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102: Fight Back Against Debt w/ Debt Collective
15 Plays3 years ago
A conversation around student loan debt has been happening at the margins of American political life for nearly a generation. By 2012, total student loan debt in the United States surpassed one trillion dollars, with the only relief coming from a pause on interest and federal debt collection that began with the pandemic in March 2020. Today, a majority of Americans, nearly 60% of polled voters, support some kind of forgiveness on the nation’s now 1.7 trillion dollar student loan debt, and borrowers have benefited from the pause on payments, recently extended to May 2022. That’s over two years without a single required payment…and seemingly without a single negative economic consequence. A recent study from the Student Debt Crisis Center also found that nearly 90% of borrowers are not financially secure enough to resume payments.
Is it time to pause these payments indefinitely? Is it past time for mass student loan debt forgiveness? While most of the conversations we have at HRP happen at the intersection of the theory and classroom practice of education, today I am joined by Thomas Gokey, Eleni Shirmer, and Jason Wozniak, as they talk to us about their organization, Debt Collective, make the moral, economic, and pedagogical case for debt cancellation, and let listeners know how to join their grassroots movement.
GUESTS
Thomas Gokey, organizer and co-founder of Debt Collective, visual artist, adjunct professor at Syracuse University, and activist
Eleni Shirmer, researcher at the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and organizer with Debt Collective
Jason Wozniak, assistant professor at Teacher's College, Columbia University, and author of the upcoming book, The Mis-Education of the Indebted Student
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Debt Cancellation Movement
00:00:00
Speaker
We have everything to fight for and everything to win.
00:00:03
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It is realistic that we can win broad-based debt cancellation, but it's going to take a mass movement, it's going to take direct action and civil disobedience and enormous public pressure in order to make it happen.
00:00:17
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So it's go time.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 102 of our podcast at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:24
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My name is Nick Covington and I'm a social studies teacher from Ankeny, Iowa.
00:00:28
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Simeon Frang, Brandon Peters, and Andrea Barrera.
00:00:37
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Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:40
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You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
The U.S. Student Loan Debt Crisis
00:00:51
Speaker
A conversation around student loan debt has been happening at the margins of American political life for nearly a generation.
00:00:59
Speaker
By 2012, total student loan debt in the United States surpassed $1 trillion, with the only relief coming from a pause on interest in federal debt collection that began with the pandemic in March 2020.
00:01:12
Speaker
Today, a majority of Americans, nearly 60% of polled voters, support some kind of forgiveness on the nation's now $1.7 trillion student loan debt.
00:01:23
Speaker
And borrowers have benefited from the pause on payments recently extended to May 2022.
00:01:28
Speaker
That's over two years without a single required payment, and seemingly without a single negative economic consequence.
00:01:36
Speaker
A recent study from the Student Debt Crisis Center also found that nearly 90% of borrowers are not financially secure enough to resume payments.
00:01:44
Speaker
So, is it time to pause these payments indefinitely?
00:01:48
Speaker
Is it past time for mass student loan debt forgiveness?
00:01:52
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While most of the conversations we have at HRP happen at the intersection of theory and classroom practice of education, today I'm joined by Thomas Gokey.
The Role and Mission of Debt Collective
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Hey, I'm Thomas Gokey.
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I'm an organizer with the Debt Collective.
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Eleni Shermer.
00:02:05
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My name is Eleni Shermer, and I'm also an organizer with the Debt Collective.
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And Jason Wozniak.
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I'm Jason Wozniak.
00:02:12
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I organize with the Debt Collective, but I'm also, like, my day job is an assistant professor of educational philosophy and theory at Westchester University.
00:02:20
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As they talk to us about their organization, Debt Collective, make the moral, economic, and pedagogical case for debt cancellation, and let listeners know how to join their grassroots movement.
00:02:31
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You can follow Debt Collective on Twitter at Strike Debt and visit their website at DebtCollective.org.
00:02:45
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So the Debt Collective is a union for debtors.
00:02:49
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It is sort of modeled on a labor union, but instead of organizing workers around an employer, we are organizing workers.
00:02:58
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debtors around their creditor.
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And it allows for a lot of experimentation.
00:03:06
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What has worked really well for us in the past is combining some kind of direct action or collective action with a legal mechanism.
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We do a lot of research on these different debt types, medical debt, carceral debt, student debt,
00:03:22
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And there are a lot of underused tools, a lot of underused legal mechanisms or enforcement mechanisms.
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But a lot of times it means gathering enough people and taking action to sort of force the issue through.
Shifting Perspectives on Debt Forgiveness
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Our philosophy in a nutshell is that the vast majority of debt that people are forced to take on is unjust and should not exist in the first place.
00:03:47
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And that people are forced into debt not because they live beyond their means, but because we have denied them the means to live.
00:03:55
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So we don't just want to get rid of credit card debt.
