> instead of me donating 5% of my paycheck to my favored cause, that spending power is erased

Yet another false dichotomy. Is there a reason you can't continue to donate the same amount of money to your favored cause even if your taxes were raised? You already said that you made more than $142,800 last year (the social security contribution limit), and it appears from your profile that you're still in your 20s, all of which suggests that you're doing better financially than most people.

Let me go back and disagree with something you said earlier:

> inflation correlated to public/deficit spending led me to cut my own charitable donations.

Current inflation is mainly due to:
1) Supply chain problems caused by the pandemic
2) Supply chain problems caused by the Ukraine war
3) Corporate profiteering under the cover of 1 and 2.

It's truly bizarre that people think pandemic relief funds are the cause of inflation when pandemic relief funds were only a partial replacement for the money that was already moving in the economy before the pandemic hit.

Anyway, returning to charity, there are multiple problems with relying on uncoordinated charity rather than concerted government spending. First is that there's never enough charity if it's voluntary. My favorite thing as a developer is when people suggest that I should make my software open source and free and take donations. That would be the fastest way to homelessness! At which point I would need even more donations.

Another problem is that people tend to want their small individual amount of charity to go to the "worthiest" cause (as they perceive it). The result is that certain "sexy" charities are oversubscribed, while other important societal problems get ignored.

> what's constructive about subsidizing an exclusive-by-design system?

Nothing. But tell that to employers who require or favor college degrees from prestigious schools.

Even if we abolished the whole university system, though, the existing student loan debt problem would remain.

> if forgiving loans today causes future students to take on greater amounts of unrepayable loans

It's worth noting that the biggest supporters of student loan debt forgiveness also tend to be the biggest supporters of publicly subsidized college. The opposite tends to be true of the biggest opponents of student loan debt forgiveness. So I'm not very sympathetic to complaints that forgiving student loans would raise college costs, because the proposed alternative seems to be: do nothing whatsoever about the problem.

Everyone complaining about debt forgiveness now, are they calling for their elected representatives to do something about college costs? Where have these people been before the forgiveness debate?

The very reason we need debt forgiveness now is that we've ignored the college cost problem for so long. So I don't want to hear "no forgiveness without comprehensive reform", because the refusal to do comprehensive reform is the source of the whole debt problem.

> i simply put more value on an expenditure which can benefit N*M future students v.s. one which benefits only M present (or past) individuals at an equivalent cost

N, M, N times M, there are all empty hand-waving. You still haven't said what you meant in specific terms by "compensate previous students", and thus it's impossible to estimate the costs or claim that it's too expensive.