I have an economics teacher that made this claim in class yesterday. I wanted to know other people’s thoughts about it.
My thought is that you should find a different class with a different teacher.
I had a university lecturer who claimed that climate change was racist “because Bangladeshi women can’t swim”
Idk how some people end up being able to teach sometimes
All I could think was: Aliens don’t wear hats on Tuesdays because Tuna Helper is in Retrograde
The irony of them making a racial and gendered generalization on swimming skills lmao.
It’s always bothered me when people will blame a phenomenon and call it racist, when the systematic racism lies in our society and its response to the phenomenon. Climate change isn’t consciously choosing to target minorities, but societies are choosing not to support the minority groups disproportionately affected by it.
At a public awareness March in my country a speaker claimed COVID was racist because it disproportionately killed indigenous peoples.
You could argue that is correlation, where the cause was actually being unvaccinated. This was an antivax march, so obviously it was the government’s fault, not being unvaccinated.
I’d bet a dollar it was a comment on the disparate impact of climate change on women and people of color, using Bangladeshi women being statistically less likely to know how to swim as an example. But sure, climate change is racist because Bangladeshi women can’t swim, that’s a much more juicy soundbite.
Bangladesh is a very populous country that lies almost entirely at sea level, and the Ganga and Brahmaputra flood at least once a year. The problem isn’t not being able to swim in calm water. The best swimmer in the world would still die if he got caught in one of those currents.
All property is a social construct and is defined by law. So if the law says debt is no longer valid, then the loan agreements cease to be property and there is no stealing it.
That’s like saying if there was no law against theft I could drive away with your car, and that’s not stealing. I don’t think your argument is very convincing.
If the law said my car is no longer my property, then driving away with it would cease to be stealing, correct. What is property without legal, government-backed title? There’s no way to formulate a definition, because without government and laws property has no meaning.
Property has existed before laws existed to enforce it. It was enforced with violence. Stealing is still stealing even if there’s no law against it.
And if there was a disagreement about whose property was who’s? With no laws to settle it, it would just be determined by who grabs said property and runs off with it first. That’s indistinguishable from a free-for-all.
This is why you check rate my professor and you should put this on there as well.
No. A more educated population is better in every way.
But, assuming that this is in the US, one of the major parties relies on keeping people uneducated, so they don’t want people to pursue higher education. And certainly do not support cancelling student debt.
Im not sure where they’re referring to, but it’s the same, or similar at least, in the U.K.
That’s how they got Brexit and they’re pushing us to be right wing.
No, if you forgive the student loans so that the graduates can contribute back with their knowledge to society.
No more so then all the COVID loans forgiven for members of Congress.
I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.
I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?
If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolen from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you already have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.
That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.
No. University tuitions are supposed to be government subsidized anyway. For example a semester in Germany is ~250€.
Woah an was für einer Uni bist du denn? Ich zahl 140€
No.
Stealing is usually defined as taking something that exists in a way that denies the original owner its use and grants the illegitimate owner its use.
This is how loans work in fractional reserve banking: loan provider has assets of $1 million, they loan out $10 million, having wholesale created the additional $9 million. If those loans are forgiven, but the original assets did not change, what has been stolen?
A fictitious amount of theoretical money.
If I make up an image, and I make a copy of that image that i send to you and you delete, but I get to keep the original, is that theft? No. Obviously not. Made up money is no different.
You can’t just destroy money. With fractional reserve banking any bank can create money, but they can’t destroy it. Only the Fed can “destroy” money by buying bonds back and not reselling them. Forgiving a is a loss to the lender, in the case of student loans, the government guarantees them, so the lender gets made whole and the government assumes the debt on behalf of the borrower.
The image is a poor analogy because unlike when someone creates an image or any form of art, when a borrower takes out a loan, the lender records a receivable as an asset and the borrower’s account as an offsetting liability. Once this happens, the loan cannot then just be magically erased—somehow, some way, the lender must be made whole again. In the case of loan forgiveness, it comes out of the tax payers’ pockets. Whether that’s theft or not is a separate topic, and I think another commenter covered it well by comparing it to any other government program or subsidy.
No it can be ‘magically’ erased, it was ‘magically’ created out of thin air with nothing backing it. The money doesn’t actually exist, the asset for non existent money can simply have zero value. Loans are erased this way literally constantly. In fact more loans are erased this way than actually paid, if only by volume and not purported value. This is what happens when you default and no value is reclaimed on a loan, or when one defaults on a healthcare bill with an arbitrary price tag.
There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, the lender has to be made whole. That’s not a thing in other circumstances where loans lose all value and the money created for them disappears.
When a borrower becomes insolvent and the loan cannot be repaid, the lender records it on their books as a loss. They cannot just pretend the loan never happened.
Of course, now we’re mixing subjects because OP asked about student loan forgiveness, which would necessarily come out of tax payers’ pockets (not the same as when a lender takes the L because the loan cannot be repaid).
It doesn’t have to come out today tax payers pockets, that’s the entire thing. The money doesn’t exist, the debt doesn’t exist.
We made up this system specifically so we didn’t have to keep exact books, that’s the point of fiat currency over backed currency. If we don’t use its primary feature for good, ever, we may as well go back to the gold standard which would elimate nearly all banks and lenders at this point in the capitalist finite curve.
Fractional reserve banking does not mean the debt does not exist. The debt very much exists. Nobody takes out a loan and just sits on it. As soon as the loan is created, goods and services are traded. At the end of the day, each party to downstream transactions can go to the bank and withdraw the balance of their account in cash. The fractional reserve system only works as long as not everyone does this at once.
Except it’s new money that’s made up, and in the case of student loans, most of that money isn’t traded for goods and services, instead more than 3/4s of the money created goes back to the lender.
Looks like we are not going to agree on this, which is okay—I enjoyed the discussion nonetheless. Have a nice day.
Not any more than any other subsidy is.
Actually nullifying a debt a borrower owes to a lender, which the government guaranteed would be paid at the time the loan was issued would be akin to theft. As far as I know, all programs that “cancel” student loan debt are actually the government paying the balance to the issuer.
It’s the same answer to “if you give someone a gift, did they steal from you?” or “is a discount stealing?”
I think one way you can at least partially answer that is by asking whether college tuition has increased in price equally with how valuable a college tuition is.
The answer is no btw
I haven’t taken an econ class in 8-9 years but I remember it saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay for it. And when you frame things in that light, then yes I could see how an econ teacher would call that stealing.
But econ is a weird science, it’s explaining human behaviors and people are weird.
Only by the rich people who are actually stealing from us. PPP loan forgiveness for their litany of fraudulent claims…