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We want to raise people's wages so that they aren't forced to put basic necessities on a credit card like diapers or medical bills.
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A lot of credit card debt is medical bills.
00:04:10
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We want to eliminate medical debt, but we also want Medicare for all so that medical debt doesn't exist anymore, et cetera, et cetera.
00:04:19
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Yeah, I guess just to contextualize a little bit within the field of education,
00:04:24
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I think some of the things that Thomas mentioned, a lot of teachers can relate to, right?
00:04:27
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Like a lot of teachers are radically underpaid, overworked, and struggling just to make ends meet, which means taking on a variety of types of debt, not just student loans, but also different types of debt, whether it be putting gas in the car, feeding the kids at night, or even I've talked to a lot of teachers over the years who take on a lot of debt to give their students stuff because their schools are underfunded.
00:04:50
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So you've got a lot of teachers that will buy supplies
00:04:52
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for kids that need it or make up for a book that's missing here and there, pencils, pens, all that stuff, and all that adds up, right?
00:04:59
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If you're on a really low salary, your benefits aren't so great because teachers are constantly under attack.
00:05:05
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There's different ways that you accumulate debt as you're trying to both take care of yourself, your family, and your students and community.
00:05:13
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Student debt is not the only kind of debt that the Debt Collective cares about and thinks is unjust.
00:05:20
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But it's perhaps where we've had the conversation that has gotten the most public and the loudest, especially over the last decade.
00:05:27
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Before the Debt Collective, it was even the Debt Collective.
00:05:29
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If you raise the notion of student debt cancellation to the average person and certainly the average politician, you'd look like you were like trying to get a ticket to Mars, like it was an insane proposition.
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And now the question is not whether or not student debt will be canceled, but when and how much.
00:05:49
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And I think that's just really important that the debt collective has really kind of the one of the roles that it plays in this kind of policy and politics landscape is really pushing the questions to the to their sort of the maximum point.
00:06:06
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And not just sort of rhetorically making those points, but also trying to run up an organizing game to follow up with it.
00:06:12
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And so hopefully in a few months, people will be like, what was student debt again?
00:06:17
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I forgot about that stuff because we'll just blow this issue out of the water.
00:06:20
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Then we get to debt collective gets to get to work on other issues.
00:06:26
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One thing that I think I'm
Debunking Misconceptions of Debt Forgiveness
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hearing here is that it's not just the case that the debt forgiveness is not the end goal in itself.
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That's kind of a starting point for a broader societal transition towards more just means of paying for higher education or freeing people of the burden, say, of that student loan debt that then allows them to contribute back towards their family and towards their communities rather than towards the need for the federal government, say, to charge its citizens' interest.
00:06:56
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on those loans.
00:06:58
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And so I think that's a really interesting point to be made on there as well.
00:07:03
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Maybe we can kind of talk a little bit here about some of the, I don't necessarily want to frame it as arguments against, because I think we're not necessarily at a point where we want to just be arguing with people or offering up refutations of talking points or things, but how can we bring more people into this conversation about student debt?
00:07:20
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Because I think in my
00:07:22
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In my lifetime, this is certainly the most mainstream I think this conversation has gone.
00:07:26
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So I don't know, what are some common pieces of resistance that you hear to people who say that loan forgiveness is either unfair or it's inequitable or some of those things to common people who may carry student debt themselves and can't see the point of student debt forgiveness?
00:07:43
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Or maybe there's somebody who, for whatever reason, either had have
00:07:47
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have paid their debts off prior to that or have had their debts paid off for them.
00:07:50
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So what are some of the common sort of themes that you hear in resistance to that?
00:07:55
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And what are some ways that you all try to bring them in the conversation too?
00:07:59
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Yeah, I don't think there are good arguments against student debt cancellation.
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There's a lot of misconceptions.
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So one thing that we hear a lot is like, oh, if you cancel the student debt, then that means somebody else is going to have to pay for it, that this is going to be picked up by taxpayers or something like that.
00:08:18
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And that's just not true, because most of this debt is owed directly to the federal government.
00:08:23
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They can just wipe it all out.
00:08:25
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And it doesn't need to be repaid.
00:08:27
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Nobody's taxes will go up.
00:08:29
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Nobody needs to pay for it.
00:08:31
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And we do see some bad faith arguments from some motivated bad faith people.
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sort of right-wing economists and policy wonks.
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Some people have tried to suggest that student debt cancellation is regressive.
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That's just factually false.
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The rich people don't have student debt because they're rich.
00:08:54
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They just pay tuition out of pocket and graduate without any debt, pass, go, collect $200, and start their life way ahead of everyone else who doesn't have the same intergenerational wealth.
00:09:08
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And we know it's perfectly calibrated towards the people with the least amount of wealth are forced to take on the most amount of debt.
00:09:16
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So student debt cancellation is progressive.
