Young Millennials Saddled With $1,005, 000, 000, 000 in Student Debt: 'Crushing the Next Gen'

[appalachiablue]

'We Are Crushing the Next Generation': Young Millennials Saddled With $1,005,000,000,000 in Student Debt. New data fuels call for progressive solutions. By Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams, Feb 25, 2019.

Underscoring the need for progressive proposals like tuition-free college and debt relief, new data shows young Americans are being crushed by debt.

In the last quarter of 2018, outstanding student loan debt went up $15 billion to $1.46 trillion. Credit card balances shot up as well, raising $26 billion to $870 billion, according to (pdf) the most recent quarterly housefold debt report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Center for Microeconomic Data.

The youngest age bracket in the report, those aged 19-29, had over $1 trillion in debt in 2018. "That's the highest debt exposure for the youngest adult group since late 2007," Bloomberg reported. Moreover, "Student loans make up the majority of the $1,005,000,000,000 owed by this cohort, followed by mortgage debt," the reporting adds.

"We are crushing the next generation with debt," tweeted Democratic presidential hopeful and Universal Basic Income proponent Andrew Yang in response to the findings.



Among the roughly one in four Americans facing that crisis—a problem a bipartisan majority of Americans want Congress to do something about—is Melissa Haggerty, a Loyola University Chicago alumna. Being "strapped with student loan debt," she recently wrote that she's "barely getting by, and looking for solutions from lawmakers."

She added: In cities across Illinois, borrowers are putting 10 percent or more of their paychecks towards paying down student loan debt. The consequences of this means financial stability will continue to be out of reach for young people like me unless bold policies are implemented that make college more affordable for future students, and provide meaningful relief to borrowers like me. In Illinois, borrowers now have a Student Loan Bill of Rights, which provides basic consumer protections to defend them against bad practices by student loan companies...MORE.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/25/we-are-crushing-next-generation-young-millennials-saddled-1005000000000-student-debt

[rownesheck]

1. these awful banks

who hold these loans are almost begging people to default. It would probably hurt all of us, but i would love it if every person with student debt would just stop paying the loans. Let the banks crumble under their own stupidity and bring about the world of mad max. I mean, that's where we're headed anyway. The psycho evangelicals and their republican masters are ensuring it. What canned dog food do you prefer to eat? Alpo always looked good to me.

[appalachiablue]

2. This is a huge crisis and something must be done. College costs

and student loans increased dramatically beginning with Reagan in the later 1980s. Higher education/college tuition before then was mostly subsidized by state tax revenues, approx. 80% revenue-20% individuals. Now the ratio is approx. 80% owed by individuals, 20% paid from taxes!! Relatives attended affordable public college 2 gens before me. None of us left with gd student loan debt!

Cancelling debt for the good of the broader community derives from ancient societies that realized the harm of indebted population and the benefits of a 'debt jubilee' as economist Michael Hudson explains:

*DEBT JUBILEE: (MH) "Periodically for a thousand years, from Sumer, Babylonia, and other Near Eastern countries, when new rulers took the throne, they would begin their reign with a debt amnesty. The idea was to restore the economy to the stability that existed before widespread debts ran up during the preceding ruler’s reign. What was “restored” was an idealized “original” or “normal” state in which nobody owed debts to the palace. These debt remissions extended in due course to debts owed to palace collectors – and, by Babylonian times (from about 2000 to 1600 BC), to debts owed to individual creditors. Most agrarian and personal debts were cancelled, but not debts among businessmen that were owed to each other. They were left in place.

The guiding logic of these debt cancellations was spelled out by Egyptians. If rulers had not cancelled these debts, they would have faced a situation in which indebted cultivators were falling into permanent bondage. Their labor would have been pledged to their creditors, and thus would not be available to perform the corvée labor that had to be mobilized each year to build basic infrastructure – walls, temples, palaces and other basic construction that was public or communal in character..." https://voxeu.org/article/some-ways-introduce-modern-debt-jubilee

>Ways to Introduce A Modern Debt Jubilee, http://www.unz.com/mhudson/debt-jubilee/