New US Student Loan Forgiveness Brings Total to $175 Billion for 5 Million People (cnn.com) 196
"Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.
While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.
This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness: "For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.
CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year." The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.
While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.
This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness: "For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.
CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year." The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.
Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even more screwed up than that. They structured student loans as non-dischargeable debt, while also mixing in a mixture of grants, affirmative action, parental income ceilings, and other crap. Then you have the people who lived off of Ramen soup, worked their way through undergraduate and grad school, put off their lives for education, etc. who are going to be legitimately pissed because the message this kind of policy sends the subsequent generations is to spend like drunken sailors and vote money at the next election to the detriment of everybody else. That money comes from somewhere either as higher taxes or inflation when the government prints a bunch of money.
Then you have the people who already paid off their loans who are left out in the cold. Then you have the people who spent like drunken sailors anyway and are now complaining that they have to pay off the debt that they accumulated while bar hopping, taking vacations in Cancun, and narrowly getting a degree in Gender Studies or something equally economically useless.
This goes on and on, which is why it's such a phenomenally bad idea all around. The student loan system released the colleges to raise tuition rates while providing less value, while at the same time disincentivizing the students from using it for something productive. That's why you have secretarial positions that require a four year college degree for no good reason. They don't care what the degree is in, just that you have one. Now to buy votes the government is taxing everybody else (including those who were frugal, paid off their loans, or didn't go to college at all) to give a handout to some target demographic.
I got a useful degree that involved undergraduate, graduate, professional school, and post-graduate training. I worked my way through college, lived at home with the parents to save money, didn't travel, didn't vacation, and so on to keep the total loan down, then I paid it off. Now here come these entitled bozos who did the exact opposite, and the Biden administration gives them five figures. Where's my $35,000 handout?
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...this kind of policy sends the subsequent generations is to spend like drunken sailors and vote money at the next election to the detriment of everybody else...
Or maybe it sends the message "we're starting to clue in that making education as easy to access as possible raises the value of our citizens/work-force, which benefits everybody."
I mean... sure, you can play the "I had to walk to school bare-foot, uphill, both ways so everyone else should too" card, or you can realize that all of the awesome stuff you have is because humanity as a whole has continued to claw its way out of ignorance.
Re: Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:2)
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Or maybe it sends the message "we're starting to clue in that making education as easy to access as possible raises the value of our citizens/work-force, which benefits everybody."
While I'm in support of this idea they haven't addressed it. Forgiving loans is a great second step, but the first step needs to be addressing the fundamental problem with the cost of education in the first place, otherwise you just get to rinse and repeat the forgiveness process every few years resulting in little more than a government funding for the banking industry while universities pad their coffers.
Re: Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:2)
When you make widgets twice as efficiently as you did last year, the price of a widget studies degree just doubled.
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You lived on ramen, worked hard, and paid your loans.
Others went on vacation, spend needlessly, and got a degree in gender studies.
Don't you see how your motivated reasoning poisons the entire logic of your argument? Try harder. You got a college degree, you should be capable of it.
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Then you have the people who lived off of Ramen soup
They didn't. Ramen soup doesn't have vitamin C so they died of scurvy.
Re:Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:4, Insightful)
Payoff to Public Service Employee Unions (Score:2)
Re:Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:4, Insightful)
Weird to put the VP first just because they are the ones running for re-election.
The biden campaign promise to eliminate some student debt was from around April 2020 or earlier. https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/j... [medium.com]
Kamala wasn't announced as VP until august.
So sick of people lumping in presidents and VPs as if they are the same person with the same plan. They are not. Just like how Trump and Pence were never the same and how Pence hates the guy now.
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Anyone who lists the VP at all never mind first when naming the administration clearly has a huge axe to grind.
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If we could fix every past mistake, that'd be great. But it's damn near impossible to do that under ideal circumstances, and our government makes it near impossible to do anything good.
Switching college education from mostly public funding to mostly private funding via loans was a disaster. We don't have a political climate where we can even bother discussing the idea of reforming that. We do have laws that allow us to help some people in certain situations tho. Take the small wins you can get and keep tryi
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It may be bitter, but it's not petty. Calling out enablers of bad behavior is appropriate and should be encouraged.