Education as a Public Good
00:09:20
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I think the argument we hear that has some emotional resonance is that we know there are some people who have really destroyed their lives, made huge sacrifices that nobody should have
00:09:35
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force them to make in order to pay off their own debt.
00:09:39
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And I can sort of understand emotionally that they might say, well, that doesn't feel fair that I had this horrible thing happen to me.
00:09:47
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But of course, the idea there isn't like I suffered, everyone else needs to suffer too.
00:09:53
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I'm somewhat sympathetic to this.
00:09:55
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And then looking at it slightly differently, I'm less sympathetic to it, right?
00:09:59
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Like the reason that we're a lot of people who like paid off their debt
00:10:04
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graduated in the 80s or the 90s when the amount of debt that they had to take on was much lower than current students have to take on.
00:10:15
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So we're just talking apples to oranges here.
00:10:18
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And the reason we're in this situation right now is because those earlier generations did not organize and fight back.
00:10:26
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The Debt Collective has been deeply inspired by the student movement in Montreal and in Quebec, where when in 2012 or so, when Quebec was going to start charging tuition and fees, and like on American scales, this was minuscule.
00:10:46
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We're talking like just a few thousand dollars.
00:10:49
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They shut down the universities.
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They shut down the city.
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They had the largest protests in Quebec's history.
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The protests were so large, they made it illegal to protest.
00:11:00
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And it's complicated, but they kind of sort of won.
00:11:05
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And so if earlier generations had fought back when the student debt were, you know, the average debt were only $5,000 instead of $30,000, then we would have better funded public education and people wouldn't have that at all.
00:11:20
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So although I'm partly sympathetic to that feeling of like, I destroyed my life.
00:11:26
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It's I shouldn't have had to.
00:11:28
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That's not fair.
00:11:29
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I agree.
00:11:30
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You shouldn't have had to do that.
00:11:31
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Let's make sure no one else has to do that either.
00:11:35
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Just to put what Thomas said so eloquently in really simple words, if I have cancer, I don't think it means that I should want everyone else to get cancer and go through it.
00:11:45
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Or if I get knocked across the head and someone takes my wallet, I don't want that to happen to everybody else.
00:11:50
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But I also think there's a really important point that I think is embedded in some of what Thomas said, too, about the ways that we shift how we think of education in this country.
00:12:00
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And what's happened over the last 30, 40 years,
00:12:02
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not to use a technical term, but if you wanted to use it, like in the neoliberal era, you have a shift where people think of education as a private good rather than a public good.
00:12:11
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And so this idea that I think another thing that you hear, especially on the right, is, oh, well, there's a lot of people that never went to university.
00:12:18
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They don't have debts.
00:12:19
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So why should they pay for any cost?
00:12:22
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Which, number one, isn't true, because Tom just pointed out.
00:12:24
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But
00:12:25
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Even if it were, there's this whole idea of like when we have a well-educated society, democracy functions better.
00:12:30
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I mean, that's like a basic liberal argument, right?
00:12:33
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And so like just this idea that we need to have a public investment in both economic terms and other terms in education if we want society to run well, if we want to have a better world.
00:12:47
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it's a really selfish argument, I think, to make like, oh, I didn't go there, so therefore I shouldn't contribute to it, I think.
00:12:53
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But it's the ways that we've been indoctrinated and taught where like, this is a private investment that's gonna help me compete in the world, it's gonna help me get ahead of everyone, rather than like a collective good.
00:13:04
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Education is a collective good that we should all cultivate, contribute to, so on and so forth.
00:13:07
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So I think like, going back to a point you made earlier, Nick, about like how, you know, this is a means to an end.
00:13:13
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I think part of the end is to rethink
00:13:16
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how we consider the collective, how we consider public good, how we think of what's good for other people besides ourselves.
Historical Context of Education Costs and Inequality
00:13:22
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And death is a way to get into that conversation.
00:13:25
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I think one of the arguments that is sort of undergirds both what the points that Thomas and Jason are bringing up
00:13:35
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is the idea that there's some kind of moral rationality behind debt.
00:13:42
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And that's part of the reason, you know, that's why, especially people feel that there's sort of, there's some kind of moral logic that when you have, when you haven't had something and someone lends it to you, you're obliged to take it, to pay it back.
00:13:57
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And I think what the debt collective is trying to push for, and what's really important is like, why,
00:14:03
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And this is a bit to the point that Jason was making, which was like, why was this not free to begin with?
00:14:08
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Why in some ways weren't we paid to attend this?
00:14:11
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This is a duty that we're performing to educate ourselves.
00:14:16
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It makes people really uncomfortable.
00:14:18
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I think more than the economics behind it, there's some kind of sense of some kind of love.
00:14:25
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real sort of moral gravity around the idea that if you have debt, you have to pay it back and that that is the fairness.
