The topic of student loan debt seems to fiercely divide people - even those who typically agree along ideological lines. Stefan Molyneux reviews a recent article titled "I've Paid $18,000 To A $24,000 Student Loan, & I Still Owe $24,000" and discussed the absolute horror of what propaganda has done to the next generation. Article: https://www.bustle.com/p/ive-paid-18000-to-a-24000-student-loan-i-still-owe-24000-9000788Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
You know, leftists complain a lot, rail, against exploitation.
It's really the foundation of leftism, the idea that those who were in power will exploit those who have less power, who have less knowledge, and will overpromise them.
Rewards will under-deliver and will overcharge, and it would just be generally a terrible thing when money moves from the vulnerable and the weak and the poor to the rich and the powerful and the well-connected.
Now, you will hear a lot of talk about exploitation with regards to Your relationship to the means of production.
Do you own a factory?
Do you work in a factory? What you don't hear a lot about from the left, which is really criminal, is how terrible and how much exploitation is going on in the shell game, the pillaging of the poor, the exploitation of the young and ignorant that comes out of what is euphemistically called, or what is called higher education, but which should be called brain-rotting indoctrination.
You don't hear a lot about how exploitive Universities are and that's because the leftists use universities to indoctrinate and Lying to people about the value of their education while getting them to go heavily in debt to pay for their own indoctrination Well, frankly, it's a sadist dream come true and I was reminded of this an article just came out Says I've paid $18,000 to a $24,000 student loan and I still owe $24,000.
This is written by Caitlin Corley.
I'll put the link below and And it starts here.
It says, it all became real the summer before my senior year of college.
It was 2010 and my home phone still had a cord which I wrapped around my fingers as I waited not so patiently for the apathetic representative on the other end to tell me the bad news about my student loan debt.
Now this is really quite astonishing.
It all became real the summer before my senior year of college.
I'm of two minds about this.
I'm really, really ambivalent. So let me know what you think of comments below.
It's tough, you know, because on the one hand, if you're smart enough to go to college, you should be smart enough to figure out your student loans.
And you should be smart enough to understand what variable interest rates are.
You should be smart. And if you're not smart enough to understand the basics of a college debt application, I don't know what you're doing in college.
That's sort of on the one hand, part of me wants to, you know, throw the...
The bricks of responsibility on the tender shoulders of the young.
On the other hand, they've been raised in terrible government schools.
They haven't been told much about finances.
They're generally loan illiterate.
They don't understand interest rates.
They don't understand how much you're going to pay in interest versus the principal and so on.
So I'm kind of half and half.
And anyway, I'm just telling you I don't have a strong opinion either way, although I have strong opinions as a whole.
So this woman says, I'm going to call her a girl because she's kind of a girl when she makes these decisions.
Girl says, my father was in front of me, his typically ruddy face redder than usual.
A 9.25% interest rate, he yelled, how can you put that on a kid?
It was clear he was worried, and he had every right to be.
As the co-signer of my loans, my debt would be his responsibility too.
So now we have two generations, right?
So the girl, and again, when she graduated from high school when she was 17 or whatever, so...
I mean, you can't even rent a car if you're a man until you're 25, but you can sign up for $150,000 worth of debt when you're 17 or 18.
Is that how it works? So the father, 9.25% interest rate, he yells.
So I guess he knows how bad that is, but he co-signed anyway.
And she says, See, now, again, this is where I'm kind of half and half.
The education that kids get in school about basic finances.
I don't know if it's because it's a female-centric educational force.
I don't know. But it's just, it's terrible.
It's non-existent. And this is why you had these variable rate mortgages that were extended to people who couldn't afford them because of diversity and wanting to make minorities equitable in terms of home ownership.
And the fact that they weren't was actually a lie and a falsehood put forward by, I think it was the New York Fed.
So this is back in the early to mid-2000s.
The government kind of forced banks to lend to underqualified minorities who then pillaged their finances because they got their down payments.
They actually called them liar's loans.
Not to say that they were all lying, but you could sort of fill in whatever you wanted.
into your income, particularly if you claim to be self-employed.
And then what happened was the interest rates bumped up, people couldn't afford it, they lost their homes, their lives were destroyed, and again, horrible exploitation.