Re: Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:2)
Re:Taxing the poor to aid the rich (Score:5, Interesting)
Good for you. Why are you so petty and bitter?
Because the Biden-Harris payoff does nothing to fix the problem, which is exorbitant tuition for degrees that do not equip a graduate to pay off the loans by himself. The loan sharks get paid off in full and the bloated educrats get paid off in full, at the expense of the taxpayers, while the students are still getting poor value for our money.
How would I do it? Structure a negotiated settlement by which the universities would get a fraction of their tuition and Washington no longer subsidizing the lenders. This way, students would have to convince lenders that their degree would result in Jon's that would pay off the financing, and colleges would have to compete for students, restraining tuition increases.
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Since you can't count, the GI Bill was passed in the 40s and Nixon was later (who was actually a crook too.)
BTW, if politics was simple, you'd understand it: They don't pass everything for the reasons they state at the time. Nixon went along with the popular EPA that the GOP today wants to kill; vetoing it wouldn't have succeeded and doing something popular is good strategy... They had rivers catching on fire pollution was so bad.
I actually knew a person who was part of the GOP group that opposes universal
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if you think your thing rebut what i wrote, you're mistaken. worlds complex.
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My company implemented an affirmative action; they put a menstrual cups distributor in the men's bathroom! So, birthing men can now have easy access to them for the brand new vagina they've just got installed.
So? Maybe women who identify as men still want to give birth? It makes sense since historically men have given birth, that such women would want to be and identify as men.
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This loan shark business is a tax on the working class to aid the upper classes. Robbin Hood in reverse.
It's way more than just that. They want to destroy the Middle Class for everyone, leaving an uncrossable no-mans-land between the Working Class and them, and they especially want to keep non-white people -- in addition to women -- from getting ahead, acquiring wealth in any form (which very much includes owning property), and very much discouraging non-white people from having families. They couldn't care less if they're told that might mean America falls behind the rest of the world as an innovator, so lon
Why should plumbers, welders, ... pay your debt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Forgiving student debt is a wealth transfer from people that did not attend college and people that attended and paid for their college to people that borrowed money for college and are not willing or able to pay back the debt.
Please give reasons why a plumber, welder, coal miner, fisherman, oil rig worker, truck driver, garbageman, sewer worker, roofer and any of the hundreds of dirty, dangerous jobs done by nearly 100% men need to pay back student loans owed by other people who do not risk their life and
Fiduciary duty of lenders is absent (Score:5, Interesting)
Suggestions:
- The lender should have a fiduciary duty to loan money based on the future ability of the person to pay back the loan ...
- The borrower is entering into a contract to 1) complete their college degree, 2) get a job, 3) save enough from the job earnings to pay back the loan, 4) pay back the loan in a timely manner
- The provider of service, the university, should be added to the contract that, they hold 25% of a student's debt and cannot resell it, repackage it, securitize it, buy loan insurance for, etc. and absorb 50% of the missed payments, and for past-due loans, they are put at the bottom of the creditors list to be paid back last
- Refinancing or debt consolidation of student loans only refinances the portion not held by the university
- The government should require universities to publish detailed statistics of student loan borrowers, field of study, year of study, amount of debt owed, year of graduation, degree at graduation, and year by year repayment numbers, and 5 year repayment percent, 10 year repayment percent,
Summary: The university should originate and hold 25% of the loan in perpetuity until the loan is paid back and not be able to get out of holding the loan
Re: Fiduciary duty of lenders is absent (Score:3)
Well, that's one way to make sure the existence of student loans actually does push up college costs, rather than merely correlate. (Service sector productivity will not mirror productivity gains in the broader economy, thus a difference in the sector's inflation rate.) Where is the money going to come from that the college was going to use for operations, right
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The lender should have a fiduciary duty to loan money based on the future ability of the person to pay back the loan
This will reduce demand. Current guaranteed loans are completely disassociated from any ability to repay other than inability to discharge in bankruptcy. Any prospective student without an ability to repay would be taken o
Re:Why should plumbers, welders, ... pay your debt (Score:4, Insightful)
That's you. That's how fucking stupid your argument is. You want the USA to be stuck being a shithole country because anything else would be "unfair". The current government understands benefits of having an educated populace, to avoid ending up with retards like you who are barely able to function, and are a drain on resources.