00:14:33
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And I think that really needs to be sort of examined and really thought about, really kind of interrogated who owes what to whom,
00:14:43
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Somebody who was influential for me on this topic and probably for many of you and many listeners as well as David Graeber, who speaks with such moral clarity on that issue of debt in all of his work, but particularly in his book, Debt.
00:14:58
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And it had always had a feeling that something sort of unjust was taking place in the system, but he really helps give you the language and the historical context of
00:15:08
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behind that idea that you're unpacking there, just like, why is it not always a moral thing to pay your debts?
00:15:13
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Or why is that the societal expectation?
00:15:15
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And I think my thinking I know has changed in that regards, because for me as a young person,
00:15:22
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And probably for all people as young people, but especially in the 90s and early 2000s, the expectation just was go to college.
00:15:29
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You know, it's relatively cheap.
00:15:30
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We're in this golden age and you're going to be able to pay back those debts.
00:15:35
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Not a problem at all.
00:15:36
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Well, then folks like myself and my wife, you know, we all went to college.
00:15:40
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We got degrees.
00:15:42
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They crashed the whole financial system through no fault of our own and suddenly couldn't get the jobs that were promised to us, a whole generation of folks in that cohort and beyond, right?
00:15:54
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And so then we saw the stagnation of wages.
00:15:58
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And meanwhile, we saw the cost of everything else go up, too.
00:16:00
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So housing has been, you know, largely unaffordable for a generation.
00:16:04
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The cost of health care has increased.
00:16:06
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So we haven't been able to pay down that debt because it feels like the rug was pulled out from under us while we may well be examples of having done everything right.
00:16:16
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Right.
00:16:16
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You know, going to school, getting married, settling down, having kids and every step of the way just comes with higher costs and you can never seem to get out from underneath it.
00:16:27
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I think the reason that that that is such a powerful idea is because it really flips the script away from, yeah, whose debt is it anyway?
00:16:34
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You know, but.
00:16:35
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Part of loaning an 18-year-old that debt in the first place is to say, well, you're taking some risk on that.
00:16:40
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So maybe the incentive should be to keep the economic system in place in the first place so that way they'll have good jobs and they'll have high wages and they'll be able to pay those things off.
00:16:50
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Because I think for a lot of people in my cohort as well, and it could possibly include you three, but I've more than paid off my debt.
00:16:57
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I've paid back that original principle times over, but just due to the fact that interest and economic circumstances have really prevented a dent in that original principle, I've been paying interest and essentially profit to the federal government for several years now.
00:17:15
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So yeah, it is a really interesting conversation, I think, if you begin to rethink the
00:17:20
Speaker
what the function of debt is and how that can actually be democratically, I guess, reconfigured or reimagined instead of just having the imposition of this notion of debt come to us from the people who, you know, ruined the economy in the first place.
00:17:35
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Exactly what you're saying, Nick.
00:17:37
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We know that the notion that some debts are mandatory and have to be paid is this kind of moral force.
00:17:44
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But we also know that there's plenty of debts that get canceled all the time.
00:17:49
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President Trump had how many bankruptcies that just got all of his debts just got written off, written off, you know, the corporate debt that's just ballooned.
00:17:59
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since, especially since COVID, but even prior to COVID is, and that has been kind of just written off time and time again, the 2008 financial crisis was a whole, you know, a debt forgiveness program, but for the, for, for the wealthy and for the banks, not for the working people.
00:18:17
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You know, I think that's an important thing to draw out here is that we do have some kind of moral vocabulary for debt being forgiven.
00:18:25
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It's just whose debt are we willing to forgive and under what circumstances?
00:18:30
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I wanted to add something really quick to this narrative because, Nick, you brought up a really important point, kind of like the education myth, like you got to go to school, you got to get a degree, so on and so forth.
00:18:39
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I think it's really important to note that the people that pushed that myth were boomers.
00:18:43
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that went to school when he was either free or you could work a summer job and pay for it.
00:18:48
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And I just want to make one really quick historical point that I think is really vital this conversation that Thomas reminded me of as well.
00:18:55
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Public universities across the country in many cases were free and or you pay just fees up until like the late 70s.
00:19:02
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So you had the University of California system, which guaranteed a free public higher education.
00:19:06
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You had the CUNY system in New York.
00:19:09
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That
00:19:10
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is taken away.
00:19:11
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And I think this is really important.
00:19:12
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It's not a natural economic development.
00:19:14
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This is a political decision to jack up prices and cut funding for higher education at the state and federal level.
00:19:22
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And then one of the reasons that's done is because in the 1960s, you have a lot of different quote unquote radical movements happening on college campuses, mainly led by people that had historically been marginalized, i.e.
00:19:35
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Black, Hispanic, BIPOC, so on and so forth, women,
00:19:38
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They're on campuses and they're saying society and the university
Debt's Impact on Generational Wealth and Education Priorities
00:19:42
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has got to change.
