The demand for a student debt jubilee was heard often during Occupy Wall Street, and the Occupy Student Debt Campaign (OSDC) that grew out of it did much important work toward articulating a vision of the what true change would look like. Others across the country—including Strike Debt, a direct descendent of OSDC—have begun to converge around a set of interlocking principles that should be central to any movement seeking to restore education as a social good and a right. To begin with, the federal government must make all two- and four-year public colleges tuition-free for all students. Any future student loans from the government should be offered at zero interest. All current student debt should be cancelled as part of a one-time corrective jubilee. And all university institutions must open their books; transparency and accountability to students and their families, as well as to their employees, is essential. If you think providing free public education sounds like pie in the sky, it would probably cost way less than you think. By our estimates, the total amount of new money necessary is less than $13 billion a year. That’s a lot of money, to be sure, but within the scope of the federal budget it is less than 0.1% of yearly spending—merely a rounding error. For the sake of comparison, U.S. taxpayers are currently subsidizing too-big-to-fail banks at the rate of $83 billion every year. To offer another comparison, tax subsidies to just twelve corporations totaled about $20 billion per year from 2008 to 2010. THE ANSWER IS NOT LOWER INTEREST RATES... THE ANSWER IS ROBIN HOOD TAX + CANCELLATION + FREE TUITION... Read more at: strikedebt.org/drom/chapter-four/
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 01:53:09 +0000
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