Monday, May 20, 2013

Stupid, Suicidal, and Shameful


Student loan debt now exceeds one trillion dollars. Whoever thought up the idea of making students borrow money in order to go to college should probably be drawn and quartered. It is without doubt the single most suicidal, stupid, and shameful practice ever developed by a nation, especially a nation that boasts of being the richest, most innovative, and successful in history.
From the standpoint of national success it is entirely stupid. Some nations offer free education to their young people as it is clearly in the best interest of their nation to do so. Do the “powers that be,” and we know mostly who they are, truly believe our nation does not need the best educated young people we can possibly have? Why should education be made so difficult as to prevent many students from attending at all, thus sacrificing hundreds of thousands of good minds to the scrap heap? And why should many others have to give up prematurely because they cannot afford to continue?
If a nation does not provide education for its young people, the future generations who will be in charge and have to govern, provide for, and protect us, it is a basically suicidal gesture as eventually and inevitably it will be doomed to fail. We can already see signs of our failure as other nations are getting ahead of us, especially in science and technology, and even in the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Where we used to pride ourselves on being the best we are falling more and more behind. There is no doubt our much neglected, underfunded, and outrageously expensive educational system has much to do with this.
More importantly, what we are doing is shameful. In effect we have made our young people into the functional equivalent of slaves, slaves to loans they should not have had to borrow and slaves to the interest system involved. High interest rates (even not so high ones) are just another way of controlling people and their behavior. The only difference between graduating and then having to pay off loans at interest, and slavery, is that the owners cannot beat and rape you at will. Apparently the U.S. will receive an estimated 51 billion dollars from our student slaves, most of whom cannot even find decent jobs and have to live in poverty rather than being productive members of our society. This is shameful beyond belief.
How could a nation be so stupid as to allow this to happen? Well, the powers that be, obviously decided they could turn a tidy profit by forcing students to borrow money. It was an untapped resource for the greedy, profit-grasping, short-sighted, immoral, and shameless capitalists that are in charge of things. A university or college degree should be free to those who desire one and are capable of achieving it. At the very least it should be inexpensive enough that it would not leave them heavily in debt, probably preventing them from moving on with their lives, if not ruining their futures entirely.
As it has now become apparent this student loan situation is so bad it is adversely affecting our economy, and there are hints of change to help correct this tragic mistake, but don’t bet the loaners are not going to fight tooth and nail to keep their tainted profits. It’s the American way!
If they truly want to help the nation, the economy, and even their remote chances of going to heaven, they should simply and immediately forgive all student loans and flagellate themselves for the most boneheaded idea of all time. I’m pretty sure those who hold the loans can easily afford it as they continue to reap much more than they ever sow and their millions and billions increase more rapidly than they can stash them overseas.

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

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