Why should a middle class worker pay taxes just so a billionaire corporation can get handouts? Why should their taxes pay for roads or hospitals they won't use? Why is the government giving billions to private space industry, tell me which poor people are getting holidays to the moon?
Oh also, tertiary education used to be free in the US. Tell me how that is fair on the people who now have to sign up for a life-long debt for the education they were told was required to do anything more than flipping burgers. A class of people by the way whom your society has grown to loath, and serve as a warning to others, rather than people deserving of respect. Your country is fucked, and fuckwits like you want to keep it that way.
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But to be more aggressive "like a man", because that's all you seem to understand:
Why shouldn't society pay it's end of the bill? Please give reasons why society should get to weasel it's way out of the SIGNED CONTRACT that authorized the loans in the first place, as well as their dissolution if the government chose to do so?
Please explain why society didn't place
Re: Why should plumbers, welders, ... pay your deb (Score:4, Informative)
Where is everyone else's guarantee that they will get a return? Where is a university's incentive to keep costs down? Everything publically funded is overpriced. You want to forcefully take people's money, give it to others, and tell them to shut up and just trust them cause it's for their own good. College makes you so special that unlike anyone else, society owes you for your time.
Re: Why should plumbers, welders, ... pay your deb (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is a university's incentive to keep costs down? Everything publically funded is overpriced.
You do realize the entire root of this problem is that we used to publicly fund education, but then we switched to private funding mostly via loans, right?
All of this comes down to costs were reasonable when we publicly funded education. We tried to privatize it and costs exploded because now it's about profit.
Now we've got an entire generation that's in horrible financial shape because the previous generation screwed them over for profit. We can't fix the solution .We can't make everything fair. But we sure can try to limit the damage.
Re: Why should plumbers, welders, ... pay your de (Score:3)
So do you; you're just suffering under the illusion that only one side of this argument is doing so. You're demanding that someone who has made the government whole, as if they never borrowed the money in the first place, continue to pay because some balance and prior understanding says so. I guess I'm not exactly sure who you want to give that money to, but apparently
Overuse of 4-year degree requirement harmful (Score:5, Insightful)
Because society benefits from an educated workforce.
A 4-year degree program is only one educational path.
There are also trade schools and apprenticeships. The former being well serviced by community colleges.
Also society does not benefit by an artificial 4-year degree requirement. When a job requires a 4-year degree, and doesn't care what the degree is in, then it's probably there just to create a class barrier. You don't want the riff raff lower class getting into too many management trainee programs or becoming officers in the military.
This also leads to a lowering of standards to accommodate incoming freshman who are less academically prepared or capable. For example before WW2 the 4-year degree programs enrolled about 8% of HS grads, today its around 16%. So if the recruiting pool is the top 16% rather than the top 8% of HS grads you have to reduce standards, simplify the degree program. We overuse 4-year degree requirements and harm society by doing so.
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Please give reasons why a plumber, welder, coal miner, fisherman, oil rig worker, truck driver, garbageman, sewer worker, roofer and any of the hundreds of dirty, dangerous jobs done by nearly 100% men need to pay back student loans owed by other people who do not risk their life and health to go to work.
That is a stupid argument. Government funding and monetary policy as a form of wealth transfer does not discriminate for people. Talking about your local garbage man is nothing more than an emotional hook like "won't you think of the children". No one is risking their life for others here. Their job, their work, their taxes remain unaffected.
While you may question the value of the bail out, if you want to make a reasonable argument then you need to limit it to the overall benefit to society.
Defrauded but still owe? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a little hazy on how you owe money when you were defrauded. Going to a college that made false promises means they lied and defrauded you. That's a crime. So I don't understand how the student (victim of fraud) would be on the hook and not the fraudulent university?