But because that horrible exploitation in the mortgage crisis of 07-08, that horrible exploitation came out of leftist principles of egalitarianism of loan opportunities.
Therefore, you didn't really hear that much about the actual cause.
So, either way, neither of my parents wanted me to take it, I could tell that much, this woman, this girl talking about her loans.
My mother didn't even have to say it, as she sat wordlessly next to me on the couch.
So, neither of her parents wanted this girl to take the loan, but then the dad ends up co-signing, and again, you know, the dad, it's your job, you need to know what this is, and you know, I don't know, I've read the article, I can't remember if the girl says what she took, But if it's not a degree that specifically leads to a career, engineering or something like that, well, then you need to do the research.
This is really, I mean, it's frustrating because in the past, when only like 10% of people used to go to college, you could go to college and it was like this big giant IQ test.
Like, why do people need to go to college?
Because they want to prove that they're smart.
Why can't they just take a two-hour IQ test instead of a four-year college degree?
Because that's not allowed, right?
Because of race and IQ differences, if you have IQ tests, then blacks and Hispanics are going to do worse.
Whites will do on average. East Asians will do better.
And Ashkenazi Jews will do quite well, particularly on the verbal, although East Asians will do better on spatial reasoning.
And so IQ tests can't be fudged, but you can fudge like crazy university degrees, right?
You can let people in, and they do.
There are a bunch, I think, of East Asian students who are suing universities for upping the scores of blacks and depressing the scores of East Asians, because this egalitarianism of outcome, which is the obsession of the left, requires egalitarianism of inputs.
And given that race and IQ is different among ethnic groups, you can't get the same.
You're really not allowed to use an IQ test to hire people, but it would take two hours to administer the IQ test and you'd have it forever as opposed to four years.
The IQ test would cost a couple hundred bucks, maybe, not even if you bought in bulk.
IQ test would cost very little.
Whereas the social and personal costs of university education runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per student, not even counting the extraordinary unfunded liabilities in many cases of $1.4 trillion in the US of outstanding So,
again, the left wants this egalitarianism, and they refuse to discuss race and IQ, and therefore you have to have this big giant manipulable college matrix to try and fulfill diversity quotas, right?
Then they don't like talking about this kind of exploitation.
So there's some history about the father, this girl's father.
This girl's mom didn't even graduate from high school.
His father, her father worked nights driving Amtrak trains to put himself through trade school.
He earned his associate's degree in his mid-30s.
He was an electrician, right? And, wow, it's wild.
So there is this, I don't know, I don't even know what it is, exploitive myth.
There's this foundational destructive fantasy That college is essential.
College is essential. And I think it was Ann Coulter who said, forget, get a college degree, take your SAT scores, include them with your resume, and anybody, well, I would say anybody who's too dumb to recognize that that's a good business decision, because it's IQ that is the most foundational predictor of how you're going to do in a job.
It's IQ, it's IQ, it's IQ, and IQ cannot be altered.
By environment. At least they don't really know how to alter IQ by environment.
Parenting doesn't seem to matter.
It's like your height, right?
I guess really destructive stuff could lower IQ, but nobody knows how to raise it.
If you get extra food, if you don't get enough food, you'll end up stunted in terms of height.
If you get too much food, you just end up fat rather than taller.
Nobody knows how to make IQ higher in the long run.
And IQ... Is at least 80% genetic.
It is 80% genetic.
So this is why this egalitarianism thing is just never going to work.
And this is why you need just ever-escalating amounts of force and falsehood in order to try and maintain this fantasy that we can end up with everyone being the same.
If you have trouble with it, just think of it like singing ability.
And you understand it's not evenly distributed, although a lot of people can improve in singing lessons.
It doesn't really matter. So, if you're an employer, you want a smart person, and you can just take the SAT scores, and if you do that, then you don't have to pay your worker the additional amount of money they need to cover their student loans, right?
And also, they won't have been indoctrinated into hating the free market in leftist hellholes of higher indoctrination, and so they'll be a much better employee.
They'll be cheaper, they'll be more motivated, they'll be happier, and...
They can get on with their lives.
And of course, you want your employees to get married and have kids because it means that they're going to be harder working, more stable, and all of that.
And this is catastrophic on so many levels.
This massive amount of debt for education is horrifying because people can't get their lives started.
