Forgive all student loan debt: Interview with Robert Applebaum

[This is a series in which I talk with experts on the topic of student debt.]

What if we got rid of all student loan debt? This is the question Robert Applebaum posed to himself in the midst of the housing bubble and Great Recession. Robert’s answer: it would create millions of new consumers who could then stimulate the economy.

Among student debtors, his idea, needless to say, was popular. He had over 300,000 people join his Facebook group. Over 660,000 people signed his petition that expressed support for a loan forgiveness bill. He’s been featured in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and The Economist.

The idea has gained traction over the years and he’s been working with Representative Hansen Clarke (D-MI) who has recently introduced legislation to forgive student loan debt on the condition that the debtor pays 10% of his discretionary income over 10 years. If there’s any debt remaining after those 10 years, the rest of the debt is forgiven.

I recommend watching Hansen Clarke deliver his speech below, if just because it’ll make my interview with Robert easier to understand. (Clarke misspeaks when he says that only “federal” loans will be absolved; private loans, under this legislation, would be absolved as well.)

Here’s my interview with Robert [abridged transcript]:

Why did you start the organization, Forgive Student Loan Debt?

It was January 29th of 2009, a mere nine days after the inauguration of president Obama—a candidate who came into office on a platform of hope and change. And there we were, debating the Obama stimulus plan, which consisted of more tax cuts, corporate welfare and trickle-down economics. Frankly I got pissed at the terms of the debate. Here we were going back to the same failed policies that got us into the mess in the first place. It occurred to me that if the goal was really economic stimulus then I had a much better, more efficient way of accomplishing that goal. At the time my monthly [student loan] payments were about $500 per month. It occurred to me that if my student loans were forgiven, I would had $500 per month, every month, with which to spend on ailing sectors of the economy. And if you multiply that across the millions of people who have student loan debt, you have a recipe to a bottom up approach to rebuilding the economy.

On your website, you point out that the bank bailouts rewarded bad behavior and haven’t done much to encourage institutional change, but wouldn’t student loan forgiveness do the same?

I readily admit that there is a moral hazard inherent in what I proposed: that future generations would expect to get bailed out because we were bailed out. That is a perfectly legitimate concern. My point is that amassing massive amounts of debt and placing that debt on the shoulders of those who can least afford it is not the only way we can pay for education in this country. Inherent in what I proposed is a strong belief that we need to fundamentally overhaul the way in which we pay for higher education in this country; and what I mean by that is public education—public funding of higher education. Education is not a commodity that benefits only the individual. Rather it is something that should be viewed as a public good and an investment in our nation’s future.

In the case of my friend Josh—he graduated with $66,000 in student debt. Over the past six years, he’s paid off about $50,000. So let’s say, in a couple years, his debt is gone and we pass student loan forgiveness legislation… Would he get any compensation or is he just unlucky?

Well I wouldn’t say he’s unlucky because he has a job that pays enough to let him pay off his debts. In that respect, he is lucky. No he would not receive a benefit from [Hanson Clarke’s] bill. But he’s not the one who needs help the most. Is it perfectly fair? No of course not. But nothing ever is. I pay property taxes yet I don’t have children. I pay Social Security. Who knows if I’ll ever be able to avail myself of social security. There are lots of things that everybody pays with their tax dollars that they don’t directly benefit from. The point is that this would benefit the country as a whole…to get consumer spending back up again so we can restore our economy from the bottom up.

Do you hold out hope that legislation will be passed?

I have hope that we’ve been successful enough in raising awareness, so that members of Congress will see a need to act proactively…I’m cautiously optimistic that Congress will have gotten the message that this is something we need to attack proactively. We cannot wait for the bubble to pop the way we did with the housing market because we saw how devastating that was. Now… I’m a realist as well. I know that Congress doesn’t act unless they have to act, so chances are we’re going to have to wait for the bubble to pop before action is taken.

Previous installments of “Interviews with the indebted”

#1 Interview with $200,000-in-debt grad, Kelli Space. #2 Interview with Alan Collinge, student debt guru who wants to reinstitute bankruptcy protection for student borrowers

Spring at Acorn Abbey

(The road to David's home is lined with flowering pear trees. They only flower for a couple days a year.)

I’ve been living at Acorn Abbey for over two months, finishing up my book and working on a variety of outdoor projects.

Here’s the Garden. The perimeter of the fence is 400 feet long. It’s 8 feet tall, and you can sorta see the fishing line I tied across the garden to keep aerial predators from attacking the chickens. I mixed in a dump truck-load of compost, hundreds of pounds of organic fertilizer (chicken poop), several bags of lime, and a bag of powdered kelp. The other big project I’m currently working on is creating an irrigation system, which involves a makeshift dam in a nearby creek. So far we’ve only planted onions and lettuce.

We had a tragedy at the Abbey last week when Ruth, our Golden Comet chicken, passed away from an unknown illness. We buried her, and in her memory we planted a flowering cherry tree on her grave.

Patience is our last remaining chicken. Because chickens are social animals, Patience has had to find ways to compensate for the loss of her friends, namely by paying extra special attention to me: demurely rubbing her wing against my calf, stepping on my hands whenever I’m sitting in the orchard, and even holding still and presenting her tail feathers to me, coyly giving the okay to be penetrated. “She’s in love with you, you know,” David says.

The chickens are as much pets as they are egg-producers, so I can’t help but feel sympathy for the poor girl. So it’s our goal to fix our diminishing chicken population problem.

We tried to raise a few chicks on our own last spring, but they were killed by predator that had successfully broken into the coop. I gave the coop a thorough inspection, and found that a lot of the downstairs wire had rusted, rotted, and come apart, which probably made it easy for a raccoon or weasel. I decided to renovate. I decided to make it into an impenetrable fortress. So I removed all the old wire and triple layered some of the more sensitive spots with new wire, making sure to leave no gaps for predators of any size.

I also dug a trench four inches into the ground, filled them with rocks, and put even bigger rocks on top of them, to keep out burrowing predators. I double-dare any predator to try to break in. We will probably buy more baby chicks at the local mill later this spring.

Here are two of the neighbor’s horses.

Holly, a local dog, is always eager to greet me on my jogs. She has unorthodox style of cuddling, in which she leans her back into my stomach so she can sit like a human as we sit-spoon.

The Abbey from the rear.

Squirrel scratching chest on deck.

Red-bellied woodpecker.

Pear trees in dusk light.

Pear tree flowers up close.

Weekly quote: Solitude

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. ” – Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862, Walden

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, from his essay “Self-Reliance”

“But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude. Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.” -- William Deresiewicz, born in 1964, from his essay “Solitude and Leadership”

“There are lonely hours. How can I deny it? There are times when solitaire becomes solitary, an entirely different game, a prison term, and the inside of the skull as confining and unbearable as the interior of the house trailer on a hot day.” – Edward Abbey, 1927-1989, Desert Solitaire