Around here we’ve devoted a lot of page inches to sounding the alarm on the ticking economic time bomb that is the student debt crisis.
We’ve also spent years discussing reasonable, just, and workable solutions.
But no matter how often we demonstrate that lending at interest for consumption is immoral, said grave evil compounded by targeting people who’ve been psyoped into thinking it’s the only option, and who are given next to no way out, Mammon mobsters always come out out of the woodwork to defend usury. Because screw kids who got duped.
Identifying Mammon mobsters with Baby Boomers is kind of a stereotype. But then again, most stereotypes have a basis in reality. And experience has shown that the older and more Fox News consuming someone is, the likelier he is to freak out at the prospect of relieving victims of the sin of usury.
But what a lot of Mammon mobsters have missed is that a) economists have sounded dire warnings for years that student debt isn’t going away and b) time happens.
These two phenomena have now intersected at the point where the Mammon mob comes for retirees.
Albert Martinez, a former lineman living in Arizona, decided to take out a parent student loan in 2010. He was working at the time and wanted to help his two sons pay for college.
More than one decade later, the loans are a $96,000 weight on his and his wife Jil’s backs, especially as they live on fixed retirement incomes.
Albert initially retired in 2018 at the age of 58 after around 40 years of serving the AT&T company.
“It was a blessing since the work was taking a significant toll on him physically, but he never wanted to retire that early,” Jil told Newsweek. “Here we are in 2024, both retired on fixed incomes with an outstanding student loan of $96,000 at 8 percent interest.”
How can this be?
We’d been given to understand that student debtors are entitled brats so foolish as to study underwater basket weaving, while at the same time being rational adults 100 percent responsible for their decisions.
Yet here we have a pair of hard-working Jonesers who got caught in a debt trap without knowing what they were getting into.
“He didn’t expect the loan would’ve ballooned and will continue to balloon,” Jil said. “We don’t know what happened. We feel our country is just taking advantage of us.”
The Martinezes were able to get payments lowered from $1,000 a month to $638, but even that reduced payment is a hardship as the couple works to make their dollar stretch in the current economy.
Taking out a loan that can’t be recovered by repossessing the property bought with it because there is no such tangible property, while payments increase with your income as interest keeps piling up, ensuring you’ll never make a dent without degrading your qualify of life …
“Taking advantage” is a rather mild description of such a Kafka grift.
Today, both Jil and Albert have taken on part-time jobs just to stay on top of the payments, but they don’t have much hope it will ever be enough to get the near $100,000 loan down to zero.
“He will never be able to pay off this loan,” Jil said. “It just is not possible.”
No secular society concerned with its people’s well-being would let them come to this, much less a Christian civilization.
That kind of debt trap is why bankruptcy exists. Yet it’s almost impossible to get student loans discharged in bankruptcy. A friend of mine managed to get a chunk of his student debt cancelled, but he had to sue his parents, twice – once in state court and again in federal – and shell out huge legal fees.
That was a decade ago, and he’s still not debt-free, despite making six figures.
Anyone who thinks that’s not insane is either insane himself or so susceptible to media conditioning he shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Still, the Martinezes’ situation is not unique among retirees, who are increasingly finding their golden years might include monthly loan payments for their or their children’s student debt.
“Retirees with student debt are more common than most would believe and, unfortunately, it’s going to get even more frequent,” Alex Beene, a financial literary instructor for the state of Tennessee, told Newsweek.
The warnings were given but went unheeded.
Baby Boomers have the second-highest average student debt load of any generation.
Over the last 30 years, both young undergraduates and returning professionals saw the price of their degrees skyrocket, Beene added.
“The result is we are going to have record numbers of Americans entering retirement with student loan debt still owed,” Beene said.
Still, many can’t or don’t want to forego retirement even while student loan debt hangs over their shoulders. Part-time work is one option, but even that often can’t keep up with the interest rates.
How do people not get that the student loan racket – and most of higher education – is a huge con game?
Maybe they find it easy to laugh at a tattooed studies major named Keyeleigh working at Starbucks to split rent on a 500 square foot flat with two roommates.
That makes a cruel kind of sense.
But once upon a time in this country, we were sympathetic to accounts of retired linemen having to pawn their dogs’ party hats to pay the light bill.
(Editor’s note: I do not know for sure if the Martinezes had to pawn their dog’s party hat. They probably should, though.)
Regardless, those kinds of hard luck stories always had back stories involving credit card theft, investment fraud, or real estate swindles.
And society responded by having laws against those kinds of con games and using them to prosecute the con artists and get their victims’ money back.
Yet usury victims are the only con game marks not allowed relief under the law.
Why is that?
Mammon mobsters love to parrot the line “These kids (retirees?) are adults who willingly entered into voluntary agreements. They’re responsible for repaying that money.”
OK.
But all fraud victims make willing yet fraudulent agreements.
They do it because they’re deceived into expecting returns on their investments that never materialize, and the fraudsters know are unlikely to materialize.
Deception, not coercion; that’s what makes it fraud.
Arguing “These kids (Boomers?) knew what they were getting into!” assumes they were aware of being victims of usury that would leave them in five to six-figure debt, financially crippling them for life. Anyone who would knowingly and willingly enter that kind of agreement is too immature, stupid, or self-destructive to make sound decisions, which undercuts the whole argument.
Those are the two choices. Either student debtors were deceived, therefore defrauded, so they have no obligation to repay; or they’re not competent to make their own decisions, so they have no obligation to repay.
Saying “They voluntarily took on crippling debt because they were misled or too stupid to realize it, so they don’t deserve help,” is just dumb.
Do Mammon mobsters think they’re championing some sacred principle by holding chumps and simpletons to unrepayable, civilization-destroying debt on behalf of the state?
Who knows what they’re thinking. On the evidence, I doubt they even are.
Enough already.
The long con has got to end.
And it will end, the easy way or the hard way – the choice is ours.
We should pray somebody in charge opts for the easy way.
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