“Student loans are like herpes with compound interest.”

Glenn Reynolds thinks that this Daily Show skit on our current student loan crisis will help collapse the (related) current educational bubble:

I agree, but I want to address another point. To wit: there’s a reason why nothing is particularly going on about resolving this problem, and it’s a pretty simple reason. If you make student loan debts dischargeable via bankruptcy, the economy will likely go into free-fall. This will have bad immediate effects, and here’s the worst one of all: nobody will love Barack Obama any more. But if you let the problem resolve itself via a tightening of loan rules and shifting new loans to amounts and terms that are more reasonable, then the economy will not go into free fall and everything will probably be fine.

Now, if you are a twenty-something with several hundred thousand dollars in student loans hanging over your head then you’re probably asking yourself, But when will things be fine for me? Short answer: they won’t. Your life will likely be moderately horrid: you will marry late, have a poorer lifestyle, will take forever to get out of debt, and will not be in a good retirement position in forty years.  Of course, in forty years Barack Obama will be 95 or so; which means that he’ll either be dead, or else utterly indifferent to your problems.  So, really, no downside for him, or any other Democrat currently in a senior leadership position.

And, honestly, in forty years I will be in my mid-eighties, which means that there’s a good chance that I’ll be dead, and if I’m not dead I’ll be ‘enjoying’ whatever surplus can be squeezed out of the generations that follow mine.  The difference between me and Barack Obama, however, is that I retrain a basic empathy for people who are going to get the short end of the stick; which is why I’m pointing out all of this now, while there’s still some hope for young voters to actually do something about the trap that the Democrats are putting them into…

Moe Lane (crosspost)