They can't move out.
They can't get married.
They can't even go on dates. They can't have children.
This is like some weird, irradiating, don't-breed-for-the-smartest people.
Anyway. It's horrifying.
Absolutely horrifying.
This whole higher indoctrination scam is one of the greatest tragedies to hit civilization in recent memory, certainly since the Second World War.
I mean, absolutely catastrophic.
So yeah, the parents should have said, no, we're not going to do it.
Or at least look into what kind of jobs can you get with this degree?
What's the average wage?
What's the job placement? Come on.
I mean, do your research, people.
I mean, it's not even that...
Like, because they're opening up universities to just about anybody with a pulse, of course educational standards have to collapse.
Of course they do. I mean, come on.
This isn't even that hard.
I mean, if you're taking only the top 10% of intelligent people...
Then you can keep your standards high.
If like 30, 40, 50% of the local young population are going into college, you have to drop your standards.
Because there's this ridiculous, well you see, in the past, people who went to college did very well and made a lot of money.
So what we're going to do is we're going to throw a lot of people in college and exactly the same thing is going to happen to them.
Which is like someone saying, well I'm I'm a really terrible singer, but people who get recording contracts are really good singers.
So if somebody gives me a recording contract and that will make me a really good singer, hey, I'm not really that tall, but I've noticed that everyone on the basketball team is really, really tall, so put me on the basketball team so I can gain an extra foot and a half.
And it's like the cause and effect is horrifying.
Horrifying. And this higher indoctrination bubble exploit of bullcrap is pillaging.
It is... Riding the wave of the prior value that a college education had.
Like in the past, a college education had more value because it was more exclusive.
You open it up to everyone and you're still riding the echo chamber of it has value, but you're pillaging from the past.
It's like fiat currency on gold.
So, the woman's talking about at this point in my education, after two years of private college and one in public university, had already taken out eight substantial loans totaling over $67,000, whose repayment I hadn't even begun to contemplate.
Well, that's not good.
You know, it all became real.
It was all off in the future. I hadn't even begun to contemplate.
I gotta tell you, I mean, if this is your approach to money, if this is your approach to value, if this is your approach to reality, I don't know what you're doing in college to begin with.
Look at your mom, didn't even finish high school, raised two kids, had jobs and so on, right?
Crazy. Crazy.
So, the father says, you know, this is bad loan, this variable rate stuff is terrible, which it is, of course.
So, I knew racking up one more loan and another $24,000 wasn't ideal, but what was the alternative?
Dropping out, transferring to a new school and hoping my credits would translate?
See, it's not a hope, right?
I started at York University, Glendon campus, then I went to McGill University, then I finished my Master's at the University of Toronto.
I went to the National Theatre School for almost two years.
So, I mean, I transferred credits.
It's not that hard. Transferring to a new school and hoping my credits would translate.
No, you phone them up and you say, dear.
Here we go. Leaving all the relationships I had cultivated with students and professors alike behind.
Wow. I mean, you're going to put yourself into lifelong debt because you have good dorm buddies?
Like, I don't know, it's kind of crazy.
So, I chose to take the loan.
In my final year of college, with my back against the wall, Sally made me an offer I did not know how to refuse.
So, whose fault? Whose fault is it?
Ah, well. Ah, well, it's this woman's fault.
So, eight years later, that loan, one of nine that left me $95,000 in debt upon graduation, because yes, interest does accrue while you're in school.
Well, of course it does, because the money that you're being lent is being pulled out of other resources, and so of course they have to charge interest on it.
Nobody's going to give you money for four years for free.
I lost control of my own financial destiny.
Terrible. So, this is some big data here.
44.2 million Americans with student loans adds up to about $1.4 trillion in debt.
Yeah, impact of the student loan crisis on the future of the country screwed, our economy broke, and the weight of the loan crisis crippling.
Just horrifying. It is destroying people's lives.
Absolutely destroying people's lives.
And like, if you promise people pay, and then you don't pay them, it's a criminal offense.
If you promise people economic value, and your degree does not translate into that, which it can't.
School is for smart people.
School doesn't make you smart.
University is for brilliant people.
University does not make you brilliant.
You know, you put me at a Steinway piano at Carnegie Hall.
I can't play piano very well.
Debt spiral. Oh, it's horrible.
