but the USA quickly found $16.8 TRILLION to bail out banks – from a financial fiasco that they themselves created. Those banks were giving out tons of subprime loans – targeting minorities through their churches causing 25% of African Americans to default on their mortgages.
student loan absolution now
They need to enact laws that prevent total interest paid to any kind of loan from exceeding 25% of the borrowed amount. Meaning your loan of $10,000 is considered paid off when you paid $12,500 no matter the interest rate. No matter if you’re paying off a student loan, a mortgage, a business loan, or even one of those giant billion dollar cooperate loan.
Also, here’s a question, what can the banks too if every single collage graduate just refuse to pay off their loans starting now? Every single student refusing to pay a single penny.
Ruin our credit mostly
i’ve been working for 5 years altogether not to mention pat summers of work, been to school for 5 years altogether, and i’ve been paying roughly $290 a month every month for the last 5 years, and i still have 16,000 dollars i owe, not to mention a personal loan, and a credit card that saved my life more than once trying to make things work when i was outside away from home, it’s a horrible feeling to literally making money when you don’t ever really see any of it
Stop telling poor kids to be welders, mechanics, etc. You would never tell a rich kid to become a plumber. Stop limiting poor kids to jobs that won’t provide a middle-class life. Also stop recommending backbreaking work to poor kids in general it’s ableist and classist as fuck.
OP, do you know how big of a demand there is for welders, mechanics, plumbers, etc?
Also, did you know that plumbers on average make $50,000 a year, with master plumbers making over $100,000? The average salary for someone out of school with a Bachelors Degree is just above $50,000, and student loans, you know.
There is nothing wrong with those jobs that you listed. Kind of makes you sound like an ass to say there is.
How elitist it is to think these dependable, skillful jobs are “lesser” simply because they aren’t cushy and white collar.
My parents encouraged my younger brother to become a landscaper after he couldn’t get through his first semester of college. The job requires him to do different kinds of work every day, which keeps him engaged and interested despite being severely ADHD. He never would have made it through college or survived in an office environment, and forcing him to go that route would have meant ignoring his learning disabilities and ignoring his specific needs that come with low-functioning ADHD. Right now he’s making $17/hr and striving to become the foreman at his company, and he’s happier than I’ve ever seen him.
Some people legitimately cannot go to college because their mental or physical health won’t allow it, but they still deserve a shot at gainful, fulfilling employment. It’s insulting to say that blue collar work can’t be both of those things, and it’s incredibly misguided to discourage impoverished people from seeking attainable employment (which can be an intermediate step to help later fund a college education if that’s what they want, by the way!) when there’s nothing inherently wrong with these kinds of jobs.
Your attitude towards manual labor and trade skills reflects a deep issue that America in particular has, wherein its citizens have been encouraged by their educators to believe they are above doing such unintellectual work. A society cannot run without the dirty, unglamorous jobs. Your life is comfortable and convenient because there are people taking away your trash, treating your sewage, paving the roads you drive on, wiring the electricity in every building you’ve ever set foot in, delivering products to the stores you shop in, harvesting the produce you eat, making your car and fixing it when it breaks, and purifying your drinking water, to name a few.
These are not jobs to turn your nose up at. They are essential to our society, and they usually DO pay well enough to provide a middle class lifestyle. I should know; my father runs a steel fabrication company and his foreman makes almost as much money as he does.
You might consider reflecting on why you think these jobs are so contemptible that you’re actively discouraging people, for whom that sort of work may open up a world of opportunity, from seeking them out.
My father is 75 ( 76 in a few days ) and he works a blue collar job ( indoor custruction ) and has always made a decent living at it. He is higher middle class. Not quite rich but he can live more comfortably than most people I know.
So don’t you dare tell me his job is not worth having. It sure the hell is. Hell he even taught me some basics.
Not to mention the fact that Mrs. White isn’t qualified to teach.
She should be required to take a remedial English course.
