Bernie Sanders Proposes Plan to End Student Loan Debt With $2 Trillion Dollar Price Tag
“a proposal which will allow every person in this country to get all of the education that they need to live out their dreams”
Bernie Sanders has announced a new plan to wipe out all college debt and to make higher education a “human right.”
The cost of his plan is a mere $2 trillion. To raise that money, he wants to tax evil Wall Street.
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been competing for ownership of this issue. It’s no coincidence that Bernie unveiled this plan two days before the first Democratic debates.
Cara Korte reports at CBS News:
Bernie Sanders proposes total elimination of student debt
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a plan Monday to eliminate $1.6 trillion in student debt currently held by 45 million Americans. And he’s looking to Wall Street to pay for its cost.
Sanders, along with Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are proposing a Wall Street tax — a tax of 0.5% on all trades, fees on bonds and derivatives. According to Sanders, the tax would raise $2.4 trillion over 10 years.
In addition to debt forgiveness, Sanders would make all public colleges and private historically black colleges and universities tuition-free.
“We are entering a proposal which will allow every person in this country to get all of the education that they need to live out their dreams because they are Americans,” Sanders said at a press conference Monday morning.
Sanders said millennials, a key demographic for his campaign, have been “sentenced to a lifetime of debt” upon graduating from college.
Here’s a video of Sanders announcing the plan:
Will there be refunds for all the suckers who paid off their student loans before now?
Robby Soave of Reason points out some of the main problems with the plan:
Aside from its staggering cost, the policy is flawed in the same way that so many plans to cancel student debt are flawed: It rewards people who made unwise investments and transfers money to comparatively well-off people. The primary beneficiary of a college degree is not society at large, but the degree holders themselves, who tend to be more privileged and have better financial prospects than those who don’t have college degrees.
Making college free, of course, would encourage more people to attend. This would likely worsen the sort of “credentialist arms race” that the economist Bryan Caplan warns about in his excellent book, The Case Against Education.
Bernie is getting support on this from Ilhan Omar and AOC. Isn’t that shocking?
70% of Americans didn’t go to college.
Why should they fund those who did? https://t.co/bcFd3DVkhH— Jubal E. Harshaw (@alimhaider) June 24, 2019
“We have to both make public colleges tuition free and forgive all student loan debt at the same time,” @AOC said Monday, introducing legislation with @BernieSanders. https://t.co/oJ6D2oP5wL pic.twitter.com/4gUNR4T2Tj
— POLITICO (@politico) June 24, 2019
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
In addition to being an insufferable Stalinist and bum, Sanders is also a complete moron. By himself, he’s just a quack. The problem is all those college students and thirty-somethings who adore him and his ideas.
Does no one at all understand economics?
I don’t understand why Bernie is limiting himself so. Why just students? Why don’t we end all debt to everyone, everywhere, by printing umpty-trillion dollars and handing it out like party favors to anybody who wants some?
Cool! Now I can buy a Tesla.
Only a Tesla? You’re a piker. I’m gonna buy Venezuela!
Well, I was going to buy one each year. I figure I have at least four coming.
Watch out buying ” Venezuela “, I hear it may be “underwater”
or “upside down” in value.
I think Bernie is partly right; the kids were cheated. I
think the institutions they attended should be the ones to
pay back the loans, and the students surrender their degrees,
and all go their own ways. Bernies plan ignores the role
colleges play in this, and sticks the cost on blokes like
me and others who had no say or part in it. Typical Democrat.
He’s saving that for the primaries or the general election, when the advance auction of stolen goods reaches its crescendo.
Some math: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157133397220944&set=a.10150153364395944&type=3&theater
Do you do math?
You don’t know what words mean…
Who doesn’t, and as regards what?
Please specify.
guinspen, For starters, Titan28 doesn’t know what the word Stalinist means.
The most that can be said of Sen Sanders, is that he is a Scandinavian-style Social-Democrat (here’s the math on that: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157133397220944&set=a.10150153364395944&type=3&theater ), so the independent senator from Vermont is very much in line with the progressivism of the New Deal and Great Society.
Yet every time he mentions policy that might bring us a little closer to Oslo (NOT Moscow), the #FauxNews/#AMtalk nation screams, “Stalinism!!!”
Here’s the irony: The #MAGA movement is a fit of nostalgia, for the America of FDR, Truman. Ike, Kennedy and Johnson, but Trumpsters think they’re going to restore that world with the policies of the un-reconstructed Reagan, and co-presidents Clinton, Gingrich and Gramm.
