Well this is excellent. I look forward to the day when the responsible members of society (people who pay their bills on time, who save for retirement, who don't over-buy) are pushed even further to take care of the people who were immature and planned incredibly poorly. Our society works fine when it's assumed that a small portion of its members are irresponsible. But when it's systemic, there isn't enough money to go around.<p>That's what happened with the housing bubble. Blaming banks is easy, and certainly they did a lot of shady stuff. But nobody forced people to take on mortgages they couldn't hope to pay. Nobody forced kids to take out $100k in loans to go to a dream school instead of a state school.<p>The student loan debt burden is enormous. And I suspect that the people who make out the worst in it will be the ones who actually PAY on time. And I'm terrified of what will happen when it's time to start cashing out my 401k. After years of saving, a person who has faithfully saved $5M should have a nice retirement ahead of them. But I suspect that so many more people will have nothing, and those people will still be voting, and cut themselves a hefty slice of the pie from those who actually planned ahead. And because of the way 401k's are set up, it's a multi-trillion dollar pot of money that can be re-assigned from the "$5m retirement rich" people to those who didn't bother to think ahead and save.<p>One person defaults on an irresponsible debt, no big deal. But the more people do it and the more acceptable that becomes, the worse it is for everyone (especially the responsible people that a society relies upon to keep the money flowing).