00:19:42
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They push for those changes.
00:19:44
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And then you get a pushback from the right.
00:19:46
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You know, a trilateral commission report comes out that Ronald Reagan reads religiously and follows with that says there's too much democracy on campuses.
00:19:55
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The students don't respect authority.
00:19:57
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OK, Reagan and his friends say, how do you get them to, quote unquote, respect authority?
00:20:02
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And how do you tamper down these revolts?
00:20:03
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They come up with a good plan, drive tuition and put people in debt.
00:20:07
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because debt then becomes a disciplining apparatus.
00:20:10
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And so these debts that are owed by generations post-Boomer are the direct result of political decisions to tamper down democracy, to create this hierarchical relationship of authority, so on and so forth, to continuously try to marginalize people that have been marginalized throughout the history of this country.
00:20:30
Speaker
So I think it's really important to keep the historical context in mind when thinking about like who owes who what are these debts legitimate or illegitimate, so on and so forth.
00:20:38
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And always remember, universities were free in this country.
00:20:42
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They can be free again.
00:20:44
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They're free in other countries.
00:20:45
Speaker
I used to live in Brazil for 10 years.
00:20:47
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You go to grad school in Brazil, the government in a public university, they will pay you to study.
00:20:52
Speaker
But there's just all sorts of different examples that we can use to say it doesn't have to be this way.
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, I just wanted to add on to that, that there's always, in American history, there's always this sort of racist component to our education system.
00:21:08
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But arguably, apart from the criminal justice system, our education system is the most racist part of our society.
00:21:19
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And Elizabeth Tandy Shermer,
00:21:25
Speaker
is a historian who wrote a recent history of the student debt crisis and shows that in a lot of ways it is born out of segregationist policies.
00:21:37
Speaker
That universities, there were at various points in American history, a desire to provide direct federal government funding to universities
00:21:48
Speaker
to make them free to attend.
00:21:51
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And the university said, we don't want that because there will be strings attached.
00:21:56
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We want intellectual freedom.
00:21:58
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The strings that they were worried about was that they would not be able to make the decisions about admissions that they wanted to make.
00:22:06
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that universities used to, and to some degree still are, these elitist institutions.
00:22:14
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So they wanted to make sure it was primarily white men that they admitted.
00:22:18
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And they were afraid that as soon as they take government funding.
00:22:22
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So why do we have the system we have?
00:22:24
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We have basically a voucher system where your student debt, the funding goes to the student and the university competes
00:22:32
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for the students who have that funding attached.
00:22:36
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And universities were free in this country for some people.
00:22:41
Speaker
So like in the City University of New York, which was a beautiful free university for working class white people,
00:22:50
Speaker
And there was a big effort in the 1970s to force open admissions because even though it wasn't segregated by law, it was segregated in fact.
00:23:00
Speaker
And they won.
00:23:01
Speaker
They won open admissions.
00:23:03
Speaker
And then almost on cue, there was an economic recession.
00:23:07
Speaker
They said, oh, well, we can't afford to keep this university free.
00:23:13
Speaker
We're going to start charging tuition.
00:23:15
Speaker
And I think
00:23:17
Speaker
I think that there's a direct link between, oh, as soon as you allow Black students in the door, we have to somehow keep the social order in place.
00:23:27
Speaker
And debt is a very powerful tool for social discipline.
00:23:33
Speaker
So to some degree, it's absolutely true.
00:23:35
Speaker
We used to have free universities.
00:23:37
Speaker
We can have them again.
00:23:39
Speaker
To another degree, it's like we've never really had the university that we want or deserve, and we need to build it.
00:23:45
Speaker
The university of our dreams is in the future.
00:23:48
Speaker
I want to touch on so many of these different points.
00:23:50
Speaker
Eleni, you're exactly right.
00:23:52
Speaker
I mean, I even just look more recently at the PPP loans.
00:23:55
Speaker
Those have been forgiven 100%, you know, in mass forgiveness for small business owners, I guess, in theory, but also, right, some of the most wealthiest people in this society who basically got free federal money, got taxpayer money under those programs.
00:24:12
Speaker
And I think, too, that the notion of almost like a generational warfare, if you look at which demographics have the most wealth in this society today, it pretty much scales with the people that, Jason, that you were talking about here.
00:24:26
Speaker
You know, that boomer generation now has the vast bulk of the wealth in the society, followed by Gen X. And then, of course, us poor millennials down at the bottom of this thing.
00:24:35
Speaker
And it does kind of seem like
00:24:37
Speaker
You know, the just thing to do, it's not a sustainable trajectory, right?
00:24:41
Speaker
It means that my kids are going to be poor and then their kids are going to be poor, etc.
00:24:45
Speaker
So it really does amount kind of to this generational jubilee, right?