I'm not saying this is exactly what happened just that I don't understand how the victim is still held liable for the loan.
Otherwise, good for Biden/Harris for following through on a government program, Public Service Loan Forgiveness, since that was clearly passed and should be enforced.
Re:Defrauded but still owe? (Score:5, Informative)
Fair enough. Except those student loans are un-dischargeable. If you lose your job, career, family, house and you’re living in a cardboard box, and declare bankruptcy, those student loans stick to you like handcuffs. There’s basically no force in the universe that allows you to get out of them. Some people are truly trapped in debt because of them.
Except forgiving the loan DEFINITELY amounts to taxing poor uneducated people and transferring the wealth to people who are mostly educsted and middle-or-higher class. It’s messy.
Re: Defrauded but still owe? (Score:2)
And not forgiving the loan DEFINITELY amounts to taxing debt and transferring wealth.
Were you to run some actual numbers on, say, a set of parent loans for a kid that graduated this spring, you'd see you'd have to forgive more than half the current balance, right now, for the government to merely make a small amount of money instead of an amount that should be unconscionable as a tax on debt. Yes, tha
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Except forgiving the loan DEFINITELY amounts to taxing poor uneducated people
No, it amounts to taxing an idiotic general public that allowed their government to create these bad loans in the first place. It's not just a tax on poor uneducated (let's face it) conservatives. It's a tax on everyone.
If a lender writes a bad loan, they are still on the hook for it even if the borrower declares bankruptcy. That's the reason why they'll ask the court to garnish wages or sell off assets in an attempt to make some of the loan back in exchange for dissolution. Nevertheless, society realize
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While I tend to be in favor of the government getting out of... just about everything, the argument for government being in this system is that if it were up to the banks, only people with good co-signers with great credit are going to be able to get loans for their kids, and only non-traditional students who've already worked for a while and built up their own credit are going t
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That’s easy. The shady college can still afford more lawyers than you.
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What fraud did colleges commit? They offered the programs they chose and people willingly took them. Does any college promise a high paying job upon graduation? Of course not, they cannot make that promise. No, unfortunately the fraud is our culture that pushed kids into college. It was our teachers, our pare
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Lies all round - but the students are accountable (Score:2)
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The difference is that the children were lied to throughout their middle and high school years by their teachers desperate to give meaning to their own lives as to how without college they were worthless. And children are idiots because their brain structures governing mid term to long term decision making aren't properly formed until 18ish and 24ish respectively.
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That excuse was tired 20 years ago, and it certainly hasn't applied over the last decade.
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They paid more than the loan terms (Score:3)
Loan companies illegally lied and/or used pressure tactics to keep people paying
The $175bn is from that. It's loans that should have long since been forgiven. Typically much more than the principle has been paid. Often by a factor of 2 or 3.
We should be arresting the loan company owners but Biden has barely managed to get these illegal loans forgiven.
Re: Defrauded but still owe? (Score:2, Flamebait)
The words used to describe these activities is misleading.
The situation is the student borrowed money from the Gov't to buy coursework at a school.
If the school defrauded the student, the student could sue the school.
Imagine you borrowed money from a bank to buy a car, and it turns out you bought a lemon. You still owe the loan balance, you need to get your satisfaction from the dealer.
The loans being forgiven are not means-tested, they are not limited to students that were defrauded, and are a purely polit
Official act (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an “official act” and thanks to the supreme court it’s legal. The worst that can happen is an impeachment vote.
Re:Official act (Score:5, Insightful)
This corrupt SCOTUS can decide case by case whatever BS they like just like they did when they ruled the constitution was unconstitutional with some legal BS word games the idiot reporters can't grasp, even with professors as guests.
They will if they want find some exception; like in 2000 when they appointed Bush and then said their ruling was a once off non precedent setting ruling.
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No, if it's an "official act" then the Trump administration won't be able to criminally prosecute Biden and Harris for it.