#FauxNews + #MSDNC = #Idiocracy
#TrueStory
Delusional.
He is delusional.
Probably, but also more that he’s trying to ‘out left’ Lieawatha Warren and Plugs Biden in the attempt to reach the top of the heap in the polls before going into convention season.
What about reparations for all who have already paid off their loans? Or better yet, all students (and their parents and spouses) who scraped together the tuition and expenses without having to take out loans?
I want the works,
I want the whole works!
Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises in all shapes and sizes,
And now!
Don’t care how I want it now!
Don’t care how I want it now!
– Veruca Salt (Willy Wonka)
All the problems that don’t react perversely to direct action have already been solved. What’s left is problems that react perversely to direct action.
Conservatives notice perverse side effects, liberals don’t and favor direct action.
Owing to the problem natural selection force, the conservatives are almost always right.
The right course is paying for the program with a working-in-education income surtax. Trasnsfer the inflated fees back to the payers.
So I searched “What is Working-in-education Income Surtax?” and the only result sort of responsive was explanations of “surtax”. So What is Working-in-education Income Surtax?
Sir, are you being deliberately obtuse? The WIE surtax would be a tax on those working in education who are the ultimate beneficiaries of all the inflated costs to the students. As a surtax, it is over and above the normal amount of tax already levied on their income. It would recycle the money paying off the loans back into the Treasury, aiming for a net zero cost to taxpayers.
I, personally, would tell Bernie take his idea and stuff it up his a$$. But that’s just me….
And perhaps he could pay for this with a special tax on college graduates?
However he were to finance it, it’s harder to think of any one thing that would accelerate the decline of academic rigor on the nation’s college campuses, as colleges competed furiously to attract and retain students who were in no way prepared, but who’d appreciate a few years of taxpayer-funded partying and idleness.
In any case, it’s time to get rid of that donkey. If it’s to be the Free Lunch Party, let its symbol be a lunchbox with a hanging price tag of $0.00
While acknowledging the improbability, if not outright impossibility, of this campaign promise – I want to know who determines the “need” of the student? Crazy Bernie says everyone would get the higher education they “need”, but that implies someone in the government (he is a Socialist – or maybe more accurately a Communist) would determine what a person “needs”.
Well there is economics, and then there is Democrat economics.
One is based on manufacturing, investments, gdp and “stuff”.
One is magic.
Where are all of these students going to go to school to get their “free” education? Every college/university has a finite number of seats in a finite number of classes. Who decides which person gets which slot? And what happens when the slots run out? There will be all of these wait-listed people who can’t even get a job at the local burger stand because they don’t have the requisite Master’s degree.
How about personal responsibility? Education a human right?
If you can’t make a plan on how to pay for it maybe you shouldn’t go then. People who thought carefully about the cost, shouldn’t have to subsidize those who haven’t.So you had fun in college? You secured a degree for your time there? Well pay your own damn bill.
I’m an electrical engineer by training. I’d like to open the graves of our forefathers and turn their spinning bodies into armatures to generate “free” electricity. How much longer can we survive with kooks running the country?
I prefer the buttered toast / cat array to spin generators for free.
The field is going to thin out substantially after this week’s debates. The Dems are providing so much material for Trump to mock on. And the MSM audiences have plummeted since their crazy obsession with Russiagate was exposed for the fraud it is. I’d like to see these debates greeted with the hooting and hollering of mockery they deserve.
I bet Trump’s tweets will outdraw the MSM and be much more entertaining (effective).
but the degree holders themselves, who tend to be more privileged
Bernie’s powers are remarkable. Even the people criticizing him are insufferable jerks.
The most pernicious part of this plan is that it represents a tremendous tax on retirees and those about to be retired. Every time a retiree withdraws cash to pay bills and liquidates securities the transaction is taxed (in addition to income tax on the withdrawal). Every time a retiree rebalances their portfolio its taxed. Every time the ETF or Mutual Fund they are invested in shuffles securities to improve earnings or avoid losses a tax is applied increasing operating costs which show up to the retiree as less earnings.
On a modest $500,000 401k retirement portfolio, one which could be reasonably expected to yield $20,000 to $30,000 in available income annually, a combination of investment changes and withdrawals that equaled $400,000 per year would reduce income to the retiree by $2,000 per year, that’s a 6.66% tax on the income in addition to the income tax owed.
It’s standard Democrat policy to take money from people who have been responsible and give it to people who haven’t. If you every expect to be able to retire you need to be sure to vote against this kind of policy.