It's horrible. You know, when I was 18, she says, I fully believed that taking out student loans was the only way to achieve my dream and my parents' dream for me, to transcend my working class upbringing.
I was desperate and uninformed, and because of this, I entered into a dangerous relationship with a loan company that will last half my lifetime.
Now, I'm finally facing up to the brutal details after years of sticking my head in the sand and learning the ins and outs of my debt, and the truth is mind-blowing.
Right, so what is it, 12 years?
Assuming it was a four-year degree, 12 years after signing her loans, I guess she's 29 or 30, she's finally facing up to the reality of her debt.
How could you not sign these things?
How could you not? Don't sign things you don't understand.
And especially because her father does understand.
And, but again, so I'm saying, well, She should know, but on the other hand, there's so much propaganda about this stuff, which the left, the Marxists, if they actually cared about exploitation as they claimed to, should be fighting tooth and nail, but they're not.
Because, again, they want to charge people to indoctrinate them.
All right, sorry, blowing off to one side rather than a microphone.
So, she's finding it very hard to find out about the loan details.
Which is, you know, she prints out her stuff here.
The interest rate reigns from 4.25% to 11%.
And, oh, it's crazy stuff.
It's up to 11%.
Sorry, the loan is up to 11% right now.
A fact I learned only when I called to ask why my monthly payments had increased.
As my lender matter-of-factly loansplained, we're not legally required to disclose when we change your interest rate as per the contract.
I had missed that clause in the multi-page contract I signed when I was 20.
So again, I think she started at 18 and then she signed loans as she went through.
Now... Feminists, of course, should be extraordinarily outraged, even if it's just like female in-group preference sisterhood stuff, they should be extraordinarily outraged that these girls are being dropped into a bottomless well of debt for degrees that have almost no economic value.
Instead, they're talking about mansplaining and manspreading and whether the word flip in flip charts is a racially charged epithet against Filipinos.
You understand how ridiculous feminists seem.
They should be focusing on this.
They should be sitting there in front of these loan booths at colleges and they should be handing out, this is the facts, this is the reality.
You're going to be a debt slave.
You're going to be a debt surf for something that has almost no economic value.
This is going to just – but they're not.
But they're not.
because sometimes men explain things too much.
It's terrible. Anyway, so she tries to get information, and of course she finds out, which, again, if you know, I don't know, I mean, as I said before, I got my first job when I was 10, and I've been paying taxes since I was 11.
So you kind of learn these things, don't you?
You kind of have to. I mean, you sit down and just grind your way through it, and you figure these things out.
So she said, I had no idea so much of my money I was paying did nothing but a bait-rising interest, barely touching the principal sum, right?
So, of course, when you are paying back a loan, when you're paying back a mortgage, at the beginning, you're paying probably 90% of the money is going just on interest.
It's the price of borrowing all that money.
And very little of it goes into the principal, which is why if you got a $500 payment on a debt, if you pay $600, every single penny you pay over...
The interest payment goes to the principal, and that's how you hack down your debt.
You overpay. That's how you hack down your debt very quickly.
I'm no financial advisor.
These are all just my thoughts and opinions.
But, yeah, no, it's just astounding, right?
So, for her payment, she's paid more than $18,000 into her original $24,000 student loan.
Isn't that astounding, right?
And here's the thing, if like, and she's still, only $171 worth of her back-breaking monthly payments even managed to skim the original amount.
She says, if like me, you didn't receive a ton of financial education in high school and you're wondering how that's even possible, welcome to my boat.
And again, I'm of two minds, you know, they're young, but you should learn these things.
But at the same time, there's so much propaganda.
Go to college. Go to college.
It's terrible. Well, and of course, as student loan subsidies and all that have increased, so has the price of college.
Funny how that works. See, when there was very strict requirements to get into college and only 10% of people went, what happened was it was cheaper to go because you didn't need the huge infrastructure to deal with so many students.
So it was cheaper to go, and the value of it coming out was better.
And so it made sense in the past, if you got into college, to even go into debt to get...
College for a lot of people, but now, well, there's much greater demand, which has driven up the price, and there's much greater supply of people with college degrees, which drives down the value.
I mean, terrible. Terrible.
So, here's what she says.
