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[Died By Bear]

From the NYT opinion page today:


ONE late summer afternoon when I was 17, I went with my mother to the local bank, a long-defunct institution whose name I cannot remember, to apply for my first student loan. My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life.

By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.

Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.

I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans.

As difficult as it has been, I’ve never looked back. The millions of young people today, who collectively owe over $1 trillion in loans, may want to consider my example.

It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college. Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins.

Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.

Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with. Maybe I should have stayed at a store called The Wild Pair, where I once had a nice stable job selling shoes after dropping out of the state college because I thought I deserved better, and naïvely tried to turn myself into a professional reader and writer on my own, without a college degree. I’d probably be district manager by now.

Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life — all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations.

Some people will maintain that a bankrupt father, an impecunious background and impractical dreams are just the luck of the draw. Someone with character would have paid off those loans and let the chips fall where they may. But I have found, after some decades on this earth, that the road to character is often paved with family money and family connections, not to mention 14 percent effective tax rates on seven-figure incomes.



Moneyed stumbles never seem to have much consequence. Tax fraud, insider trading, almost criminal nepotism — these won’t knock you off the straight and narrow. But if you’re poor and miss a child-support payment, or if you’re middle class and default on your student loans, then God help you.

Forty years after I took out my first student loan, and 30 years after getting my last, the Department of Education is still pursuing the unpaid balance. My mother, who co-signed some of the loans, is dead. The banks that made them have all gone under. I doubt that anyone can even find the promissory notes. The accrued interest, combined with the collection agencies’ opulent fees, is now several times the principal.
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Recent Comments
cmschles
10 hours ago

I don't quite have the courage to default on my student loans, fearful of how it might affect my future. But I agree with your sentiment —...
Someone
10 hours ago

It won't go down alongside "Letters from the Birmingham Jail" or "Civil Disobedience."A summary of the rationalizations:"My modest origins...
wko
10 hours ago

Irresponsible, rationalizing, disgusting, selfish, self-centered, self-serving behavior. I have absolutely no sympathy/empathy for this...


Even the Internal Revenue Service understands the irrationality of pursuing someone with an unmanageable economic burden. It has a program called Offer in Compromise that allows struggling people who have fallen behind in their taxes to settle their tax debt.

The Department of Education makes it hard for you, and ugly. But it is possible to survive the life of default. You might want to follow these steps: Get as many credit cards as you can before your credit is ruined. Find a stable housing situation. Pay your rent on time so that you have a good record in that area when you do have to move. Live with or marry someone with good credit (preferably someone who shares your desperate nihilism).

When the fateful day comes, and your credit looks like a war zone, don’t be afraid. The reported consequences of having no credit are scare talk, to some extent. The reliably predatory nature of American life guarantees that there will always be somebody to help you, from credit card companies charging stratospheric interest rates to subprime loans for houses and cars. Our economic system ensures that so long as you are willing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, you will keep being enthusiastically invited to play the economic game.

I am sharply aware of the strongest objection to my lapse into default. If everyone acted as I did, chaos would result. The entire structure of American higher education would change.

The collection agencies retained by the Department of Education would be exposed as the greedy vultures that they are. The government would get out of the loan-making and the loan-enforcement business. Congress might even explore a special, universal education tax that would make higher education affordable.

There would be a national shaming of colleges and universities for charging soaring tuition rates that are reaching lunatic levels. The rapacity of American colleges and universities is turning social mobility, the keystone of American freedom, into a commodified farce.

If people groaning under the weight of student loans simply said, “Enough,” then all the pieties about debt that have become absorbed into all the pieties about higher education might be brought into alignment with reality. Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education. There are a lot of people who could learn to live with that, too.

[Fox]

On the one hand, America's student loan system is fairly obviously sub-optimal, even dysfunctional, so discussion regarding reform is worthwhile. On the other hand, the way in which this person is trying to frame a purely self-interested financial decision (to borrow substantial sums of money to purchase years of higher education and then refuse to pay it back in full) as some sort of moral crusade is banal. He or she is choosing personal satisfaction over responsibility and the honoring of promises. Perhaps understandable, but not laudable, and certainly not a solid foundation from which to build up to a case for real reform.

[Died By Bear]

[Fox]

[edwardcatflap]

[tophatcat]

He probably doesn't want to pay back his car loan because he wants to use his money to buy the newest smartphone for texting messaging his friends.

[Stan Rogers]

His life is his. It belongs to him, not a bank, government or anyone else. Besides he paid taxes and the government got it's money back anyway.

[Died By Bear]

[slothrop]

edit

[Plain Meaning]

[edwardcatflap]

[hellofaniceguy]

We all know the rules of the game; you borrow...you pay back with interest.
No one forces anyone to borrow..but most feel they will/can scam the system and get out of repayment or whine and complain about having to repay.
Don't borrow!

And yet...we all have money for smartphones, other bills, monthly play money, travels, other personal indulgences...

[Died By Bear]

You buy a car and don't pay, they come and take it back. What can they take back from student loans? The only thing they do is garnish your tax return. Most companies won't adhere to federal guidelines for garnishing wages. It's a win-win for most FSA. (Free Shit Army)

[SeoulNate]

These stories piss me off.

If you are poor, don't go to an expensive university, or study harder to get a scholarship, and work while you are in school.

My family was poor as hell, I paid for uni myself at a good in-state school by working full time and taking class full time. Was it fun party time? No, but it was possible and I finished with just 4,000$ in student loans from the last semester when I had to student teach and could only work on the weekends.

Did the same with my MA. Zero student loans for a 45,000$ MA.

TLDR: Stop being a lazy bum

[edwardcatflap]