Now, now Justin: despite painstaking efforts to assure that I was engaging in an Abstract Thought Exercise, you're just determined to read it as a practical query. But exploring the dynamics of our political-financial system is one of lbo-talk's raisons d'etre and in that spirit I invited theoretical analysis of a fascinating confluence of social facts.
Social fact 1: credit card companies are currently thrusting exorbitant credit limits upon segments of the population.
For instance I regularly receive unsolicited "rewards," amounting to tens of thousands of dollars of credit, for my "financial responsibility." After getting their approving dad-like pat on the head I get the siren songs, of the dream vacation in Bora Bora that I uniquely deserve, the house addition to that'll make me complete, etc. (Of course what they won't tell me, have killed congressional proposals trying to make them tell me, is how many years at their interest rate it would take to pay back my carpe diem expenditures.) They've sent me all these credit increases at the same time that my income has almost qualified for Earned Income Credits.
Social fact 2: the present structure of higher education makes it increasingly likely that students, especially graduate students in humanities and social sciences, will accrue enormous student loan debt.
Social fact 3: institutional structures (to say nothing of moral ones) mitigate strongly against reneging on gov't student loans.
Social fact 4: the student population likely to be highly indebted by gov't loans correlates highly with the segment of the population receiving high credit limits from the bottom-feeding credit card companies.
This array of social facts present interesting material for social analysis. My theoretical understanding of the finance system and its mutual imbrications in the sociopolitical realm would be enlarged if anyone here could indicate possible institutional factors or regulatory procedures that might mitigate against the elective affinity I perceive here between the confluence of social facts enumerated above, and the possibility of a segment of the student population choosing to pay off their gov't loans via the funds made available by their credit cards, after which they might subsequently and regrettably feel compelled to file for bankruptcy.
inquiring social analytical minds wanna know, Maureen