hadespussercats wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote:hadespussercats wrote:Here's the thing-- is capping student loan repayment demonstrably different from cutting taxes for a certain part of the population, or providing public assistance to same?
Yes, because one is like arbitrarily forgiving people's car loans, and the other is cutting taxes or providing assistance to the needy.
hadespussercats wrote:
I don't think the nation owes me my loan money, and I take care of that responsibility. But without our loan payments, I could stay home with the Sprog til he's in school, and J and I could spend far more freely. This effect spread across the entire educated populace is quite an economic incentive, don't you think?
Yeah - but, it's not anybody else's business what you do with Sprog. You didn't ask anyone to have 2, 3 or 4 children, and nobody asked you to have any. I mean - I love kids and all, and but for a large number of people having babies, I'd prefer they didn't, nor is it fair to saddle single people with the obligation to pay out money to pay off people's student loans so they stay home with the kids. What if a single person wants to stay home and take care of the yard?
An economic incentive for what?
You're misunderstanding me-- I'm just pointing out that capping these loans would change the economic lifestyle of a wide swath of the populace, in ways that might boost the economy.
Paying off a someone's student loan so that they will stay home to take care of children isn't a way to boost the economy. The government just paying off people's debts, or part of people's debts, doesn't boost the economy. It inflates the currency, because since we are borrowing all of our money and/or printing new money to cover these things,and it would just artificially make GDP look bigger than it really is (because the government payments to pay off student loans would be automatically counted as part of GDP).
hadespussercats wrote:
A cap on loans might work as an incentive for people to put the money earmarked for loan service into wider circulation.
I'm not getting how the government borrowing or printing money to pay off billions of dollars of student loans helps the economy. You might get a small blip when some of those people buy things they otherwise wouldn't, perhaps. But, overall, the effect on the money supply of doing these spending programs is of a much worse effect than any blip due to consumer spending.
The only way to really help the economy is to have the economy expand with new productive industry. That's the reason the 1990s were so good. Computers, cell phones and the internet. Entirely new industries that were able to produce hundreds of billions of dollars of new goods and services. Maybe more than a trillion dollars worth. We don't have anything new like that on the horizon now, and the government is doing all it can to squelch the industries that we do have - coal, oil, nuclear and any manufacturing in the US is being hurt by our government, not helped. And, we do things like finance Finnish auto companies, and make laws that destroy the domestic light bulb market and hand it over the Chinese.