Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
At Slate, Jordan Weissmann reports that the Social Security benefits of some senior citizens are being garnished by the federal government to collect old student loans. In some cases, that pulls the oldsters income dangerously low:
…today, the Government Accountability Office unveiled a rather depressing report about how the government may be driving some of those retirees into poverty in its attempts to collect on their debt. [Hi-lighting added.]
It’s not clear from Weissmann’s story whether all the loans were incurred by the seniors for their own educations, or whether some of the seniors co-signed loans for children or grandchildren who defaulted. But whatever the origin, garnishing Social Security for old students loans is a bad policy, and a cruel one.
Moreover, by driving the seniors into poverty and thus forcing them to apply for benefits such as food stamps, garnishing Social Security to collect these loans may well produce a net loss for the government.
One alternative: wait until the seniors die, then seize their estates to pay off the loans. A better alternative: forgive the loans. That requires an act of Congress, which is possible, and political courage, which also is possible, but not very probable.
We need a better system for dealing with college costs for students. Why even have student loans? We don’t require tuition for public education through high school. There might be a few exceptions, but in general public schools are considered a community good, a universal good, and are paid for by taxes. Everyone contributes.
Why not a similar system for financing college educations? Students who enroll in public colleges and universities should have their books and tuition and fees paid by the state. In exchange, they agree to pay higher income taxes for the rest of their lives. That fair bargain would remove the individual debt burden, pay for future education, and would not burden people who neither attended nor graduated from college.