nyker wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 11:44 am
dan0rama wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 10:33 am
Interesting how it is still socially acceptable to publicly humiliate people who get into trouble in the backcountry. I never see headlines like "little shits from Seattle who thought majoring in theater for $100k was a good idea become baristas at Starbucks" or...
I imagine you would start seeing those headlines more if people realized a lot of the recent announcements of $billions in student loan forgiveness likely went to those people with those sort of majors...amounts that you and I pay for in higher taxes.
I apologize for continuing down this tangent from the point of the original post. The billions in student loan forgiveness aren't going to people like you speak of above. Most of the money is split into these large categories:
- 7.3 billion for public servants (teachers, firefighters, nurses, military, etc.)
- 5.8 billion for borrowers with disabilities
- 7.55 billion for borrowers who were defrauded by for profit colleges
(
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/l ... s-it-work/)
That is 20.65 billion. The article does not explain if the other 4.35 billion is for administration of the program or what. Also, 25 billion is approximately 1.5 percent of the $1.6 trillion in student debt so this money is only going to select individuals.
To put this amount in perspective, our defense department is the only government entity that has not passed an accounting audit and our defense spending dwarfs these amounts. (See this link:
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/99796164 ... hange-that). Our 2022 defense budget is 778 billion for defense and that does not include 234 billion for veteran's benefits (2021 figure), so we are looking at over 1 trillion dollars a year here. Per the article, all federal agencies have been under the same requirement to undergo an independent financial audit since the early 1990s but the Pentagon didn't even attempt one until 2017. One might say the massive size of this department makes an audit difficult, but the Department of Health and Human Services, which is also very large, has now undergone a clean audit for 22 years in a row.
Obviously, defense is a necessary expense but the amount of waste here is extreme and there is little doubt, based on the quoted article and others, that it far exceeds 25 billion.
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