The student loan problem in the USA is huge and going to put the youth in debt slavery for life, so we need to forgive allsome that debt.
Note the correction to my prior irresponsible statement. No one should be completely absolved of their responsibility else no one learns to be responsible. There need to be consequences, just not debt slavery for life. Typically 7 years (Jubilee) is the max allowed in the Bible for slavery, then you must have allowed and encouraged your slave to work him/herself out of the hole and be prepared to be a responsible member of society. Slavery should be an honorable duty to help than to exploit.
Many people went back to school to avoid the prospect of being unemployed and are living off the massive student loans. My ex informed me she took out a $25,000 loan to go back to medtech school, and she told me the advisers told her that if ever she couldn't pay it, she wouldn't have to worry about it.
Perhaps those advisers weren't paying attention when the USA changed the law several years ago making student loans ineligible for bankruptcy relief. I suppose there is means testing in bankruptcy court w.r.t. to extended payment programs for student loans, yet that means the debtor is a slave any way, because the debtor must be destitute and a judge is dictating the debtor's financial life.
Nice to see that you corrected it. I admit I should have a heavy bias toward leaving it uncorrected, but toward the end of it all . . a valuable service was provided and that needs to paid for somehow.
Total forgiveness would only serve to dump those lost monies back into the hands of every tax payer (with the bulk of US education loans now being handled by the government, and their persistence after bankruptcy), which I could only see would serve to kill off education if the costs (both previous and future) remain unchecked. Forgiveness alone wouldn't be enough to prevent the situation from happening again.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/.
More towards this . . who is going to ask or push for something like this? Going into education (USA is used for the examples), most of these people are complete idiots. Generally when they graduate, they are relatively intelligent (or at least now have the ability to become so) and have every hope in the world that everything will work out because they have a degree now.
From that perspective, it would show a moral defeat to themselves if they were to change course and demand forgiveness on loans. One of the driving factors in their previous 4-5 years is undoubtedly that they are going to be able to pay back their expensive loans by getting an awesome job.
From the alternative perspective,
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/?level=nation&mode=graph&state=0&submeasure=27 indicates that 45% don't graduate bachelors degrees within 6 years. This means the 45% of the 14.5 million enrolled (last year's info) aren't graduating or are taking on excessive debt.
These same 7 million people will turn to more debt, like credit debt, to support themselves for the years until they either graduate or leave education. Who will tell this desperate group of people that their loans should be forgiven? How could you convince them, given the mindset achieved after seeing 55% of their peers graduating? From this perspective, they would seem like a sore loser to even ask for even a % of their loans forgiven.
What I'm saying is that there seems to be significant barriers, more than what I provided for sure, for the people affected by this form of debt from actually moving toward trying to ask for less of it. How do you convince a slave that their shackles are too heavy, or their tethers too short, without getting them in the mindset that they shouldn't be wearing them at all?