$148,910 is the average income of lawyers.
$69,847 is the average income of truck drivers.
$41,950 is the average income of farmers.
Saw a meme on an instagram page called attorney.memes, which showed a pipe with water pouring out of it.
The water pouring out was called “obscene amounts of money”.
The person driving it, with a suit on was labeled as “farmers, truck drivers and other blue collar workers”.
There was also a leak in the pipe called “$10,000 in student loan relief” and a starving person drinking from it labeled as “Lawyers and other white collar professionals”.
Here’s why that was probably one of the dumbest memes I’ve ever seen.
First up, just the economics of being a lawyer.
$165,000 is the average debt after law school.
With 4.6% being the average interest rate on undergrad debt and 6.1% being the debt on grad school, lawyers would on a 20 year student loan expect to pay $265,737 back.
$13,250 a year for 20 years.
Which for starting lawyers, where the average salary is $68,400, that student loan payment can be pretty rough, but there are ways to pay less early on, where by the time lawyers hit the five year mark and the average beings to reach the $100,000 mark, the student loan debt isn’t much.
The second point is the core point to the meme itself, which is that lawyers and higher education isn’t subsidized, but farmers/truck drivers are.
22 billion dollars was how much farmers got in subsidies from the federal government in 2019.
Just a quick comparison, the federal government in 2019 alone spent over 30 billion dollars on pell grants for higher education.
Through other departments and forms of grants, the federal government spent 80 billion dollars subsidizing higher education.
That’s also not including the massive spending on higher education on the state level, such as New York, which put in 7.8 billion into higher education in 2021.
Looking at this, what does it all mean?
First up, I actually am pro student loan bailouts.
The only reason I thought the Biden plan for the $10,000 in relief was a bad idea is two parts.
- It does nothing to fix the issue with student loans and colleges, which caused the debt to get so bad.
- The subsidy mainly helps upper middle class people or people who went to cheaper colleges, but does nothing for those in crippling debt.
If the plan was relief, with a long term fix, I think “hope”, everyone could get behind that.
That being said though, this meme is wrong and I weirdly think will just make the people opposed to the student loan relief more unhappy.
Higher education is one of the most subsidized things in the US, where most American’s don’t have a heavy student loan burden, due to attending state colleges, which are normally cheap.
This was just spreading false information that fields such as farming or truck drivers are getting a larger subsidy over college grads, which there’s no argument is the case.