So, she goes more into detail, and I want to read the whole Article here, sensitive to your time, but this is such an important issue, such an important topic.
I mean, this can be the difference between a happy life and a miserable life.
Seriously, like the college stuff, particularly for women, right?
Because your eggs have a best-by date and there's no women.
You can put makeup on, you can do yoga, you can go for a facial, but you can't blow the accumulating dust off your dino eggs, right?
I mean, so if you wait too long to have kids...
Which, if you're in debt, this destroys sexual market value, right?
I remember going on a date once with a woman many, many years ago.
And we were talking about her lives.
And of course, I don't waste time on dates.
I don't waste time on dates.
I mean, I immediately get to, you know, what are you doing?
What's your life? What's your family life?
What are your values? What do you want out of life?
And if I can get finances, I will.
And I remember this woman was talking about how she was...
At the time, $17,000 in student debt.
And she didn't have a job that made a huge amount of money.
So if you want to get married, guess what?
You now own that debt.
So ladling these women down in debt not only delays dating, family, children, and so on, but it makes them less attractive as marriage partners because if you marry this woman, you've got to take on her debt, right? I understand.
I really, really need you to understand how absolutely catastrophic these decisions can be.
It is the difference between a great life and a desperate, lonely, barren, horrifying, economically, socially, romantically, love-destroyed relationship.
I'm not kidding. You can build a cathedral to your future, or you can call in horrible loans for bullshit degrees, and you can have an airstrike on everything that is to do with your future.
So yeah, you get a six-month grace period, but the interest keeps going up.
And so that's quite something.
So one way to extend the grace period, this is kind of how they get you, right?
Like how the loan shark might give you another loan to cover the loan, to just get you in deeper and deeper.
One way to extend your grace period is to attend graduate school.
When you decide to continue your education, you don't have to worry about making any payments until you graduate.
and she went outside the United States.
And here's the funny thing, right?
So she says, she got a master's degree.
She said, a master's degree I don't have any student loans for because universities outside of America don't believe in charging $60,000 a year.
That's not true.
And it just shows how blind to basic math and economic reality people are these days.
Well, oh, well, the university is free in this place, or it's very cheap in this, No, it's not. It's not.
It's not. When you go to a university outside of America, you're simply transferring the loan from you to the taxpayers in whatever country you're going to, assuming you're not paying these very high sort of foreign student things, right?
So... The question is why can they charge $60,000 a year for degrees that have almost no economic value or have negative economic value?
There have been studies that have shown that people who study economics know less about economics than people who haven't studied economics.
Like you end up dumber as a result of higher education, right?
Just horrendous. So yeah, thinking as well as cheaper overseas, it's not cheaper overseas.
It's just that the taxpayers have to pay.
Oh my gosh. Just horrendous.
Yeah, so this is the kind of life, right?
This is the kind of life. She says, I couldn't afford to make my student loan payments and had to default on them for the entire 12 months I attended the program.
And this is astounding to me.
I mean, maybe I'm an indulgent father, but to me, not that I would ever let my child get into this kind of unbelievable debt.
Slavery. Slavery. I'm not mincing the words.
This is a form of serfdom or slavery.
This is paying to have access to the modern...
Economy with time and future and family and marriage and love and horrifying.
At least slaves could get married.
But no, if you're the father, and I enable the behavior kind of thing, but you co-sign the loans.
If you're the father, you make the student loan payments and your daughter pays you back.
Then at least the interest isn't accumulating.
I don't know. So over that year, she said my inability to make my loan payments added $5,000 in compounded interest to the principal sum of my $24,000 loan, settling its total at $29,000.
See, if your father had paid your loan for you, since he did co-sign, then you would have saved $5,000 even if you paid it all back to your father.
Anyway, it's just weird. This bump sent my total student loan debt to $95,000.
Now, she's got a master's degree at this point, right?
This is really important.
She said, And this is the great unspoken.
This is the great unspoken horror, literal horror of modern, quote, education.
So let's say that the government got its educational hooks into this girl when she was five and then took her to 18, right?
So 12, 13 years, depending on, depending on, right?
Then she did a four-year undergraduate degree.
Maybe she did a two-year master's degree, right?
So we'll make it as generous as possible, 12 years worth of high school.
