But the jobs went away didn't they? And wages have been pretty stagnant for decades. And inflation makes dollars worth less every year.
The student debt isn't really the heart of the matter. The real problem is that government involvement has crippled our economy. One wage earner supporting a family with a middle class lifestyle? That disappearred about 40 years ago. Thanks Nanny State.
>>One wage earner supporting a family with a middle class lifestyle? That disappearred about 40 years ago. Thanks Nanny State.<<
I have no problem with it — my wife has never had to work a day in almost 20 years (and my ex-wife the same).
Maybe you chose your profession or avocation badly. We are importing H-1Bs left and right for engineering and IT jobs left and right. And NOT because of the lower wages they theoretically get. It is because we don’t have Americans with the right skill set(s). Just for the heck of it, I did a job search for my skill set (IT management for large ERP implementations) and came up with hundreds of possible jobs in about 5 minutes.
And I had some student debt which I paid off as promised. It isn’t the same as people today spending $200K for Graduate degrees in Ethnic Womyn’s Studies (I am not accusing you of that).
But if you do succeed in getting the Nanny State to pay off your student debts, remember to make it retroactive to the mid-1970s.
ps: The Gummint doesn’t CREATE jobs. It just interferes with job creation, Gen X and Millenials voted barry the zero in, they can live with the results.
My perception of the OWS crowd is that there are a lot of well-spoken (and by this I mean they have a good command of the English language) people among them who are overly "educated" in a formal sense (which explains the $100,000 in student debt) but very lacking in real-life skills. I suspect a lot of these folks have expensive undergraduate educations in fields that simply don't offer much in terms of lucrative employment, and many may have graduate degrees in professional fields where there is a huge imbalance between the enormous supply of workers relative to the number of jobs available in those fields. I'll use finance and law as two possible examples of this -- both of which involve inflated employment figures over the last few decades that were largely fabricated by unsustainable excesses in both fields.
I don't get the impression that there are too many unemployed auto mechanics or medical doctors among those OWS crowds.
What you say is spot on, but in addition the Government has put student loans in a special category that cannot be easily discharged by hardship.
If the lenders had to take into account the degrees they were lending money for and the ability of the borrower to complete the degree. A lot of this foolishness would stop.
Right now the lenders have almost no risk and are encouraged to lend as much as possible. (no skin in the game)
If the student defaults they can often triple the amount owed through penalties.
Their are documented cases of former students committing suicide or fleeing the country to escape this debt.
To me it makes no sense to acquire much student loan debt unless your in a field like Engineering, Medicine, etc. and even then the debt should not exceed much more than 1/2 of what you could expect to be making 5 years into your career. (Ex: if you expect to be making 100K 5 years into your career, 50K in student loan debt).