I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.

I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?

If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolen from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you already have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.

That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.

What happened there? I followed the link but it looks mods removed whatever the offending poster had done.

I really don’t think giving the head of state the power to pardon is a very good idea. I used to be totally baffled how it was a thing at all but the rationale has since been explained to me. While I sorta get it, the theoretical benefit is far outweighed by the inevitable grimy reality. Like others, probably mostly because of my own biases, I find it hard to summon a great deal of outrage about this understandable if blatantly hypocritical move after so much prior abuse of the lower had already occurred, but frankly if the option weren’t even there then nobody would even need to talk about this. If the justice system of the nation is supposedly well designed and theoretically trustworthy then there isn’t the need to have the ability for it to be arbitrarily overrulled in a manner that operates very much like the monarchical tyrants the United States was supposedly foundationally opposed to.

I’m curious about the “better tech than us” claim. Can you give some more detail and context to this?

My parents have a well worn story of the time they were students and very poor and they saw a homeless guy outside the kebab shop and asked if he’d like a kebab to which he agreed. They brought it out to him and he examined it and threw it on the ground and yelled at them about something they now don’t remember exactly but they think was something to do with not wanting chilli sauce. Guessing that guy wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time, bit of a bummer for them though because they scraped together the last of their cash to pay for that and it would have been better if they could at least have eaten it themselves.

I really can’t see a downside. If they seem to be obviously homeless or they’re actively asking for help, they probably need it. Though it’s extremely unlikely that your meager contribution will be the change that suddenly allows them to magically overcome poverty and become middle class home owners with well paying jobs, that doesn’t really make them need it any less. Whatever they use the money on, it’s going to be what they need in the immediate term, be it drugs or food or anything really and unlike others this is the only way they can really get that money so they do need people to occasionally part with it. You’d only give it to them because you had it spare anyway and it’s not going to make them more homeless than they already were. If the concern is that it’s not addressing the root personal problems that put them individually on the street or the root social problems that put many on the streets, that’s completely true but if you’re serious about doing that you’re going to need more than the couple of bucks in your pocket anyway. That’s going to be concerted massive political will and financial effort and several people’s lifetimes worth of work all at the same time, besides you can always involve yourself in some way in such efforts and hand over spare change. The only times I can really think of where it makes sense not to give directly are: you can’t afford to do it, the physical circumstances of handing it over are dangerous/impractical, you don’t care about homeless people or other people in general or you subscribe to some nasty Malthusian ideas and think yourself somehow benevolent for condemning people to destitution as some kind of “cruel to be kind” doctrine in which case you’re unlikely to have given this a lot of thought anyway and don’t really face much of a dilemma.

Good old klapaucius:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:! I wish there was some use to me still remembering that word today.

WTF!?

NES is a good one, it was juuust about part of my time in that a couple of people I rarely saw had one and I loved playing it with them when I did seem them, but really that’s because I didn’t at the time have a games machine or a computer so anything would have been good. I’ve played a few of the games and they were alright, pretty good. I got an original NES console with several games as an adult and was super excited because it’s so classic and retro and I found that much as I love owning it, I really couldn’t stand playing it for more than a few minutes. The games are just, kinda boring and they feel very, incomplete. They suffy some of the same problems as the Atari games I played just to see what the time period was like, those Atari ones in particular feel very unfinished, like someone thought it’d be interesting to try making a game, had one attempt, made something like a sort of prototype and then got bored and just shoved it on the market and moved on to a different hobby. The NES games weren’t as bad as that, but there was a similar feel of lack of consideration for the actual player. To me, it the NES kind of represents when games were starting to get good, which I think would annoy a lot of people that were gamers for a long time before that, because it’s always annoying when younger people make these proclamations totally ignorant of the time they’re speaking about, but in my head at least that’s what the NES generation represents. It’s the starting point of what was to come, with some flashes of brilliance and a lot of meh and even the really good bits aren’t as good as their later more refined iterations.

Yeh, this is a weird question. Kid has to know he’s going to be accepted by his own Dad and still be able to make up their own mind on things. Hopefully when they’ve more fully developed they might sway a different way but acceptance from their Dad shouldn’t really be conditional upon it.