“I have went”? please. It’s “I have gone”, Mrs. White.
first, my kid would not sign anything without me seeing it first. 2nd, upon seeing it i would be at the superintendant’s office the next morning.
then we would speak to the teacher.
black folk gotta nip it in the bud.
Dont let your children be controlled like this. I remember back when I was in school my mom always told me “if you really need to use the bathroom or attend to an emergency and the teacher won’t let you, then just leave the classroom and I’ll deal with teacher and principle”
Mom had my back
If I was this kid I would use up those passes and then just fuckin’ throw up or get a severe nosebleed in the classroom and then refuse to leave because “sorry, I can’t go to the nurse, I already used up my two passes for the fucking MONTH”
There was a student at my high school, who we will call John Doe, who actually did that. When teachers gave him a limited number of bathroom allowances (usually 3 per semester, which was the standard at my school), he would use them in the first week, and then induce vomitting my eating rotten food he found around the school garbage cans. If teachers refused to let him go, he would just throw up on something they had to touch. Light switches, keyboards, whatever was available.
Instead of making admin do anything about this toxic policy, they just doubled down harder, to the extent that one girl politely informed a teacher that she felt like she might be about to have a seizure and could she go to the nurse, please. She was denied, sat back down at her desk, and promptly passed out and concussed herself on the concrete floor when she fell.
Another girl had severe vertigo-induced fainting, could not get a teacher to excuse her from a phys ed class, and fell off a monkey bars and split her head open, and nearly lost an eye because her glasses broke when she landed.
A student with, I believe, diabetes had a severe blood sugar drop and tried to eat a candy bar in a class with a “no food or drinks” rule. The candy bar was taken away, and she had to be taken out by EMTs.
This kind of human rights abuse in public schools is not new. I graduated a full decade ago.
I’m glad it’s being publically discussed again, (briefly around 2003-2005 this was also a popular subject of discussion). I hope that this time, concrete changes in policy are actually affected.
to me, one of the weirdest things about our economy right now is the credential inflation
like my dad got a job as a mechanic when he graduated high school, and he was employed with a high school diploma to a full time job with a union, and had health insurance and benefits.
at this point, I have graduated from high school, have a Bachelor’s degree, have a Master’s Degree, have two years of experience working in my field, and am a due paying member of multiple professional organizations. And that qualifies me to compete in a two-stage interview process for a part time job that offers no health care.
This is what decades of stripping the working class of their rights looks like.
“And remember: the sky is the limit! You can be anything you want to be!”
“Thank you. I want to be a secretary.”
That stopped them short. “What?”
“A secretary,” she repeated.
“But…” they trailed off, dumbfounded. “Why? You could be a CEO, a scientist, a law–”
“I don’t want to be a CEO,” she said. “I want to be a secretary.”
They scoffed. “You want to answer phones all day?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“Schedule appointments?”
“I like organizing.”
“Be a second banana?”
An affirmative nod. “I’m skilled at helping.”
“I just don’t understand,” they said. “HOW could you be okay with all of this?!”
“I enjoy the work.”
“BUT YOU CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE!”
“I know.”
“Then WHY?!”
She shrugged.
“Because I want to be a secretary.”
Honestly though, this is very similar to my mom’s experience. She’s always been super bright, but has realized as she’s gotten older that intellectual pursuits just aren’t her jam. She dropped out of her PhD program to have kids, and although she has her master’s and was a pretty good school psychologist, she hated having to make huge decisions. She’s a church secretary now and loves it, and she’s GOOD at it; she’s letting her school psych certification permanently expire this year with zero regrets. If you can be anything you want, that includes the things we don’t tend to value as highly as a society. Not everybody is built for or wants the “respectable” careers.
My grandma did this to me, saying that i didn’t want to get stuck on the outside, making coffee and filing papers. The thing is, that’s exactly what I’ve always enjoyed the most, making and organizing things. That would be enough for me.
Nobody seems to realize that if you tell people they can be anything they want to be they will. And not everyone WANTS to be doctors or lawyers or CEOs or scientists. Sometimes, they just want to be a secretary.
ifesbob 