Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired.
I’d suspect he sacrificed work-life balance his whole career (yes, CEOs are known for golfing and vacations, but I bet they still think of work 24/7). So just like people complaining about student loan forgiveness, some people get so angry if they perceive someone might have an easier experience than they did.
CEOs sometimes think like this, but they seem to forget how much more they are paid when it comes up.
I’m on a business junket to [Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Jackson Hole, wherever] where I will [ski, drink, go to the beach, take a fishing boat, whatever] at an all-expensed resort or hotel, and have a couple meetings or attend a business conference, too. I’ll take a private jet and be there for a week. Everything is a business write-off. I’m getting paid while I’m doing this.
Next month will be another business trip.
Vs
Some family saved for years to visit Jackson Hole, take a hike, go fly fishing, and stay at a modest hotel or camp out. They’re not getting paid, everything is out of pocket, and they can’t write any of it off.
There’s a huge difference in not just pay but how their lives are structured financially. Tons more opportunities to write off and business expense things vs a normal person where everything is out of their personal money.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
Yeah, same reason I don’t like insulin, I want a permanent cure for diabetes… In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
/S in case people are confused
In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
Student loan forgiveness with no other action is completely counter-productive. Just like allowing drug companies to charge anything they want for Insulin, and then just having the government pay them is completely counter-productive. The answer to spiraling insulin prices (when not due to a shortage of some key ingredient) is to cap prices, not just pay whatever ransom drug companies are asking.
College costs have spiraled out of control because laws were passed to prevent you from escaping student loan debt through bankruptcy. From a lender perspective there’s almost no risk to giving students as much money as they want to borrow. Colleges in turn realized they could just keep raising prices because students could “afford” pretty much any tuition price through loans. If you just “forgive” all student loan debt, you’ll just encourage colleges to jack up prices even more. Why not? Come one come all, the government is going to foot whatever the bill ends up being!
If you’re going to forgive student debt, it needs to come with 3 things:
- A hard cap on public university tuition tracking inflation
- Student loans need to go back to being forgiven as a part of bankruptcy.
- A long-term plan to make public universities “free”
You want to find a middle ground with conservatives? Make tuition free for the occupations we have a shortage of to encourage people to go to school for a degree in which there will be a job waiting when they’re done.
We need more teachers? Teaching degrees are free for the next decade. You want to be a marine biologist? You pay whatever the (reasonable) capped state tuition is.
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
Not all loans were predatory, some people just made dumb choices all on their own. If anything there should be a reasonable limit on the interest rates and the loans should be refinanced.
And, as for why not both, we actually can’t afford either. Investing for the future is a better deal for society than fixing people’s personal mistakes.
But…if you think free public university is a good thing…isn’t not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying “folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it’s legal Federally”? IMHO people shouldn’t have these loans in the first place.
If we can’t afford loan forgiveness, we can’t afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