On the other hand, each of the last five or so times they tried basically the same thing, courts told them it wasn't legal and they couldn't do it. When the same happens this time, there will be good argument that they will have known it wasn't legitimate and therefore couldn't be an official act.
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... I'm sorry, do you actually think that being an official act makes the cancellation valid or are you just purposefully being a disingenuous little shitweasel? I really can't tell. In any case it doesn't. What that decision you are referencing does do is protect Biden from being sued by people who did pay off their college loans or by people not covered under the conditions outlined, assuming any of them had standing which they almost certainly don't. The loans in question WILL be reinstated, assuming any
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That if is doing more heavy lifting than Eddie Hall.
Re: Official act (Score:2)
You can't criminally prosecute an elected official when they pass illegal laws. That is established law that pre-dates the SCOTUS decision you complain about.
You really should read the decision, rather than key news readers or politicians running for office 'paraphrase it' for you.
Hey! (Score:2, Insightful)
College was correlated to a middle income life (Score:5, Insightful)
The only value in the actual degree paper, for most degrees, is getting past HR. So instead of giving away 175B maybe we should change the hiring process. Ban asking for degrees, ban giving raises to government employees just because they have an additional couple letters to their title. Make HR actually screen for merit.
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A college degree was never a ticket to the middle class.
Saying that reflection of reality now does nothing to help the people who were lied to for years. Stay in school, get a good job, earn a good living. That was what entire generations were told by *everyone*.
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I'm 30% disabled, Service Connected. For that I receive roughly $540 a month in compensation. I'm also on Social Security. Now, if I had a student loan and were behind on it does that mean that you think I shouldn't receive either of those government benefits?
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I don't know what cloud cuckoo land you're living in, but I wouldn't want to join you there. Nobody with the slightest hope of getting elected wants to cut or remove VA compensation for service connected disabilities. Why? Because veterans tend to vote in larger percentages than voters that never served do, and it wouldn't matter
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[citation needed]
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Come up with some links to reputable sites or admit that you're making this up.
Don't matter! (Score:3)
Re:Don't matter! (Score:5, Insightful)
The government gravy train for all the grifters is coming to an end.
What are you talking about? The biggest grifter of all time is trying to get back in so he can grift off the taxpayers even more [citizensforethics.org] than he did the last time [yahoo.com].
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You talking about this guy? https://nymag.com/intelligence... [nymag.com]
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Vote for Trump: his 2nd biggest talent is CAUSING bankruptcy and people won't even blame him because his biggest talent is lying.
Student loans are insane (Score:2)
All they do is prevent people from getting the qualification that would serve society best. It is no surprise the US still has to import a major portion of its academics. That is incredibly short-sighted.
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The US imports academics because they can, not because they need to. They get people with far more experience with research and as faculty if they import foreigners, anyone with the same level of experience is either already faculty or hopped to the private sector and not coming back.
Having people with the ability doesn't magically confer those people the 10 years of experience which Universities can find abroad.
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here's a way this could be more palatable... (Score:5, Informative)
here's a way this could be more palatable...
Government takes over the debt, and lowers the interest rate to something closer to zero/or inflation... so only cost is managing it, while students pay the loans back, and not interest.
What is killing the students and the economy is that they are stuck paying upwards of 10K a year for loan repayment a year, only to have their principal drop by a few hundred bucks... anecdotal story of a woman that spent 10 years paying down the student debt and managed to pay 120K. on an 80K loan.. .with the principal dropping to a lovely 76K... I'd be hard pressed to find most people who can pay over 10K a year in debt repayment. Think of the benefit to the economy if that debt was paid off at cost... and the hundreds of billions of dollars being available to spend to drive the economy instead of funding bankers extravagance. This could be massive driver for economic growth.
With next steps being - letting the feds offer tuition assistance at a lower interest rate to those that qualify, with a crap ton of rules/caps to prevent abuse by maybe looking at the dozens of other countries that do this... and maybe states investing in their state schools...
There is not debt (Score:5, Insightful)
The $175bn here are loans where the terms of the loan have already been satisfied and more interest than principle has been paid.
