1) I cited to student loan interest rate trends in my article. You can easily compare it to the prime rate and average mortgage/auto rates over time. Student loans rates are generally much higher (particularly if unsubsidized, the amount is often greater than 2x).
2) Forgiving a relatively small subset of student loans for people making under $125k is not going to have any impact on the 5-year-old in question. He has bigger things to worry about.
3) Republicans have used this as fodder to fuel culture wars. I should know - I used to work for one. They made this an issue - an oversimplified one at that - not me.
4) Since we're drawing on life experience, I was one of those 22-year-olds. I went to college and law school. Thankfully I'm debt free. Many of my peers were not so fortunate. Schools literally committed fraud to entice people to matriculate (look it up!). For-profit schools in particular ran some of the biggest rackets and banks and the federal government backed the loans. Please look at this issue beyond the small sample size of your experiences. Pinning the majority of the onus on impressionable young people who have a lot of people telling them what to do is completely unfair. Especially when they are trying to better themselves with education.
On a relate note - remember what happened 10+ years ago? The Great Recession. For people like me who were in school when Lehman and Bear Stearns went under, we entered the workforce at one of the worst times in American history. Many chose graduate school to better themselves, enhance their marketability, and bide their time. That increased the costs of graduate school and markets like mine (law) became oversaturated.
I say all of this because it's not as simple as - you take out a loan, you pay it back. There were unprecedented economic forces at play that still detrimentally affect people to this day.
And just because guidance counselors and teachers and parents were not screaming college and graduate school at your high school, that certainly doesn't mean they weren't screaming it elsewhere. Where I was and where many of my peers were - they pushed it. Hard.
5. Yes, Krysten Sinema. I think we found something we can agree on - when capitalism works, it's truly beautiful. I just think, as someone who has gone through the student loan system, that the industry preyed on a lot of people when they were most vulernable. Forgiving a subset of loans for lower to middle income families is the least the government can do. It also should only be the beginning of reforming the industry as a whole. But perhaps that's for a future article.
