thatjsguy

Do you run out of toilet paper often?

So who was losing 20 years ago when you could pay for school with a summer job?

But who sets the price of tuition? The Boards of Regents/Governors/Trustees. Tuition used to be cheap _even at brand-name schools_.

Absolutely, but if we have to deal with the burden while ensuring future students don’t have to suffer (because let’s face it: short of Jesus Christ coming back and demanding it, I don’t see private loan forgiveness in our future), I’d rather do that. I just want SOMEONE to have a break. It doesn’t have to be me.

So I dated a 41-year-old. He went to school about 15 years before I did. Know how much student loan debt he has? Zero. Zilch. Nada. In the amount of time it takes to reach the age necessary to acquire a learner’s permit, we inflated the cost of education into the stratosphere.

Education used to be affordable. It is absolutely not impossible to go back. I’m curious to know how long you think education has been this unaffordable, because it’s a pretty new phenomenon. I’m therefore confused why it’s so hard to imagine a world where education is reasonably-priced.

Taxation has been around forever. Society gets to vote and decide how to divide up shared resources. I’m perfectly fine with tax dollars going to education (coupled with drastically-reduced tuition, like it used to be a short couple decades ago). I’m curious why everyone thinks it’s so impossible to have affordable education, when not even a generation ago we actually had it in the US.

What if we just like... paid for school with taxes like literally every other country? (Trust me, it shouldn’t cost as much as it does to get a degree. I promise it can be and, in fact, used to be affordable.)

The electorate will do what it wants. If people keep electing terrible reps, term limits don’t stop that, it just stops that one particular bad rep and replaces them with another. Similarly, we have some awesome Michigan House members who would be fantastic again, but they’re term-limited and have to run for something else to continue to serve. It’s sad.

Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. I’m sorry you had to pay off your loans. I’m paying about $100,000 myself. But even if I didn’t get amnesty, I’d rather not have one more graduate who, like me, has sincerely considered whether simply being dead would be easier to deal with. And there are a lot of people like that. I’d rather be in debt forever if it means that subsequent multitudes can be free of the burden I carry. At least someone gets some relief.

We did this in Michigan. It doesn’t work. It’s an attractive platform item, but what ends up happening is lots of turnover means it’s easier for lobbyists to sway candidates. You also just lose institutional knowledge. And guess what? We have term limits and an entirely new governor still poisoned an entire town full of kids.

Term limits don’t work.

Missing the point? My point is that a little trash on a riverbank pales in comparison to the large-scale environment destruction being committed every day by giant companies. Provide the homeless with food and shelter instead of worrying about some minimal pollution.

I mean, I’m angry at a lot of people, legislators included. There’s plenty of anger to around..

People are afraid of rightwing ideologues on the Supreme Court because it means that certain cases might be reasoned from a point of view that is based less on sound legal philosophy and more on personal beliefs from the 1800s.

I live in Michigan, where PFAS are being found in water supplies all over the state. Companies did and still do dump poisonous chemicals into the environment, and day by day certain alphabet soup agencies give them more and more license to do so. We can talk about some garbage along a river bank after we prosecute large companies for knowingly poisoning entire swaths of land and bodies of water for decades, considering the scale on which they can harm people and the resources they have to avoid doing so.