The loan companies were illegally collecting on a debt that the debtors either didn't know should be discharged or didn't have enough lawyers to do anything about.
As for you point about the gov't paying the debt, we just forgave around $3 trillion in small business loans during COVID, most of which went to large businesses who created small ones on paper to soak up the loan money.
So I say we just wipe out all the debt, tell the private equity vultures they should be glad their not in prison for what they did in 2008 and then go back the one good thing from the early 60s: tuition free college.
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Lots of people have their debt discharged (Score:2)
Several Donald Trump donors got tens of millions and in a few egregious cases hundreds of millions of dollars just kind of handed to them for free from our taxpayer dollars and then the loans immediately forgiven. Joe Biden put the brakes on that but around 3 trillion was given out beforehand
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I literally said it's not about paying/forgiving the debt in the first line... it's about transferring it from the banks to the feds... and having people pay it back at an interest rate that covers the cost of the program.. not a profit.
"Government takes over the debt, and lowers the interest rate to something closer to zero/or inflation... so only cost is managing it, while students pay the loans back, and not interest."
Banks will suck several times the amount of the principal in interest charges.
It's not
Wait so you're perfectly okay (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a weird hill to die on...
Also you are literally ending on the policy Hillary Clinton made the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign, which is lower interest rates for student loans. It was a stupid idea when she proposed it and it's a stupid idea now.
It's actually fucking hilarious watching your mental gymnastics. On the one hand you know screwing over the next generation is both bad for you a
Re: There is not debt (Score:3)
This is the government's debt already- there hasn't been a non-direct loan issued in 15 years, the "mortgage crisis" had most other guaranteed-but-private loans purchased by the Department of Education, and anyone that cared to consolidate their pre-2010 loan anytime in those 15 years now has a direct consolidation loan. (And they mostly did due to the additional benefits the direct loans have.) As to the interest rate, you can certainly advocate as you are, but y
Re: here's a way this could be more palatable... (Score:2)
Check, already happened years ago. Try to keep up.
Fun fact: college was free in the 60s (Score:3)
Ronald Reagan's people talked about the need to cut funding to keep the "bourgeoisie" (their word, not mine) under control. The YouTube Channel Some More News covered it about 2/3rds the way into their Reagan segment.
Bush Jr delt the final blow to federal funding for colleges resulting in the debt crisis we have today. I just finished getting my kid through college and if I take out the extra money I gave 'em so they didn't feel pressured to get a part time job it was around $180k. I lived like a pauper for 4 years to cover it and still walked away with $20k in debt.
The upper class, the elites, don't need us anymore. They want H1-Bs. They want people from other countries because then they don't have to pay to educate them. At most they have to send 'em to a grad school to get some final training they need, and if that doesn't work out they ship 'em back and the loans those H1-Bs took get paid for by our tax dollars.
Oh, and for all the "Be a plumber or HVAC" guys, fun fact: Private Equity firms noticed that too and they're buying up all the small businesses and running the ones that won't sell out of business with anti-competitive practices that are illegal but not enforced.
Like it or not folks we're gonna have to fix this mess, no matter how much you hate college kids. But maybe you'll die before the shit hits the fan. That seems to be the plan for a lot of folks. Leave the mess to their kids.
Fun fact: rsilvergun is a serial liar (Score:3)
He doesn't provide any evidence for his assertions, and they are easily disproven [time.com]. What has changed a lot since the 1920s or 1950s is that (a) we send a lot more students to college than before but haven't increased the number or sizes of colleges nearly as much, (b) businesses use college degrees to help screen out unreliable workers because they're no longer allowed to use a lot of other methods like aptitude years, and (c) colleges now include a lot of additional benefits like fancy gyms, fancy food and
Ouch (Score:2)
For those of us that paid our student loan back (Score:2)
We're just suckers. Personal responsibility is of course racist.
Lawsuits coming in 3, 2, 1... (Score:2)
What they are calling "fixes" to the law that allows forgiveness is expanding the program beyond what the law allowed. It will get shot down by the courts, after the election of course. Buying votes by making empty promises is the goal anyway
The irony is suffocating (Score:2)
Many recent college graduates love to believe those who don't go to college are complete idiots. . . . .
