
It’s a con job designed to turn bright kids into indentured serfs. No moral society would tolerate it.
You did a good analysis here, but the problem is actually worse than what you wrote. Note that in your 1973 prices you have books at $150. You don’t have books in the modern analysis. It is very easy for a book for a single class to cost $150 these days, and sometimes they are in the $200-$300 range. This is often for a temporary license too, such as with an online homework system plus ebook that you get locked out of as soon as the class is over.
This article: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-cost-of-college-textbooks-statistics/ says that books are about $1,200 a year, which is consistent with an average cost of $150 per book. So that’s an extra $5,000 or so after four years (sad that that seems like a small number.) If you are in courses that abuse the book system, you could be paying more like $300 per class, bringing the total to around $10,000.
The University of Minnesota Website lists plenty more possible fees at their institution:
https://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs/fees
Of particular note is the collegiate fee which each college charges its majors or students who merely take courses from that college (in addition to tuition.) These can easily exceed $1000 per semester.
Then there is another page with fees associated with specific courses:
https://onestop.umn.edu/finances/costs/course-fees
These are generally material fees. Some of these are book fees. I believe that “Digital Materials – Opt Out” means that there is an ebook you purchase as part of the course, and that the publisher is offering a lower rate due to this. Thus you get charged the given rate and if you opt out you get refunded that amount. I think “e-learn” is just a higher rate charged for online courses, i.e. $100 more per credit (you thought you were being clever by dodging our room and board fees, huh?) The one that sticks out the most is NURS 3075, which charges over $5000 dollars in “required digital materials”, though obviously that’s an outlier.
So my ballpark numbers post actually undersells it. Its worse than I thought. And that’s not even taking into account the pressures on the job market that make it difficult to even find a decent job.
The hard way feels like it will be a blessing. Maybe some number of the cultists would be shocked into abandoning their revolt against nature and God.
Talked recently with a payday loanshark in passing. He was convinced he’d found a “hack” for the system because he was making money too easily. He was quite upset to be informed that his behavior was a basic form of evil.
Let’s hope you’re right, because it’s going to be the hard way.
And the folks involved in the student debt racket are worse than the payday loan shark. Because usury isn’t defined by the interest rate, but if the loan is for goods that are consumed. So charging 8% interest for a degree that can’t be taken back to settle the debt is worse than lending at 1,000% for a car that can be repossessed.
Heh, but they feel better about it and maintain good social reputations because it’s a “respectable” debt racket.
What we need to do is make that job just as seedy and disreputable in the public eye as payday loans and ghetto pawnshops.
The same folks who want pornographers relegated to selling brown paper-wrapped wares out of grubby shops on the wrong side of the tracks should want the same for usurers.
My guess, based on observation, is that those who recoil at the idea of forgiving the debt (but weren’t themselves part of the con) are subject to conditioning. I’ve seen people who are dead sure that debt forgiveness would be Robbing the Taxpayer, and whip out quotes about how democracy ends as soon as people realise they can vote themselves largesse from the public coffers (as if that ship hadn’t left port a hundred years ago). Some others seem perpetually paralysed by letting the perfect be the enemy of the good – they will say that minimum wage laws are inflationary or point out the flaws in certain proposals to mitigate the lot of the poor; but they will offer no alternatives and prefer to do nothing.