Student Loans

I only follow a couple of mouth-breather accounts on Twitter, and those are mainly dedicated to organizing book burnings, so I haven’t seen a lot of the teeth-gnashing from the right over President Biden offering relief to low- and middle-income folks buried in student loan debt. Well, yeah, I see some of it second-hand, retweeted by lefties who stay in touch with happenings in Fox Nation, and it’s about what you’d expect: if they can’t pay their debts, they shouldn’t have gone to college in the first place, etc.

What I do see is tweet after tweet from people like me who went to college back when it was cheap, borrowed a couple of thousand, and easily paid it back within a year or two of graduating. The general tenor of their tweets is hey, I took out student loans during college and paid them back but I’m happy to see you getting some help from the government. What they really mean is, look at me, I went to college and paid off my loans like a good citizen! Which I did, and probably so did you, but we’re not going to brag about it on Twitter, are we?

The student loans Donna and I took out in the 1960s were interest-free. Tuition at California state colleges was more or less zero. It’s tempting to say things were easier then, but they weren’t. For the first several years of our marriage we had to come up with cash in advance for everything: rent, transportation, gas, food, clothing, dentists, doctors, you name it. The first student loan we took out was for transportation … I needed a way to get back and forth to my classes … but we almost didn’t apply because we thought the money had to be used for books or tuition or dorm fees, things directly related to educational expenses. We’ve never forgotten Mr. Wong, the loan officer at Pacific Coast Bank in Sacramento, who set us straight on that and helped us get the loan.

Taking out and repaying student loans wasn’t enough to help us establish credit, though. The very same Mr. Wong, a year or two later, suggested we buy a TV from Sears on an installment plan and pay it off on schedule. That’s what we did, and from then on we had a credit rating. And here we are today, in hock up to our ears like everyone else. Damn you, Mr. Wong!

Funny how whenever government suggests helping low- and middle-income taxpayers it’s pouring gas on inflationary fires, but when the 1% demands another tax break or the Saudis want additional cluster bombs to murder more Yemenis, it’s like are you sure you don’t want another trillion or two?