Economics really isn’t my strong suit so the fact that the outcome is surprising or confusing to me isn’t entirely unexpected but I have to say that outcome is actually kind of surprising. I would have thought the theory for how the tariff was supposed to work was that the 20% increase in price seen on the ground for foreign made washing machines owing to the cost of the tariff being passed on to the consumer would mean that the domestic producer of washing machines could expect to look more attractive on the shelf than the foreign made ones for being cheaper. The domestic manufacturer could also afford to be cheaper in a way that’s easy for them to achieve because they don’t face the artificial increase in the cost of making and selling their washing machines. This would mean they had the opportunity to sell more of them than their foreign competitors resulting in higher profits. If they saw it as an opportunity to raise prices by 20% without being punished by their competitors, wouldn’t that eliminates their natural advantage? Seems they’d be leaving money on the table. I would have thought the more likely outcome you’d see would be the domestic company essentially raise prices by something more like 19% so that they still get to profiteer from the chance to raise prices without penalty in the marketplace and unlike their competitors keep that as profit rather than put it towards paying tarrifs, but still be cheapest on the market meaning increased sales. You’d see a double benefit from their perspective. I mean that would still completely suck, everyone would be paying 19% more than when they started, but you’d think you’d see some of the intended desireable effects of the tariff in this one simple example of the washing machines, ignoring other factors.

Thanks OBAMA!

Do you ever find that sometimes when you intervene in to other people’s conversations to pull out some of your best absolute cracker lines like “why don’t you google that?” that people just don’t react properly at all? Like you’d expect an appropriate response like some light cheering and maybe lifting you up on their shoulders and handing you a medal and at least a couple of trophies. You know, something befitting of your incisive and insightful contributions, and instead they just kinda stop talking to you? That’s so weird huh?

Is it true they can hold on to a charge for decades? I was told that but it seemed unlikely.

You deadly seriously didn’t know if they were talking about the Pacific Ocean? In a post about someone who has trouble speaking clearly, in a reply clearly establishing you were aware there were writing errors, zeroing in on a word well known to be accidentally substituted for the word “specifically” by some speakers. You deadly seriously didn’t know?

Unfortunately you just cannot simply take English as it’s spoken in your country and assume it will apply universally and without change across all English speaking countries even as you and I now mostly successfully converse in English. The roots of words can be interesting and sometimes informative to know but it’s not the whole story and ignoring actual usage will never garner a true understanding. It sounds like it’s pretty important avoid the word in the US, but not so in Australia. It’s not totally neutral here, it’s still swearing and you won’t hear a school teacher saying it to children, but it’s also not coming from the same place in terms of meaning as in the US or UK for example. Sometimes it’s an insult, essentially meaning a bad or objectionable person, sometimes it’s used in much the same way as “mate”, other times it can simply mean “person/people”. Much like English itself, context is important and you have to know the background and contextual cues to understand which meaning to take.

You should come over here some time, you might like it, the weather is nice, we share a lot in common with the US, so you’d feel right at home but there’s just enough interesting differences to be exotic and provide opportunities to learn something about the world you didn’t know before. I can tell you’re well meaning and I think people will probably appreciate that too.

It’s about cultural context, c*nt is deployed in reference both to men and women in Australia

Hanging out for the next one. Dude’s so funny.

Given the context of the post, that they’re asking for help, picking on this seems needless and unsympathetic. Given their own acknowledged problems with speech I don’t see why making a joke about their writing would seem helpful or appropriate.

No person nor source gets it right all the time, I like your idea as an evaluative technique but I think the assumption that being incorrect here is necessarily because of lying might mean discounting a lot of sources/creators who are otherwise reputable. I’d look at it more like degrees of doubt cast over everything else they say where you don’t have the expertise to evaluate the accuracy. Much like a driver’s licence, you get dinged enough times for more and more infractions and eventually you lose your license. If they keep continually getting things wrong where it’s something you know something about eventually you can probably discount them on anything else as well, but if it’s just once or twice, especially where they’re not egregiously wrong, some benefit of the doubt could be beneficial to all concerned. Better I would have thought to take what feels like their salient points on the content they produce on topics where you aren’t knowledgeable and check if other people are claiming anything similar and where something is verifiable, try to verify. Of course theoretically you should do that all the time but in practice at least each time you know someone is wrong about something it’s an indication that for them specifically further checking is required.