The federal government has 3.8 trillion dollars worth of cash flow. The federal government does not have 3.8 trillion dollars in cash.

You can’t claim to be a champion of the little guy and claim to give a damn about inequality when one of your big campaign ideas is a giveaway for a group that, demographically speaking, is among the highest income/highest wealth groups in the US.

Comparing the mortgage mess to the student loan crisis inconvenience is intellectually dishonest. They’re clearly on two fundamentally dissimilar scales.

“19% of respondents think they need less than $100,000 to retire. Another 25% think they’ll make due on under $500,000. Are they serious?”

1) Six percent is the correct number; not eight. Federal loans (origin of roughly 95% of outstanding student loans) do not have an age requirement. If children are included it is because they have student debt.

As of 2018 14% of the American population had student debt. 56% of Americans with education debt had balances less than 20k. 22% of Americans with education debt had balances greater than 40k. A whopping 6% of Americans with education debt had balances over 100k.

Retirement savings is a real issue. Most Americans are not saving enough. Student loan balances are not. The highest income households in the US have hundreds of billions of dollars of education debt? No one should care.

The CBO has a nifty little chart that shows how effective tax rates have changed over the past five or six decades. Everyone that references those marginal tax rates needs to check it out... and then stop referencing those marginal tax rates in this context.

I agree that college was never intended to be vocational training. It was also not intended to be a mainstream activity either. College was and honestly still is a luxury good. There’s nothing wrong with that either. It was for the children of upper class people to spend time “learning about the world” so they could…

We wouldn’t have a “student debt crisis” if people believed post-secondary education is about improving your earning potential. The fact that that’s even a thing is proof that many people believe the exact opposite of what you’ve described.

I use an online service to file my taxes but I always do them by hand myself prior to doing so. I’ve yet to have a delta between my number and theirs of more than a dollar.

Um it’s primarily people. Specifically the innumerate lemming variety of people. The number of entities that are properly handling real estate as a money making tool (these are the corporations and true investors) are dwarfed by the number of entities pissing away what little money they have on an “investment” that…

Investments are purchases from which you reasonably expect to get out more money than you put in. Why is this concept so freaking hard for people?

Budgeting is how you end up with that sort of money... Is that really not blatantly obvious?

“There are plenty of no-talent hacks who have become wildly successful DESPITE their complete inability to perform.”

“Talent and hard work neither enable nor assure.”

Yeah the real lie is probably the idea that hard work should lead to success. Talent combined with hard work does. 5'4 Bob Marshall isn’t going to hard work his way into dunking on LeBron James.

On the list of reasons why the American meritocracy is a myth a handful of rich families bribing their way into elite schools is like reason 19,962. It’s so far down the list that this headline matched with this event can only be interpreted as white nonsense.

“I’m thinking of all of the really hard working students, students who put in the time, got great grades, and whose parents don’t have hundreds of thousands to bribe their way in.”

The system actually allows for plenty of downward mobility. The child of parents at the “top” has a much better chance of ending up anywhere but the top than retaining that position. Class isn’t that sticky.