Four years of higher education in an undergraduate degree, which puts her from 12 to 16, and then another two years of a post-graduate degree, a master's degree.
Maybe it was a year, but let's say two.
But that's astonishing. So this woman has been educated for 18 years, and she's useless economically.
Do you understand what an astounding gap that is?
I mean, the Beatles played in Hamburg, I don't know, six hours a day or eight hours a day for a year or two and ended up being like incredibly expert musicians.
This woman has been educated in government-controlled institutions for close to two decades.
And she has no skills to bring to her business.
She's waiting tables. She's working in a pizza place.
She's got nothing. Do you understand how insane that is?
I really need you to just, I want this to go deep into your spine.
18 years. So the leftists complain about exploitation.
18 years. What is it?
$14,000 a year on average the government pays per student for, you know, like primary school and junior high and high school and so on.
I mean, I can't even imagine.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And this woman has no economic value whatsoever.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine taking a writing course for 18 years, full-time, And not even being able to write a complete sentence.
Can you imagine taking a painting course for 18 years full-time and not being able to make a painting that anybody wanted to buy?
Do you understand what I am railing and raging against this exploitation?
I really, really need you to see this and please send this to people in your life.
This is cancer, this stuff.
Anyways, more details about her loans.
So here's what she says.
She says, when I finally got my first full-time office job at the start of 2013, it paid less than $20,000 a year.
Less than $20,000 a year.
That's $10 an hour.
This is like, I mean, this is stuff I did when I was in college, like temping, you know, like typing in Excel and stuff like that.
She said I would make $1,400 a month and send $750 to Sally Mae as a loan person.
The average one-bedroom apartment rented for about $3,000 a month.
More than half of her net pay was going directly to loans.
Nearly a two-hour commute each way to my office, which wasn't so terrible until I started working overtime and my hours shifted from 9 to 5 to 9 to 9.
And this is what she says.
Now, this is why I would talk about how this stuff is literally dangerous.
It is dangerous for your life.
It is dangerous for your life.
Listen, if you're working 9 to 9, You have a two-hour commute each way to your office.
Then you're getting up at 6.
You're getting home at 11 p.m.
It takes a while to unwind.
And you're getting no sleep.
You're getting no sleep. Do you know what getting no sleep does to your health?
Do you know what it does to your stress?
Do you know what this kind of... Like this...
This stuff will...
Fruit ninja...
Years and sometimes decades of your life because of the stress and the frustration and the fear and the anxiety and also in terms of simply being able to speak up at work.
If you're desperate for the job, if this is the only job you can get, if you have to have the job, otherwise you drown even deeper in a sea of debt.
You can be mistreated at work, you understand, and you can't say anything.
You kind of got to shut up and take it.
You get diminished. You get whittled away.
You cease to exist. You become an empty drone, a puppet of the debt masters dancing a dismal tune of spiraling economic inconsequence.
This can be fatal.
At thebombinthebrain.com, thebombinthebrain.com, I've got a whole series on how If you went through an abusive childhood, it can take up to 20 years off your lifespan.
It's the stress and the difficulty and ischemic heart disease and cancer risks and so on, right?
This kind of stress, this kind of futility, this kind of fear, this kind of you can't ever grow up, you can't move out, you can't...
I mean, you understand this stuff can kill you.
This isn't just a bad education.
This isn't just debt. This can be your life or lack thereof.
This can be an early grave.
Oh, it's crazy. I won't get into the details, right?
And the $750 a month is just to make sure that her balance doesn't increase.
Just paying enough to keep the interest at bay.
And so she got a better job.
Now that's interesting, right? So she finally gets a better job and she advances in the company.
This is probably nothing to do with her education.
She's just a hard worker and concentrated and decent and all that.
So a commute became better.
Only 30 minutes. Student loan payments grew larger too as the variable interest rates increased over time and my steadily rising balance dictated I'd pay more just to cover basic interest costs and not even touch my principal balance.
One paycheck went to rent and another to loans and that was it.
Isn't that crazy? She's scarfing down rum and arguing with her roommate about splitting the $10 netflix bill.
This is horrendous.
In a first world country...
This is the great decay of the great lie.
And you're barely making enough money to survive, living from one paycheck to the next.
You feel every cent.
I don't have to live like this. It's a tough life.