Ironically, the biggest share of the Wall Street trading tax will be borne by the largest pension funds:teachers, government employees, labor, etc. Many of those funds are underfunded, currently, even with reduced return assumptions. The 0.5% trading tax in those large plans is really a 1% tax on the same money because proceeds from securities sold will need to be reinvested.
Second observation: I’m old enough to remember TV ads that stated something like, “If you want a good job, get a high school diploma or GED.” So now a high school diploma or GED isn’t good enough? What is a college diploma going to be worth if everybody has one? The value will be diluted just as the HS diploma was. That will lead to further stratification of higher education and a lower value of degrees from what is perceived as “lesser” colleges. The Ivies and other elite, mostly private, schools will have a higher value to their diplomas. A degree from State Tech U is not and will not be equivalent to the same degree from HYP, etc.
Given their hatred of Boomers, most of the Millenials and GenX’ers who will benefit from this plan will see this as a plus.
These people are nuts. They are so far out in the ozone that their ideas are not worth even covering. Snowball’s chance in h_ll.
If both Sanders and Ocrazyio Quartez had s functioning brain they may have achieved great things. Their prospects now look very bleak!
They SHOULD look bleak, but I don’t see how sitting in Congress with a 6-figure salary, plus all the skim you can get away with from your campaign funds, as being a road to bleakness. Too many “poor” people get elected to Congress, almost none are that way when they leave.
Bernie is where he is without a single true job on his resume; Occasional-Cortex was a bartender. They have left bleakness in the rear-view mirror, at our expense.
There are roughly 240 trading days each year. Bernie wants to take 1/200 of each trade.
In aggregate terms, he wants to confiscate about 80% of the FULL VALUE of everything that trades in one day, and he wants to do it every year.
It wouldn’t take many years of Bernie in charge before we’d be begging Venezuela for foreign aid.
Says the man who has long represented the state with some of the most expensive public higher education in the nation!
Ok, for starters, money flows, and business is international. Proposing 2.4 trillion dollars worth of taxes on Business X will cause a corresponding flow of cash and assets away from those clutching fingers. Second, this is a dynamically unstable tax. Slugging Wall Street means tax revenues will skyrocket during good times, and crater during bad times, the exact opposite of what the country needs in any kind of tax legislation.
Third, it’s a Bernie idea. I don’t think he’s proposed anything that works since… ever.
“Da Boin” could screw-up a muster in a one man submarine… He’s been in Congress since 1990 and has had 3 (three) bills he sponsored get signed into law: One gave a cost of living increase to disabled Vets and the other two renamed Post Offices in Vermont. He’s also the only member of Congress that was kicked out of a hippie commune for being too lazy…
As with medical, the issue is three-fold. First, price, not cost. Second, immigration reform. Third, shared responsibility.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, seeing all those taxes transferred to fees against my 401k will annoy the crap out of me. And the drag on the economy as the government sucks up yet more capital would probably kill my job, or at least any chance of getting a raise ever again.
On the other hand, the thought of watching the left flounder when they begin to figure out that there’s a “human right” you have to WORK to really benefit from, is delicious.
I guess I’ll just keeping paying my student loans (on time, every month) and buy more popcorn.
Bet someone could propose a plan to end Bernie Sanders that would be way more cost-efficient.
You gotta come bigger than that Bernsides…we need allz the reparations for the tall midgets!
I am 100% in favor of this plan. Not because it would reduce student debt – I predict it will actually INCREASE it as other students with no debt decide to jump on the gravy train and run up huge bills in the expectation of a Federal bailout. Rather, the ultra rich Wall Street denizens are some of the biggest financial backers of communism in the US, and it is long overdue that they feel the pinch.
If corporate plutocrats and thieves of Wall Street like Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook do not end up broke, homeless and freezing to death under a bridge, then their taxes are too low. I am aware that Bernie’s proposal has Venezuela written all over it, but given the fact that socialism is all the rage I don’t think economic collapse can be avoided anymore. And I am selfish enough to want the ultra rich morons who funded this nation’s descent into totalitarianism sho bet what they asked for – good and hard.
I understand your sentiment, but the fat cats won’t being the ones paying for it, we will. There will be a line on your IRA, 401(k), brokerage statement saying “.5% federal education tax.” Just like your phone bill and electric bill.
You realize the tax on your phone bill [at least federal part – was it ever repealed?] was instituted during the VietNam war to defray costs of the war.
Gubmint is famous for applying taxes/tolls, etc. to pay for things – and keeps them on long after the original item has been paid for [e.g., tolls on the George Washington Bridge as an example].
