Paid OFF!
Okay, I’m going to write about student loans. I paid mine off.
It took a while too. It wasn’t always easy. My first wife and I wanted her to be able to stay home with kids. At the time we felt that was important. So, we made it on one income. That was difficult then and it’s practically impossible now. We bought recapped tires, rebuilt batteries and I worked on our cars. (They were easier to work on in those days.) We ate economically and didn’t eat out often. She finally went back to work. We got tired of living hand to mouth. And in the middle of all that I was working on getting my college degree. I didn’t pay off the loan until married to my second wife 20 plus years later because we were a two-income household.
Never missed a payment. BUT I had help. Thanks to my service time in the Army, I was able to go to college on the GI bill so I had an additional source of income. I worked part-time jobs and finally got better full-time jobs. Consequently, we didn’t need to borrow as much money as others. College is expensive especially if raising a family is in the mix. It took me 7 years but I got my degree.
But the kicker is the loan could be paid off. The interest was low. We weren’t locked into a payment schedule where making the minimum payment meant that the loan was never paid off. The debt wasn’t crushing financially.
Not so now.
It takes more now.
When I was growing up one wage earner in the household was enough to make ends meet and get a little ahead. Originally my parents lived in a small town and after dad came home from WWII they struggled to make a living. So, they packed up and moved to the big city.
We didn’t have a car, so we walked or rode the bus. We lived in a duplex or as my mom called it, a three-room efficiency. We all slept in the same bedroom. My dad hired on at a defense plant and started making good money. He also worked parttime on weekends as a driver for milk route for a Mennonite farmer. He picked up milk from surrounding farmers and delivered it to a dairy. The milk that he picked up was in milk cans. Those cans were heavy and he would load and unload a whole truck of them by hand. Dad had started out working in the coal fields in Missouri before WWII. He was used to hard work.
The point of this little life story is that people still want the same things in life. They want to be able to take care of their family, be safe, be healthy, have a roof over their head and feed their family if they have one. Some people want more. Some are satisfied and happy with what they have.
Life is so much harder to do now especially for those with slightly bigger dreams and goals. For the majority of households it takes two wage earners just to keep up. I retired from a large aerospace company. I was a single parent for some of the time and had to pay for someone to watch the kids. Family pitched in a lot of the time and that kept my costs down. When both parents work it usually takes at least half of one’s monthly paycheck if not more just to pay for childcare.
Subsidizing education
Who is paying for all these loans anyway?[1] It’s kind of murky in places but basically it’s the United States government that’s on the hook for 90% of student loans. I’m seeing a lot of posts out on the internet of people griping about the cost being on their backs. Kind of interesting. Over 100 million lower income people don’t pay any taxes in the United States.[2] They don’t make enough money. Thirty million plus don’t even bother to file. They’re too poor.
America started subsidizing education in 1862 with the passing of the Morrill Act and has gone up since then.[3] Currently we spend way more on education than any other country in the world yet we don’t rank as number one.[4] Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Finland and Germany all rank ahead of us. There are arguments and papers ad infinitum as to the reasons why. Pick one you like.
Somebody somewhere agrees with you.
Bottom line.
Have you heard the expression that children are the future of our nation? I agree with that wholeheartedly. People talk about the importance of teachers in educating our children. Also true. So what do we do? How do we go about securing the future of being a better nation? There’s lots we can do.
- Prioritize funding education. We keep supporting education at all levels. We may need to find better ways to do it but we need to keep doing it. People have value.
- Education including higher education needs to be affordable to everyone not just those at the top of the economic heap. The less fortunate can be just as brilliant as the fortunate and contribute just as much given the chance. A real chance. Not a soul crushing economic hardship chance that isn’t really a change in their circumstances.
- We need to have the top 2 percent in this country doing their share and have them start paying taxes especially all the billionaires and multi-millionaires! In other words, over half of Congress.[5]
- Start paying teachers better! People talk about how important teachers are right up until teachers ask for better wages and benefits. Same holds true for law enforcement and first responders.
- Fund public education NOT private or religious education with tax dollars.
- Stop censoring education! It won’t work in today’s society unless there is totalitarian control.
- Cultures are remembered by their art, scientists, philosophers, writers, warriors, achievements, etc. NOT for bankers and lawyers.
- Teachers are educators NOT babysitters. Fund childcare.
- BTW supporting education is not socialism. It’s good policy.
- Except for new math. As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on that one.
- Bring back Drivers’ Education! High school sports coaches need something else to teach! Teach them about using turn signals and coming to a complete stop when required!
- Have politicians clean up their acts, especially their educational ones. Trump Party six figure income hypocrites complain about student loan forgiveness when they had millions in PPP loans forgiven.[6]
- Fund apprentice programs and trade schools. College isn’t for everyone. Tradespeople make the country run.
The goal isn’t to show a monetary profit from education. The goal is for the country to reap the benefits of having an educated population that can post literate comments on social media and perhaps learn a little bit about how government operates in case they ever get to be in government. Do they teach government anymore? Because from what I’m reading people aren’t paying attention in class.
The bottom line is that we need to fund education for everybody.
[1] Who carries the paper: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081216/who-actually-owns-student-loan-debt.asp
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/us-households-paying-no-income-tax/
[3] https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/education/higher-education-subsidies
[5] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires/
[6] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-shines-light-republicans-are-criticizing-