00:24:49
Speaker
To say, let's allow, let's lift this burden from the youngest, you know, the poorest, the neediest among us and let them build up the generational wealth for their families as we had as well.
00:25:00
Speaker
And I think, Thomas, to your point as well, I was just looking at the statistics for, you know, the demographics of student debt.
00:25:06
Speaker
And I think the largest debt holders are maybe black Americans, hold a large majority of the student debt total.
00:25:14
Speaker
So, you know, there would even be some equity in that as well, allowing historically marginalized groups to allow, again, to develop the generational wealth that older, whiter generations enjoyed.
00:25:27
Speaker
And certainly it has been taken out on the higher education system when the students who go to put their education into practice then get punished by the, I guess, the elites at the top with the power who want to sort of neuter them for being able to flex their socioeconomic, sociopolitical power.
00:25:47
Speaker
And Jason, we were talking briefly before we hit record about, you know, your interest on the impact of debt and pedagogy.
00:25:54
Speaker
And I definitely see this as an educator and in our state in particular, the emphasis on STEM, you know, the emphasis on college and career readiness, which is usually just meaning workforce preparation for kids, because it seems like in the wealthiest country in the world, our education system,
00:26:11
Speaker
is really focused on high stakes outcomes for kids because once they leave high school, college is so expensive.
00:26:18
Speaker
We need to make that worthwhile.
00:26:21
Speaker
The likelihood of them getting a good job is kind of contingent on that college completion.
00:26:25
Speaker
So I don't know if you want to speak to that, the impact of debt and pedagogy there, but I'd love to hear that perspective as well.
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing this up because I think it's ironically, we talk about student debt, but we often don't talk about how
00:26:40
Speaker
debt impacts educational experience.
00:26:42
Speaker
And so you'll hear an argument around the morals of it, the economics of it, the politics of it, but very rarely do we actually talk about like, what does this do to the educational experience of both teachers and students?
00:26:53
Speaker
And I think you kind of hinted at one way.
00:26:56
Speaker
You can trace different ways that debt messes with or makes miseducative experiences happen.
00:27:02
Speaker
And I think one way you hinted at, which is to say that once you know that debt is waiting for you in the future, you start to adopt
00:27:10
Speaker
this like return on investment approach to your education.
00:27:14
Speaker
So you start to think of education, not in like, how do I make myself a more full, free or human being, but instead, how do I shape myself as human capital?
00:27:24
Speaker
That's going to be able to sell myself on a market.
00:27:26
Speaker
How do I brand myself?
00:27:27
Speaker
How do I continuously be an entrepreneur of myself?
00:27:31
Speaker
And so you take on this return on investment logic and you do this, what you just mentioned.
00:27:36
Speaker
You might love poetry, you might love art, you might love philosophy, but instead you become an engineer or an investment banker because you have these debts to pay and you know that your education has to have an economic return rather than, say, like a social or humanistic return.
00:27:51
Speaker
And you shape your educational path that way.
00:27:55
Speaker
So as a student, you start to make these rational choices and you can't really fault students for thinking this way because they know what's waiting for them at the end, right?
00:28:02
Speaker
This massive debt.
00:28:04
Speaker
As demoralizing as it might be to think of education in this way, you kind of understand it from a rational argument.
00:28:09
Speaker
The other thing to think about is the ways that this impacts teachers themselves.
00:28:13
Speaker
So the NEA has a really good study that lists just how bad the teacher debt crisis is, like K-12 and adjuncts and faculty in higher ed.
00:28:23
Speaker
And the debt levels are astronomical.
00:28:25
Speaker
I think I average around $60,000 for the average teacher teaching in K-12.
00:28:29
Speaker
That's crazy.
00:28:31
Speaker
When we think of it, though, like how does that impact how they teach?
00:28:34
Speaker
All sorts of interesting things start to become uncovered.
00:28:37
Speaker
So as Thomas said, like debt is a disciplining mechanism.
00:28:41
Speaker
If you're in major debt and you're at a school where you think you need to be teaching, maybe it's critical race theory or some other controversial topic, but you are afraid that you're going to lose your job and then not be able to pay your debt, that has disciplined how you teach in the class.
00:28:56
Speaker
Maybe it keeps you from speaking up.
00:28:58
Speaker
Maybe it keeps you from assigning certain assignments, reading certain books, because you're afraid that if you lose your job, you're screwed.
00:29:05
Speaker
And so it disciplines the teachers this way.
00:29:09
Speaker
Last point about this is that I think one of the things that we're seeing more and more is that education K through 12 up until higher ed becomes a process of socialization into the death economy.
00:29:20
Speaker
In other words, from a very early age,
00:29:22
Speaker
Kids are socialized into taking the role of debtors.
00:29:25
Speaker
And this actually happens.
00:29:26
Speaker
You brought up like something you mentioned in previous programs here.
