Kudos to columnist Victoria Hugo-Vidal for her brilliant and righteous takedown of Rep. Jared Golden’s diatribe on student loan forgiveness (The Maine Millennial, Aug. 27).

She takes issue with Golden’s definition of “working class” and his suggestion that young people “join the Marines” as a way to get a college education or “join a union and enter an apprenticeship.” She has excellent comebacks for all three.

She has other rejoinders to his poorly reasoned attack on student loan forgiveness. Her final thought on why loan forgiveness riles so many is that it’s a “class signifier”; in other words, it’s an effort for a person to rise to a higher class. This is one of the benefits of a college education, and Golden opposes that because he doesn’t think other Mainers should foot the bill for it. She cites other examples of where our money goes without our choice.

One has to wonder why this issue caused such an extreme response from Golden. I hope he reads and absorbs this column.

Barbara Doughty
Portland