I fear you are correct (in the short term), but once the little guys start getting their 401Ks taxed, the little guys will look for an alternative.
More importantly – I don’t think the Khmer Rouge wing of the Democrat Party (AOC, Omar, etc) will do what the Clinton-Biden-Warren corporatist wing did for decades: talk about “soaking the rich” while fashioning laws and tax codes to make the rich richer. The Khmer Rouge wing wants blood (literally, not figuratively), and in my opinion they are ascending in power and influence within the Democrat Party. So while the rich may benefit for a time under Sander’s plan, it will be much shorter than they think.
Where are we going to come up with the money (or wampum as Fauxahontas would say) along with the medical care for illegals and reparations for blacks, same-sex marriages, Native Americans and left-handers?
AOC whines about getting elected to Congress is easier than paying off her student debt. No one forced her to attend Boston University (Tuition only is $53,900).
My daughter has student debt as she graduated from Central Michigan (Tuition only is $12,500) rather than a commuter college, but her four years tuition was less than AOC’s one. Of course, it’s in Mt. Pleasant, MI rather than Boston.
I’m sure that in the future, most students will be tested for particular skills and their education and jobs will be tailored for “the good of society”. How else are they going to get enough doctors and other medical professionals to take care of everyone with the free health care?
University employees vote Democrat nearly 100%. This is simply a plan to launder taxpayer funds to the Democrats. His plan ensures that colleges/universities do not need to run on an economic model like a business.
Taxpayer funds –> students tuition –> paychecks –> Dem donations and Dem votes.
Free SJW indoctrination for everyone? How generous!
BTW – will the university endowment funds also be subject to the investment transaction tax?
Or will they get an exception, along with the gov’t pension funds, union funds, etc.
Anyone who wants an education can get it today for virtually nothing. Just purchase a laptop or chromebook (a good one can be found for a few hundred dollars) and then a high-speed internet connection (mooch or pay $40 per month) and then you can access some very high quality online education materials. Numerous education start-ups are providing free content as are some elite universities. There are also these cool places called libraries where a virtually never-ending supply of educational materials called books can be borrowed for next-to-nothing.
So, as usual, this stupid douche-bag is spewing lies and bullshit. He’s not interested in educating anybody, he’s interested in indoctrination and redistribution of wealth. This twat is a fool, but it’s scary how many young people are lapping up his pablum.
What happens when we cross the tipping point and people start electing more of these Marxist twats? Is the American electorate really that fucking dumb? Will those of us who value our freedom just roll over and let these Marxist twats steal what we’ve spent a lifetime earning and saving, or will it go hot? It’s scary to think how close we might be to that point.
Makes me think of C.M. Kornbluth and his “Marching Morons” collection. The educated will be too ignorant to actually do anything, while the technicians (tradesmen) will actually make society work.
Bernie makes me long for the days when members of the Senate and House were not afraid to get physical against the idiots who were looking to destroy us.
Why aren’t people looking beyond their own short ranged greed? Why the hell should I pay for these loans? No one forced them to sign for the loans, no one made them pick schools they were going to be in debt to long past the time when they find their degrees mean little. Why should I pick up the tab for these people when I worked and sacrificed to put my 4 kids through college and they don’t owe a dime? Why should I be penalized for doing so while he proposes these people skate?
This, along with the growing list of those who the candidates want to pay reparations to, is nothing less than bribery for votes. Sure, most of their promises are, but never before has it become this outrageous and open.
Where is law enforcement to carry these con artists away for violating numerous bribery laws we have across this once great nation?
Bernie sees his poll numbers slipping to Warren, so he has to out bribe her efforts to bribe people to vote for her. And the people of the US get the shaft.
Agree 100% – and why should we be paying to clothe, medicate, and house the invaders? Saw an article where DHS requested a bid for 2,000,000 diapers. It should have been for 2,000,000 bullets.
So government schools over promoted the benefits of a university education, overpaid its teachers then blamed the private funding market for excessive interest charges this requiring the federal gove3nment to become the lending source for student loans to go to government schools to get a degree (most not worth the paper they are written on). Students have now over borrowed and now these socialist (government) wants to forgive all student debt. How asinine is that?
I notice there are never any proposals for higher education reform to drive down costs.
Bernie Sanders is wrong — a college degree Is a human right! No one should be forced to sit through lectures and exams to get one. The federal government should simply award degrees to everyone (excluding those who are politically incorrect, of course).
The education complex, of which Democrats are big supporters, told us for years, the kids have to get a college degree to make it in the world. Now they are telling us a college degree is a roadbloack to that?