00:29:29
Speaker
If you look at the way report cards and grades are structured, it's almost identical to credit report.
00:29:35
Speaker
Both the credit report and the report card will give you an evaluation where you get like a letter or a number score based on the amount of work you do in a specific amount of time.
00:29:46
Speaker
As a student, you accumulate credit.
00:29:49
Speaker
So there's all sorts of ways where from a very early age, the grading system report cards are socializing students into the debt economy.
00:29:58
Speaker
In other words, how to be an obedient debtor, how to meet the demands of the creditor.
00:30:04
Speaker
And over the years, this then ends up serving people in power, i.e.
00:30:08
Speaker
creditor.
00:30:09
Speaker
And so there's just all sorts of different ways in which
00:30:13
Speaker
The material reality of financial debt starts to impact the educational reality of what happens in our classrooms and the ways that we learn and teach.
Debt as a Poverty Tax on Institutions
00:30:21
Speaker
And I think that's something that really, as an audience that you have a lot of teachers with, I really hope that teachers can start to think about this question.
00:30:28
Speaker
How is the debt that I owe, or perhaps my students might owe, or their parents might owe, how is that changing what we teach and learn in class?
00:30:36
Speaker
I think Jason kind of nailed all of that.
00:30:39
Speaker
I mean, I guess just one tiny thing is that, you know, this is some work that Jason and I have really been pushing in the higher ed context, but it's equally as true in some cases and more so in the K-12 context, which is that this debt doesn't just burden individuals.
00:30:53
Speaker
It also burdens the institutions themselves.
00:30:56
Speaker
So budget cuts and the decline of progressive taxation that funds higher ed and K-12 schools
00:31:04
Speaker
means that these schools themselves also take on debt.
00:31:08
Speaker
And they pass on a lot of that debt to students in higher ed in the form of tuition, which then becomes student debt.
00:31:15
Speaker
But that's also the cost that workers and the public bear in terms of program budget cuts,
00:31:23
Speaker
furloughs, all kinds of austerity pressures that institutions K-12 through higher ed face is a function of debt in a lot of cases.
00:31:32
Speaker
And there's, it's kind of, you know, for any kind of like budget nerds out there, it's really interesting when you start to look at your institution's budget and take a, just begin to understand what portion debt service plays in the institution's budget.
00:31:46
Speaker
In the Philly public schools, it's close to it.
00:31:49
Speaker
They had to actually pass some laws saying that it couldn't grow higher than 10% of the budget.
00:31:54
Speaker
But it hovers around 9% right now of the whole school district's budget goes to paying the interest and the fees and the principal of borrowing money that they didn't have.
00:32:03
Speaker
So this debt, I think a good way, I've heard Thomas say this before, and it really stuck with me.
00:32:07
Speaker
Debt is a poverty tax.
00:32:10
Speaker
It's the price that we pay from not having enough to begin with.
00:32:14
Speaker
And that is true from the people, from students, from educators and institutions themselves.
00:32:21
Speaker
So I think it's pretty comprehensive.
00:32:23
Speaker
When you put your debt goggles on, you start seeing it everywhere.
00:32:27
Speaker
I just want to plug an article that Eleni wrote because she won't do it.
00:32:30
Speaker
But Eleni wrote a piece for the New York Times on K-12 debt that, in my view as an educator and someone that studies this stuff, is probably one of the most important pieces that come out in the last.
00:32:40
Speaker
you know, at least in our generation, right?
00:32:42
Speaker
So Eleni Shermer, the New York Times, check out this article if you're interested in this question, the K-12 debt.
00:32:49
Speaker
It is so important.
00:32:51
Speaker
And just to add to what Eleni said, the Philadelphia School District is paying over $300 million a year in debt service.
00:32:58
Speaker
$150 million of that is in interest and fees alone.
00:33:01
Speaker
If you're an educator, ask yourself, what could the district do with $300 million, especially now during COVID?
00:33:08
Speaker
How many masks does that buy?
00:33:10
Speaker
How many tests does that buy?
00:33:12
Speaker
Does it hire new nurses?
00:33:13
Speaker
Does it hire social workers?
00:33:15
Speaker
Does it fix the buildings that are falling down?
00:33:17
Speaker
Not all of them, but maybe at least seal some windows, at least who knows what.
00:33:21
Speaker
So just think about what that money does.
00:33:23
Speaker
And in this piece, Eleni kind of highlights this.
00:33:24
Speaker
So I just really encourage everyone that's listening to check out this piece by Eleni in the New York Times, which came out a couple of months ago.
00:33:32
Speaker
That is incredible.
00:33:33
Speaker
And I'll definitely, I'll add that in the show notes to it as well.
00:33:36
Speaker
Wrapping things up as we kind of move towards action steps that our listeners can take and talking about the week of action that you'll have planned next week, just kind of thinking some of the key points from the last half an hour per se is thinking about debt is not inevitability, it's a choice.
