From Debt Peons To Wage Slaves – Are Students A ‘Class’?

Authored by Michael Hudson, via NakedCapitalism.com,
Students usually don’t think of themselves as a class. They seem ‘pre-class,’ because they have not yet entered the labor force. They can only hope to become part of the middle class after they graduate. And that means becoming a wage earner – what impolitely is called the working class.
But as soon as they take out a student debt, they become part of the economy. They are in this sense a debtor class. But to be a debtor, one needs a means to pay – and the student’s means to pay is out of the wages and salaries they may earn after they graduate. And after all, the reason most students get an education is so that they can qualify for a middle-class job.
The middle class in America consists of the widening sector of the working class that qualifies for bank loans – not merely usurious short-term payday loans, but a lifetime of debt. So the middle class today is a debtor class.
Shedding crocodile tears for the slow growth of U. S. employment in the post-2008 doldrums (the ‘permanent Obama economy’ in which only the banks were bailed out, not the economy), the financial class views the role industry and the economy at large as being to pay its employees enough so that they can take on an exponentially rising volume of debt. Interest and fees (late fees and penalties now yield credit card companies more than they receive in interest charges) are soaring, leaving the economy of goods and services languishing.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jun 2, 2017.