Poll: Where do you stand on free tuition to state colleges and universities

[JDPriestly]

114. It is free to the student at the time of matriculation and attendance.

It is paid for out of taxes and not out of student loans. I posted above the percentage of students now getting assistance in paying college costs including tuition. It is in the 80 percentile. That means that a huge number of kids going to college are already qualifying for aid and incurring debt that a good number of them will pay back over the course of 20-30 years. That debt is too heavy a burden on many of them. It should be paid back in the form of taxes that are imposed on those who earn the most.

I used to read complaints filed in the courts. That was years ago, and an amazing number of the complaints then filed in federal courts were attempts to collect on student debts.

Since 2005, student loan debts are no longer dischargeable in Bankruptcy Court thanks to a bill that was pushed through with lots of Democratic help including that of Joe Biden. That's one of the bills that Elizabeth Warren disliked so much.

When our country was young, immigrants incurred debt in order to pay for the passage to America. In exchange for that passage and to repay the debt, they indentured their lives for a period of years to some master. It wasn't slavery, because it was not a lifetime indenture. But the master/indentured servant relationship was coercive, and the debt had to be repaid. Some of my ancestors came as indentured servants.

Student loans are akin to indentures. There is no way to get out of them other than death or disability or some catastrophic situation. In other words, and to be honest from a cynical viewpoint, students are indentured, obligated to repay their student loans, as long as they are at all useful to our economy. If they can earn barely enough to live, those student loans force them to work. For a pittance, for millions.

Education should not have such a high price.

The good news about capitalism is that it frees and gives incentives for a lot of innovation and efficiency. People who are saddled with a lot of debt become subordinates, wage slaves, the modern equivalent of the indentured servants except that they have to apply to their future masters for what we call "jobs."

The extent of indebtedness in our country and specifically the indebtedness for student loans sort of cancels out the advantages of capitalism.

We as a society lose more from the excessive indebtedness of our citizens than we would lose from funding education at state schools and colleges for all who qualify to attend them.

And who gains from that indebtedness? A few very wealthy people at the top who pay lower taxes as the government collects interest from the middle class and poor in lieu of higher taxes for those who earn the most, and those who directly receive the interest payments. (And those who receive the interest payments are not people who save their money in the banks at interest rates less than 1% on average.)