00:33:52
Speaker
And it's kind of a combination of the kind of society and the kind of economic system that we want to have.
00:33:59
Speaker
And we have a say in
00:34:01
Speaker
and certainly what that looks like, at least going forward, since we didn't have a say in the one that we sort of generationally
Call to Action: Joining the Debt Collective
00:34:08
Speaker
inherited.
00:34:08
Speaker
So what kind of things then, if listeners are interested in getting involved, what kinds of individual actions can they take, collective actions toward forgiveness, achieving that at a political level, or perhaps at resistance, at keeping pressure on
00:34:24
Speaker
elected officials either to indefinitely suspend those loan payments as they've been continually pushed back or achieve full forgiveness or getting involved in Debt Collective?
00:34:33
Speaker
Where do you think our listeners should start?
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, I would encourage your listeners to go to debtcollective.org and join the union and get involved.
00:34:44
Speaker
We have some local branches around the country.
00:34:48
Speaker
We don't have any currently in Iowa, although we have members in Iowa.
00:34:54
Speaker
So if there are folks who want to help get something off the ground in Iowa, that would be fantastic.
00:35:00
Speaker
Thankfully, we have won an extension to the payment pause.
00:35:04
Speaker
And because of the rising COVID rates, we have decided to suspend our in-person week of action that we had been planning on the previous timeline.
00:35:14
Speaker
And instead, we have a debtor's assembly and strategy session that is going to happen virtually on January 23rd.
00:35:24
Speaker
7pm Eastern, 6pm Central on Sunday, January 23rd.
00:35:29
Speaker
It's going to be a virtual meeting and it's going to lead up towards future direct action, both in person and just other things that we can do to resist, cause trouble and prevent them from turning student loan payments on at all, ever.
00:35:49
Speaker
Currently, they're threatening to turn them back on May Day of all days and to force through broad-based debt cancellation.
00:35:57
Speaker
We haven't talked about it yet, but Joe Biden can cancel 100% of federal student loans with one signature.
00:36:05
Speaker
We've already written the executive order.
00:36:08
Speaker
All he has to do is sign it.
00:36:10
Speaker
We have everything to fight for and everything to win.
00:36:13
Speaker
It is realistic that we can win broad-based debt cancellation, but it's going to take a mass movement.
00:36:18
Speaker
It's going to take direct action and civil disobedience and enormous public pressure in order to make it happen.
00:36:25
Speaker
So it's go time.
00:36:27
Speaker
I just want to add to that too, again, this focus on teachers.
00:36:32
Speaker
And Eleni and I have been doing some work.
00:36:34
Speaker
reaching out to different teacher unions and talking with different teachers about how we really want teachers to play a frontline role in this.
00:36:41
Speaker
I know you're busy as hell and you got a lot going on, but there's also a lot of freedom to win with this.
00:36:46
Speaker
And again, like teachers aren't under an enormous pressure and enormous stress right now, but I think the only way that we can alleviate some of that stress, at least, is by fighting for debt cancellation.
00:36:57
Speaker
And every single educator deserves that and it should be demanded.
00:37:02
Speaker
And so keep your eye out if you do end up joining the Debt Collective for specific events and discussions tailored towards teachers that we hope to cultivate over the next couple of months and beyond.
00:37:13
Speaker
So if you're a teacher and you're listening to keep this on your radar, because we want to get you plugged in.
00:37:19
Speaker
Really, I think the most important thing is just to really take a step back and look at how far the conversation has come.
00:37:25
Speaker
in the last decade.
00:37:26
Speaker
You know, that's a product of absolutely relentless, unapologetic belief in the justice that we need and organizing.
00:37:38
Speaker
And I think Thomas and Jason both said, getting involved at your school, starting a debt collective chapter, joining a debt collective chapter,
00:37:47
Speaker
talking to your colleagues about why we should think of teachers' unions as debtors' unions.
00:37:52
Speaker
That's an important alliance to be made.
00:37:54
Speaker
I think there's a lot of ground yet that we're still going to cover.
00:37:59
Speaker
There has been so much progress made, I mean, in the last two years, let alone the last decade.
00:38:04
Speaker
But I think we've still got some more consciousness raising, I think, to go, not just to continue to push this into the mainstream, but then also to get people from the next step, from awareness to that action, you know, to taking those next steps.
00:38:17
Speaker
So I want to thank you all so much for taking the time with me this morning to talk about this.
00:38:22
Speaker
You know, you can follow the Debt Collective at Strike Debt on Twitter.
00:38:27
Speaker
So thank you so much again for joining.
00:38:30
Speaker
Thank you for the work.
00:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having us.
00:38:32
Speaker
This is cool.
00:38:33
Speaker
Glad to be in touch.
00:38:38
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast.
00:38:41
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:38:45
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.