. . . yet, those uneducated " idiots " aren't eyeballs deep in student loan debt begging to be forgiven :|
It's rather amusing to watch really.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
vote for those who give you money
Elon Musk makes $100 offer to Pennsylvania voters to pledge to vote for Trump.
Re: (Score:2)
vote for those who give you money
Elon Musk makes $100 offer to Pennsylvania voters to pledge to vote for Trump.
Which is a violation of election laws. Needless to say, this is not election interference [nbcnews.com] according to the convicted felon, so nothing will be done.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: vote (Score:2)
I ask rhetorically, of course, Republicans don't give a shit about reality.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The GOP almost always has run on giving you tax cuts to buy votes - which mostly is people who actually make money to pay taxes. If somebody else gets some money it's a nightmare... meanwhile the real serious grifters (usually corporate) walk away with crazy amounts of money.
Re: (Score:3)
These loans created money by fractional reserve though; they weren't loans of "actual" money, and discharging them simply undoes the money creation.
This type of loan discharge does not actually "cost" much in terms of the way people generally consider cost, and the benefit to society is arguably better than the cost it did incur.
Now, as for the harder to predict cost about, does this really incentivize people to just take out loans and hope they are forgiven, and the cost that incurs on society; I cannot sa
Money creation, not deletion (Score:2)
These loans created money by fractional reserve though; they weren't loans of "actual" money, and discharging them simply undoes the money creation.
No it does not because the money created is now in the hands of the university. A loan is a negative amount of money because it is owing. Deleting it is effectively the creation of even more money. It essentially increases the money supply because now people get to keep and spend the money they would otherwise be using to pay off the loan.
Re:Money creation, not deletion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what school of thought informed your theory of money, but it's wrong. Money is debt. If I perform a service for you and you give me money, it's because I didn't get anything in exchange for that service at time of service; the money represents the "debt" that I'm owed something in exchange for that service, at a future time.
Thus "destroying money" forgives the debt. Similarly, discharging debt (by repayment or by forgiveness) destroys money (because there is no claim on future exchange). Again, because money is debt.
Money supply cannot be increased by people spending money they have on thing A instead of thing B. Money supply is only increased when people don't spend their money and have it in a bank which allows the banks to issue loans when people do take on debt - money is created only when debt is increased.
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money is created only when debt is increased.
Exactly. but if the government waves its magic wand and just makes the loan on the bank's books disappear without actually repaying it that does not make the money that first loan created disappear so, in some sense, that debt still exists it is just that nobody is tracking it now. Relieved from having the loan on their books the bank can now make more loans, thus creating money and increasing money supply.
Effectively the government printed money and gave it to the bank to cancel the loan. It's similar
Re: Money creation, not deletion (Score:2)
Re: Erm (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I admit that technically you're likely correct; the government sold bonds to source those loans. Selling a bond, though, is effectively no different than fractional reserve: issuing debt creates money. This is at the societal level; those bonds were very likely not bought with cash but with leveraged funds (that is, created by loans).
Cash accounts are tied to deposit accounts, so it's very likely that the account used to buy a bond, or the account against which your hamburger cash was drawn, is, in fact, c
Re: (Score:2)
How about all the politicians who were forgiven in their six and seven figure PPP loans? https://www.nbcnews.com/news/a... [nbcnews.com]
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The 'free money for everyone' pitch is coming from both parties. The only difference is who they want to give the free money too...i.e. their respective voting blocks. And of course the money isn't free, anything but free. Neither party ever mentions that.
In this way you are correct, there is already a one party system. One group is tax-and-spend, the other is debt-and-spend, the commonality is SPEND. That's our one party. The SPEND party.
Funny thing is , a robust balanced budget would actually be
Re: Effing bullshit (Score:2)
Next time, take the loans, leave your money invested, and earn more over the 30-year life of the loan, after taxes, than it costs you to pay off the loan. Don't worry: the government comes out ahead too.