ATTS

⚡️This system is functioning exactly as designed. Student loans are not education financing. They are human capital annuities. The borrower is the asset. The payments are the yield. The goal is not repayment. The goal is duration. When interest accrues at a rate that consumes almost the entire payment, that is not a mistake in math. That is a choice in architecture. The loan is structured so the borrower remains solvent enough to keep paying, but never free enough to exit. This is why the balances barely move even under heavy payments. The system optimizes for perpetual obligation, not resolution. What makes this uniquely corrosive is timing. These loans are issued before income is real, before bargaining power exists, before the borrower understands compounding, risk, or the labor market they are entering. Consent exists on paper but not in reality. That matters. The deeper truth is that student loans quietly replaced wages as the shock absorber of a shrinking middle class. Instead of society paying for education through taxes or employers paying through higher wages, the cost was pushed forward in time and pinned to individuals who had no leverage. That kept headline numbers clean while hollowing out the future. Interest doing the work of a tax without calling itself a tax is the tell. Taxes at least have an endpoint and a political accountability loop. This has neither. This is why you see despair instead of reform. You cannot reform something without admitting intent. Admitting intent collapses legitimacy. So the system pretends the problem is financial literacy, budgeting, or personal responsibility. That narrative protects the structure by blaming the captive. The psychological damage is as important as the financial one. When someone realizes they can do everything right and still sink, trust collapses. Once trust collapses, participation becomes transactional at best and hostile at worst. That is why people disengage, gamble, flee into extremes, or simply stop caring about preserving institutions that treat them as amortization schedules. This is also why defaults are rising and why enforcement is returning. When voluntary belief fails, coercion steps in. Garnishment is the final admission that the social contract failed and force is now required. A healthy system creates citizens who plan decades ahead. This system creates workers who plan month to month and resent the future. A society cannot indefinitely run on obligations that never resolve. Eventually the asset revolts, exits, or breaks. And when that happens, the problem will suddenly be called a crisis, even though it was engineered quietly for decades.