When I'm 64...
There is an excellent article in The Nation caling attention to the consequences that many of us are facing as a result of massive student loan debts:
...[The Chicago Tribune] found Carrie Gevirtz, a 28-year-old social worker with a degree from the University of Chicago, a $55,000 school debt and an annual salary of $33,000. She is quoted as saying, "I can't afford my lifestyle. I'm not in a position to buy a place. I can't buy a condo and don't know when I would, unless my income changed dramatically.... I was not prepared for this.... It really freaked me out." To make ends meet after deducting her $250 monthly payment on her student loan, Gevirtz has a second job at a health club and does baby-sitting.
Starting July 1 the interest on student loans taken out by students will rise to just less than 7 percent. Loans taken out by parents for students will shoot up to 8.5 percent. The theory the Republican Congress works on is that increases in fees and interest payments from the white-collar masses are not the same as tax increases, some of which might have to be paid by our protected class of billionaire kleptocrats from whom, we are told, all blessings, especially our jobs, flow.
...
How can a young couple, each with $40,000 or $50,000 of debt, think of having three or four kids? They will have to wait until they are in their late 30s to have a family and by then, when they think of college costs, they will feel compelled to limit themselves to one child.
There's a policy for you! While our legislators are up nights working on new tax gimmicks to further "capital flows," as they like to call their money-grabbing, they are also burning the midnight oil to throw up financial barriers that will keep the middle class from having children. Forget the cant about family values. Make that childless couple values. [I never wanted kids to begin with, but this is a really good point.]
There is social control in loading young people up with financial obligations. Burdened with debt and desperate to have and keep a job, there is no way they can take a wild year off and certainly no time for protesting, organizing or causing the kind of social and political trouble young people cause from time to time. Would there have been a civil rights movement? Would there have been an antiwar movement if those collegians had been saddled with the debts our present-day young people carry?
My loans will be paid off by the time I'm 52 - IF I can keep a job that pays me $24,000 a year or more. If not, I'll have to defer again and then maybe by the time I'm in my sixties...
...[The Chicago Tribune] found Carrie Gevirtz, a 28-year-old social worker with a degree from the University of Chicago, a $55,000 school debt and an annual salary of $33,000. She is quoted as saying, "I can't afford my lifestyle. I'm not in a position to buy a place. I can't buy a condo and don't know when I would, unless my income changed dramatically.... I was not prepared for this.... It really freaked me out." To make ends meet after deducting her $250 monthly payment on her student loan, Gevirtz has a second job at a health club and does baby-sitting.
Starting July 1 the interest on student loans taken out by students will rise to just less than 7 percent. Loans taken out by parents for students will shoot up to 8.5 percent. The theory the Republican Congress works on is that increases in fees and interest payments from the white-collar masses are not the same as tax increases, some of which might have to be paid by our protected class of billionaire kleptocrats from whom, we are told, all blessings, especially our jobs, flow.
...
How can a young couple, each with $40,000 or $50,000 of debt, think of having three or four kids? They will have to wait until they are in their late 30s to have a family and by then, when they think of college costs, they will feel compelled to limit themselves to one child.
There's a policy for you! While our legislators are up nights working on new tax gimmicks to further "capital flows," as they like to call their money-grabbing, they are also burning the midnight oil to throw up financial barriers that will keep the middle class from having children. Forget the cant about family values. Make that childless couple values. [I never wanted kids to begin with, but this is a really good point.]
There is social control in loading young people up with financial obligations. Burdened with debt and desperate to have and keep a job, there is no way they can take a wild year off and certainly no time for protesting, organizing or causing the kind of social and political trouble young people cause from time to time. Would there have been a civil rights movement? Would there have been an antiwar movement if those collegians had been saddled with the debts our present-day young people carry?
My loans will be paid off by the time I'm 52 - IF I can keep a job that pays me $24,000 a year or more. If not, I'll have to defer again and then maybe by the time I'm in my sixties...