We must advocate for the canceling of student debt
Student debt affects more than 44 million Americans.
While 50 years ago, I attended public institutions that didn’t charge tuition and didn’t incur any debt, the situation was different for my daughters. Both of them will have paid off their student debt within the next six months after almost 20 years. I was surprised to learn this is the norm for white borrowers but not for Black borrowers. The median Black borrower still owes 95 percent of their student debt after 20 years.
Canceling $50,000 for each borrower will close the racial wealth gap by 20 percent, which will improve financial security and mobility for Black borrowers and other persons of color as we deal with the debt crisis for millions of people.
I call on President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to cancel $50,000 of debt for each eligible borrower.
TOM WADE, AUSTELL
Will animosities lead to destruction of society?
Events, political and social, over the last number of years are enough to give one cause to believe that a change is coming. Animosities stoked by partisanship begin to seem insurmountable; accusations cast blindly and wildly, each side against the other; absurdities stacked upon absurdities. Where is this leading us?
It would seem that our divide is based on our conception of the good society. One side places its faith in the individual, tempered by law but otherwise free to choose its own course. The other sees a society made up of competing groups, some oppressed, some oppressors, with the only acceptable outcome being the suppression of the oppressors.
Are we willing to make our goal the destruction of the individual? Are we ready to accommodate a society ruled by competing factions with no role for the individual? The last 230 years have shown us that the outcome of such societies has been invariably disastrous. Let us choose more wisely than that.
GREGORY PETERSON, LOGANVILLE
