Maeve Higgins: We are more than money and can’t be reduced to transactions

Millions of young people in the US have been saddled with massive debt before even starting out

Millions of young people in the US have been saddled with massive debt before even starting out.

A lot happened in March of 2020: the pandemic, the panic, the stopgap measures to relieve people of old burdens as we were saddled with new ones.

One such measure the US government took was to pause student loan payments. Student debt is gigantic here, with 45m people owing $1.6 trillion in federal loans taken out for college. This debt is second only to mortgages, and it’s more than the debt Americans owe on car loans or credit cards.