I’m pretty sure cutting back on unnecessary expenses, spending less than you make, doing the math, and deciding what your real priorities are doesn’t target “people who are decently off”. Most financial advice seems to come down to those basic concepts and they’re nearly universal.

I’m talking about financial security. The ability to sleep at night with the knowledge that when something goes wrong you aren’t headed for the street. If this hypothetical person is 2-300 dollars/month away from being able to handle the monthly payment they’re considerably more than 2-300 dollars/month away from…

You’re talking about professions where median compensation is near or above six figures. That is literally funneling money from the bottom 90% up to the top 10%. It’s probably even worse when you look at households because, as we know, educated people tend to cluster around each other which is another driver on wealth…

I’ve thought a decent amount about the idea of the federal government deciding what is/isn’t valuable and allocating subsidies that way. Rationing is another likely consequence of all these “progressive” ideas as well. I don’t think that system would work out very well.

Gillibrand’s “transition” plan is trash.

If you work for a medium to large company... your employer.

If her point was that Americans spend truckloads of money dealing with avoidable or preventable chronic illnesses then she’s absolutely right. A lot of those countries with all that “free” healthcare put a premium on prevention because prevention is a shitload less expensive than managing an illness or attempting to…

It does. How many times in your adult life could you commit to not seeking any substantial credit for 7-8 years? How many 23-38 year olds (You said millennials) can commit to not wanting to attempt to buy a house until they’re 31-46? We’re talking about the same group that feels like mid-size sedan level debt is…

Credential inflation is already a thing. Post-secondary education is already worth less than it was a decade or two or three ago and there’s no reason to believe that trend isn’t going to continue. Consequence free post-secondary education will just continue to devalue the product until it’s basically 13-16th grade.

You forgot inflation.

The median student loan balance in the US is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15k. The median monthly student loan payment in the US is around $200/month.

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…