Deleting our doubly dubious trillion dollars of student debt?

In Ha-Joon Chang’s "23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” he explains that so many more people going to college isn’t really that big a plus for economic output — that they have to go only because everybody else goes; meaning without it they wont be competitive -- on a relative basis.

He gives the example of Switzerland having had only 15% college educated up to 1990 — with about the highest worker productivity in the world — up to 40% by now; same reason.

What occurs to me is that if a college education is not that much of an INHERENT plus economically — then — the gigantically jumping costs of recent years are not justified even the slightest little bit. If everybody understood that — or had understood that all along — then, whatever has was added to college costs that has ballooned them so high and put everybody into such a deep pit (now there’s the mixed metaphor of the week) APPARENTLY FOR NO REASON could have been cut to the bone without hesitation.
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Given that this generation’s unnecessarily (super) deep college debt was just that, UNNECESSARY — maybe that gives us an opening to give them extraordinary one-time relief (one-time assuming we can reverse the crazy high cost trend) — perhaps putting all such debt under the Income Based Repayment program (and not charging tax on unpaid at the end — should be easier in a presumably more sane 25 years from now).
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Too add to the forgiving justification: this generation has also been subjected to the results of 30 years of Republicans getting every last Voodoo economic wish (following written in 2011):
80′s Reagan got his 25% across the board income tax cuts — building unprecedented peacetime debt – his dereg’ing savings and loans crashing the industry. ’90′s Sen. Gramm and friends tore down the Glass-Steagall Chinese wall between retail and investment banking – not without help from Clinton Democrats — setting the stage for our much troubled 2000s. ’90s Greenspan noted Wall Street partying too hard while failing to remove the punch bowl – the burst bubble end gave us the 2001 recession.

2000′s Bush cleared away more financial reg’s — while smiling on little reg’ed shadow banking’s proliferation – converted Clinton budget surpluses into trillions in tax cuts for the better off — which cuts flooded by now much degreg’ed banks and never much reg’ed non-banks with too much savings to be lent to too many borrowers – inflating an oversize real estate bubble whose burst aftermath left said prolonged illiquidity contraction and said low demand dips — while trillions of piled up Reagan-Bush debt inhibit routine Keynesian easing of low demand dips with temporary deficit spending. 

[Coming up?  A possible end run of the Constitution's bar to legislatively altering contracts -- for public contracts only (Chicago's parking meter rip off, restructuring student loans) -- under eminent domain?]

PS.  Thomas Frank's (of What's the Matter With Kansas fame) Salon article "Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media -- Tuition is up 1.200 percent in 30 years.  Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping" exposes the exponentially rising costs of (fundamentally unnecessary?) college degrees as just another financial game (#1001) where Americans are being squeezed because the alternative of not buying at exaggerated price will be even worse.

Everything we do in this country seems to be turning into a LOSING casino game — manipulated by the sharpies. (Hint: legally mandated, centralized bargaining will make everything healthy and happy again — make a completely different power setup.)

exposes the exponentially rising costs of (fundamentally unnecessary?) college degrees as just another financial game (#1001) where Americans are being squeezed because the alternative of not buying at exaggerated price will be even worse.
Everything we do in this country seems to be turning into a LOSING casino game — manipulated by the sharpies. (Hint: legally mandated, centralized bargaining will make everything healthy and happy again — make a completely different power setup.)
- See more at: http://angrybearblog.com/2014/06/ny-feds-bogus-estimate-of-return-on-college-and-brookings-misses-the-student-loan-crisis.html#more-25278

exposes the exponentially rising costs of (fundamentally unnecessary?) college degrees as just another financial game (#1001) where Americans are being squeezed because the alternative of not buying at exaggerated price will be even worse.
Everything we do in this country seems to be turning into a LOSING casino game — manipulated by the sharpies. (Hint: legally mandated, centralized bargaining will make everything healthy and happy again — make a completely different power setup.)
- See more at: http://angrybearblog.com/2014/06/ny-feds-bogus-estimate-of-return-on-college-and-brookings-misses-the-student-loan-crisis.html#more-25278

exposes the exponentially rising costs of (fundamentally unnecessary?) college degrees as just another financial game (#1001) where Americans are being squeezed because the alternative of not buying at exaggerated price will be even worse.
Everything we do in this country seems to be turning into a LOSING casino game — manipulated by the sharpies. (Hint: legally mandated, centralized bargaining will make everything healthy and happy again — make a completely different power setup.)
- See more at: http://angrybearblog.com/2014/06/ny-feds-bogus-estimate-of-return-on-college-and-brookings-misses-the-student-loan-crisis.html#more-25278

Links to: Cost of College Degree in U.S. Soars 12 Fold: Chart of the Day