It's a tough life. You live your life encased and encaged in dismal meth.
It's horrible. So yeah, she's not getting anywhere with these kinds of loans.
And how Much fun, is she going to be the date?
I mean, even if you were willing to take on this $95,000 or whatever it ends up being, I mean, what's this woman, how's she going to go out and have fun?
What's she going to be able to do?
She can't go out for dinner unless somebody else pays.
She can't go to a movie, so is she going to be fun to chat with?
Hey, how's your life going? The elephant foot of debt is squishing my tits.
So, if she misses a payment, she gets charged more interest, credit affected, and her father's credit, right?
This is an intergenerational bond, bondage, you understand, right?
If she dies before her debt is paid off, the loans don't die, the debt goes on, right?
Here we go. My dad will be on the hook, or depending on the terms of the loan, even the poor soul who marries me.
You understand? This is killing family.
This is killing children.
This is killing opportunity. This is like a giant, irradiating, egg-destroying Bomb that goes off over the city called intelligent people.
This is the birthrate castration of the thinking classes.
Horrendous. So she says here, in the seven years since I flipped my tassel, I've dutifully paid a total of $57,170 towards the $95,000 debt I accumulated across nine loans from my undergraduate education.
So her principal sum has been reduced to just $69,000.
Only $26,000 of the $57,000 she's paid has touched the principal balance.
She's paid over $30,000 just to be pretty much in the same financial situation she was when she graduated.
Horrendous.
And you'll hear these lines, I don't know.
Oh, the interest on student loans is tax deductible.
She says here, the interest on student loans is tax deductible, but I'm disqualified because of how much money I make.
This is horrifying.
And she says, by the time I finally finish paying off my loans, I will have paid nearly $170,000 to my original $95,000 loan.
$170,000 is a horrendous amount of money no matter what, but when you're young and just starting out, It's crippling.
It's crippling. It's how much it costs to raise a child.
A child. And...
Of course, she has 10 years left on the loan.
No telling how many more times the variable rate will increase in the meantime, right?
Governments love crushing down interest because then they have to pay less on the money that they borrowed.
But if there's too little interest, people don't save and they have trouble...
I'm selling their debt, so...
Horrendous. It's obvious that college is an invaluable experience still, should it really cost me in the next 20 to 30 years of my life.
But it's more than that. It's again, you're dating, you're getting married, you're having children, you're...
I mean, it's such a beautiful experience to be married, and it's such a beautiful experience to be a parent.
I'm just telling you, man, anything that stands in the way of people being able to achieve that if they want it is, to me, a giant, hellish, gate-stone portal of sheer evil, of pure evil, of pure evil, for universities to dangle these kinds of promises in front of young people,
for the whole miseducation industrial complex to lie in To children about the value of their degree to get them to sign loans that are going to make them debt slaves for decades to exploit them in this manner is, you know, that the leftists used to get mad.
They used to hear this from the socialists.
Oh, you know, there was a mining town and you had to buy your mining equipment from the company store and they overcharged to get rail against this kind of stuff.
But that's nothing compared to all of this.
You can just quit. Go somewhere else.
You can't leave this.
You can't get away from it.
You understand? This is a debt, livestock harvesting of an unbelievably brutal dimension.
Unbelievably brutal dimension.
See, in January 2017, two states brought lawsuits against Salimé, detailing how the company took advantage of students by selling them subprime private loans with expected default rates at 92% at a massive profit to only the company itself.
So here's the question, right?
So if you borrow money from a bank, there's an old saying that says, if you owe the bank $100,000, you're in trouble.
If you owe the bank $10 million, the bank's in trouble.
So this just takes a moment, right?
This takes a moment to think about. If you're running a bank, and let's say that you make 3% profit on a loan.
So every loan that has 100% default means that you have to have 33 loans that go perfectly.
It's very hard to make money In a bank, unless you rigorously vet people who borrow from you, because if people fail to pay back, the ripple effect of that is enormous.
So here's the question.
How is it possible for a bank to lend to people with an expected default rate of 92%?
Come on. I mean, this isn't even brain surgery.
Just think if you have ten friends who each want to borrow $1,000 from you and you know for sure that nine of them are never going to pay you back, are you going to lend out your $10,000?
Of course not. So the question is, how does this work?
