Pay Back When You Can but the Debt Must be Fairly Attributed

Post -18 year-olds' claims upon the tax-payer are diverging rapidly and unequally.  Those who gain a university place must find £27,000 in fees and just under 3 years' maintenance: shall we say a round £60,000?  Those seeking work (at 18 or, for the moment, 16) but failing to find it, or finding it at minimum wage levels, are entitled to subvention by the tax-payer. 

Angels do not argue that young people should not have claims upon the tax-payer; or that all claims to support should first be met by family.  Until adulthood every young person has a claim for support on the family, but families should perhaps have more recognition from government of the financial burden they carry in supporting their young people. 

What is patently unacceptable is that those who are undertaking a university education, having achieved a place against the current odds, pay for it for long stretches of their working lives when other young people are being supported in their idleness.  Public debt is public debt: if we must all be ready to pay off what brownian economics left us then the debt must be shouldered by all, including those on welfare.