Man, talk about sticking her foot in her mouth! The comments were relentless (sampling below), and I’d say she had it coming. Read story and more comments here.
- “Happy Mother’s Day! May we all work our moms into the grave!”
- “You let your mom work until she was 73 to pay your debts?”
- “Do you hate your own mother so much?”
To which I’d add the following: If her mom had to work as a waitress to put her through college, she might’ve picked a cheaper school than Dartmouth.
And if her mother was still working at age 73 to pay off her daughter’s student loans, then as Wikipedia points out here, she was doing so while Ingraham was working at the New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, who you can safely assume pays its lawyers more than minimum wage (details here).
So either Ingraham is lying in order to take a cheap shot at indebted students less privileged than her (likely), or she took incredibly selfish advantage of her poor mother.
The argument for at least partial student loan forgiveness is this.
First, when state tax revenues plummeted during the Great Recession, they slashed state support for public colleges, which responded by drastically raising tuition. In other words, the burden of educating our youth was traditionally shared among them, their families, and taxpayers; but in the first decade of the 2000s, the state’s share was unceremoniously dumped on students.
Second, spending tax dollars on higher education is a societal investment. Our economic prosperity, global competitiveness, and national defense all depend on having an educated workforce. That makes it appropriate to share the cost of higher education across society.
Third, our best and brightest students are a resource we can’t afford to waste. But access to higher education is unequal, and if we don’t support capable students of lesser means, we won’t have all the skilled professionals our society needs, and the general competence level of workers in our economy will suffer.
Finally, there’s an issue of fairness. Our young people are told they can’t get a good job without a degree. Employers often require a degree, even for jobs that really don’t require one. So, society is telling young people that to participate in our economy, earn a wage they can raise a family on, and be middle class, they must have a degree. Yet they have no control over skyrocketing college costs. To a substantial extent, they’re being forced to take on student debt.
Ingraham isn’t stupid. She graduated from an Ivy League college, was a top student at the University of Virginia Law School, passed a bar exam, and was hired by a prestigious New York law firm. Persuading others is what lawyers do for a living; if anyone can formulate a reasoned argument against student loan forgiveness, she can.
If this is the best she can come up with, that suggests to me there isn’t one.