How can it possibly work?
How can it possibly work?
Well, I don't know the exact answer because it varies in various locales.
But a lot of times, the banks or the lending institutions are kind of forced to make these payments because the leftists in charge of government want more indoctrination and so on.
And they also want to pretend, they want to turn people against the remnants of the free market.
So they put them in these horrible situations of lies, exploitation.
I mean, to me, a university should guarantee you a job that more than pays for your student loans or you get your money back.
I mean, this is of course, right?
I mean, if you buy a house and you don't get the house that you're expecting, the house that's in the brochure, you don't have to pay.
You get your money back and more and damages too.
You rent maybe even for the time that you were waiting.
So they promise you this economic advantage.
It should be there or you get your money back.
It's not that complicated. The whole idea of universities are ridiculous these days.
Everything's on the internet anyway.
Just study stuff on the internet and go take some standardized test and pay a hundred bucks to have somebody market for you.
That's all you need. You don't need to go to college.
It's ridiculous. It's like it's just never stepped out of the Middle Ages.
Well, of course, that's the whole point, right?
Well, except it has insofar as now.
So the government will guarantee or backstop a lot of these loans.
The governments will force lending institutions to lend to students and so on.
And of course, this is the great lesson of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, is that if the banks end up running out of money, they can just run to the government, who will then pillage the taxpayer and pay off the banksters, right?
So this is how They're either forced to do it and or they'll just get their money back from the government in one way or another.
Kids are taking out loans, she says, at 17 or 18, that they won't be able to pay back until they're 40 or 50.
They make more money when students can't pay.
Just horrendous. Yep, here we go.
If we can't afford bed frames, we can't afford weddings, children or mortgage payments, we can't afford much of anything at all.
And what happens to the economy when people are this much in debt?
What happens to people's capacity to take care of their aging parents if they're this much in debt?
What happens to people's lives as a whole?
Money is so central to life itself that when you start messing with things like money supply, with things like interest rates and so on, you literally are destroying lives through foundational chaos.
Crazy. Here we go.
All they wanted was for me to have more.
It's the parents, right? I assume.
And now I'll have almost $200,000 less.
And the whole price, you know, having kids when you're young.
I'm an older dad, but having kids when you're young is a pretty good idea because you've got a lot of energy, you've got a lot of vitality, you've got a lot of strength, you've got a lot of flexibility.
You can just bounce back from being up half the night with a colicky baby or whatever.
But when you get older, it's tough.
It's tough. And she doesn't say what she took and she doesn't say whether her job had anything to do with her education.
She's some temp job, right?
I assume some $20,000 a year office job can't have anything to do with her education.
So there was no point. She probably could have done this job when she was 16.
You know, and I don't know about you, but for me, my economic value came out of things in general that I studied outside of school.
Like I was a software entrepreneur because I taught myself how to code when I was 11 or 12 years old.
Bought a computer with a small inheritance from my grandmother and learned how to code there.
And then that's ended up being...
I don't study that in school. Oh, it's crazy.
It's just horrifying.
She says, sometimes I struggle to imagine a future in which life doesn't swing from one paycheck to the next.
Like a crushing pendulum of debt, but I know it exists.
And she says, 40 will actually be the new 20.
What a comforting and not at all terrifying thought.
Well, that is the reality, except that it's not going to be the new 20, dear, because at 40, I mean, your eggs are mostly gone and your chances of having healthy children, certainly more than one, are very, very low.
And this kind of exploitation is horrifying beyond words.
It's horrifying beyond measure.
And if you care about the young, if you care about the poor, if you care about their hopes and their dreams and their loves and their joys and their possibilities and their freedom, this is a form of slavery.
I'm not kidding you.
It used to be called indentured servitude, where you would cross over to the New World And the price of your voyage would be baked into the salary that you would accept in a job that you were forced to take or you chose to take as a result of...
Let me start that again. You would cross over from London to New York, which would cost a certain amount of money, and then you'd work at a job for a certain amount of time to pay that off.
Yeah, that's a better way to put it. But at least you knew that going ahead of time, and at least you had reports of whether the job was valuable or not, and you were escaping very little opportunity and freedom in your home country.
But this is worse than that.
This is worse than that.
It can go on for decades.
You're lied to about how much value is being generated by your education.
