look, you don't have to tell ME about the means test. i have my own story about being completely fubared by my ex one christmas season. to make a long story short, i couldn't even get temporary relief from TANF because i had a vehicle worth 6k, 2 k over the maximum allowable value for a vehicle. i had no job at the time. i had exactly 5 bucks.
what was floated here was the idea that AN INDIVIDUAL should not pay their student loan back. why? because the individual has taken out too much money and is now facing dire job prospects. right. so, we are supposed to encourage someone who has made unfortunate decisions to not pay their student loan back. what?
my point was that i do not see how a transition to a socialist society is in any way encouraged by a vocabulary in which we speak of the "state" as providing "free" education (or whatever) and, conversely, the same ill effects are accomplished by laying the blame for all at the feet of the state or some amorphous "ruling class". my other point was that we need to recognize how we are interdependent. were we to do so, we would recognize that the education that we get for "free" is a gift we give one another and that a healthy society is one in which we reciprocate that gift by giving back to the community that gave to us. speaking of an abstract, disinterested state that dispenses "benefits" is precisely what we DON'T wan t to do.
bailing out on your student loan just because you don't want to pay it back is NOT revolutionary. it accomplishes nothing. it *might* be reasonable if it were part of some larger Piven and Cloward strategy, but right now, encouraging people to bail on their student loan when they can very simple defer their loan for a WIDE variety of reasons or can get a forebearance for almost ANY reason seems utterly ludicrous to me.
i'm working on a kelley-to-english translator.