Forgiving student debt.

There has been lots of chatter of late about forgiving student debt (like this) and so I need to weigh in at least once on this topic so that emerging conservatives understand the old school conservative viewpoint on this matter.  It's really not all that difficult to understand.  If you incur a debt you need to own it until it's paid off.  Period. Sure, you can default but then you are a deadbeat and it will forever show that on your financial history.  And lest you think you might not care, it is perfectly legal for corporations to base hiring decisions on your credit history.  As the debt Ponzi collapse wears on we can only expect this to become a bigger and bigger part of the hiring decision because conservatives do not like deadbeats.

Now for those who might feel sorry for the poor students, please consider:

• These students were adults when they entered into the debt contracts.  Let's not forget that.  These people vote and help shape our nations future.  They are not kids.

• Most of the students got useless degrees which will not help them add appreciably to the national economic output.  I mean, if we had turned out a huge number of engineers and doctors and scientists it would be one thing.  But we didn't.  We turned out a bunch of liberal arts majors who have zero sale-able skills.

• Student loans are often taken out for non school purposes like general living expenses such as rent and food money.  In fact many go to school just so they qualify for the loans and can thus afford to move away from their parents and have their unearned freedom.  More than a little partying occurs which is paid for by, you guessed it, "student" loans.

•  If these loans are forgiven then that doesn't mean the debt goes away. It simply shifts the debt from a liberal deadbeat onto a producing worker.  This is not opinion, it is economics 101.  If there is consumption, someone had to pay for it (or will have to do so in the future).  Debt defaults just move who the payer ends up being.

I am for paygo.  I didn't go to college but I'm a well paid engineer anyhow.  College is not a requirement for gaining skills and this is tenfold true now that the Internet is so available and so fast.  College is overpriced and overused.  Some small percentage of our population actually needs to go to college (150+ IQ students who might invent the next game changing tech), the rest need to just get their asses to work and learn on the job.  Instead of paying for an education they should get paid to learn.  Expect the old apprentice type programs to be coming back into style soon.