It fixes a lot for the people struggling with them right now.
We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
Aka, politics as usual.
The interest/payments pause is not the same thing as the student loan forgiveness plan. They're entirely different things.
Now, if we’re going to argue about the very specific loan forgiveness being effective, then sure, it has been currently struck down. But I have trouble believing that nothing good has come from it, if only by forcing this convo, and convos like these taking place.
Sometimes you have to do something loud to get people’s attention; it certainly got yours.
If I know anything, it's that "people" are often simply wrong about stuff. If a bunch of people wrongly thing two different things are the same, that doesn't make it so.
> The general tone of this convo has been that nothing helpful has come from these actions, and that’s not true.
I don't care about the general tone, I was only responding to the statement that A "did" good because different-thing B "did good."
My understanding is this thread is specifically about the student loan forgiveness plan that was just ruled unconstitutional, not some amorphous larger thing (which may be how you personally think about it).
It doesn't say anything about the moral hazard of paying off student loans for those who haven't paid them, while ignoring those who have. Or about the likelihood that a student loan cancelation will need to happen again. Or that those two things together will encourage people not to pay their student loans in the future, hoping for another cancelation. Or that universities will be able to raise prices even more because they expect further cancellations.
Sure, the deficit may not go up as much as naively you'd expect it to. And we won't have to pay it off with taxes immediately. (we'll just have more debt instead). But you seem to not care about all of the reasons that people oppose this, and just throw a pdf in their face, hoping it'll shut them up even when it doesn't argue what you want it to argue. Please stop.
The interest rate pause was not declared unconstitutional today - and it will continue until the loans are scheduled to be started again in the next couple months.
The pause will continue until September (it was not effected at all by this ruling) so it once again exists without the forgiveness policy.
Why do you think one cannot exist without the other? The pause is fine with or without the forgiveness, and the pause existing didn’t save the forgiveness.
> Congress recently passed a law preventing further extensions of the payment pause. Student loan interest will resume starting on Sept. 1, 2023, and payments will be due starting in October. We will notify borrowers well before payments restart.
Source: https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/covid-19/payment...
This is not a problem that is going to be solved by injecting more unaccountable government cash into the system. Students would just take on more debt, expecting more forgiveness, and schools would thus simply continue raising prices. Why would anybody do anything differently?
Guys, seriously, we’re not talking about people taking loans out to do blow and hookers, they’re trying to get an education. You’re all acting like we’re just going to give out forgiveness and then throw our hands up and doing nothing after that.
Maybe you're responding to what I said about unaccountable government cash? But you seem to be thinking I'm saying it's the students who lack accountability and whose incentives are screwed up by the government cash?
That's not it at all, it's not the students' incentives that are a mess under the current system and an even worse mess under the perpetual forgiveness system. It is schools whose incentives are messed up. They have no reason to keep from raising tuition and fees indefinitely because they are guaranteed to be paid. It's that problem that setting a precedent for forgiveness makes worse.
It has nothing to do with what people with student debt spend their money on.
But it is not the only potential solution.
But the availability of other actual potential solutions does not make the non-solution of one-time blanket forgiveness that we're discussing here any more appealing to me.
Don't worry, sugar daddy government's got your back Jack.
Also points scored in the last election. IIRC, this plan was announced a single month before the 2022 election. They got to benefit from the votes of people who thought they were getting their loans forgiven, without ever actually doing that.
If it was so certain that they had no intention of going through with it, why not call their bluff and turn the responsibility for killing it back on them?
That's the wrong question. It was never if they had "intention of going through with it," it was about if they would be able to actually pull it off. The GGP stated "This was doomed to fail from the beginning and I bet they knew it," and I have to agree. Their plan to push this through purely via executive action was very likely to fail (and did), and the lawyers and politicians who formulated almost certainly knew the odds.
The legal analysis at the time of its passage certainly thought there was a strong legal argument for it to be allowed.
Forgiving either person's debt will improve each one's finances, but won't affect whether they've gone to college in the past.
Edit: in case it wasn't obvious, the question is rhetorical. I'm not advocating for forgiving any kind of debt.
It'd be fair to ask why student debt vs other kinds of federally held debt, but why notmall debt is pretty clear.
But this is going into the weeds and not really addressing the point of the argument.
You can already do that with bankruptcy, but it specifically does not apply for student loans
Bankruptcy is very different than student loan forgiveness. For example, 91% of people hire an attorney to do the bankruptcy, there are court fees, you take a huge hit on your credit score, you can't get credit, you either get put on a payment plan or you have to liquidate your assets, etc. Compared to that, student loan forgiveness is basically a freebie. When I asked, "why not forgive any type of debt," I meant it in the same kind of way that student loan forgiveness works.
You are the one telling me bankruptcy has consequences
The point is school debt is specifically excluded from bankruptcy by law so people have no recourse
You ask why not forgive all debts, and my response is we don’t need to do that, if debt is enough of a burden people can file bankruptcy
Yes, there are consequences and people have to make that choice
There is no choice for student loan debt, hence forgiveness
You can’t have it both ways - there has to be an out
> We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
But this plan stretched the law past its breaking point, which why it was struck down. IIRC, the plan would have been OK if Congress had only passed a law explicitly granting the authority to forgive the loans, which it didn't even when Democrats controlled Congress.
IMHO, They'd fix the student loan issue immediately if Congress passed a law to allow the debt be discharged in bankruptcy (but maybe with some kind of delay or different fix to prevent the previous abuses of bankruptcy that led to the current regime), and perhaps added a claw-back from the schools for future government loans.
Come on. It's not no "unintelligible, extremely disorganized speech or writing manifested as a symptom of a mental disorder" to disagree with you.
Furthermore, framing this as just about "not helping people" is simple-minded. There are almost always trade-offs between different goods, and maintaining separation of powers is an important good as well. There are serious, serious problems with allowing small provisions of law meant to solve small problems to be re-interpreted to allow the executive to unilaterally make massive policy changes.
Same for the discrimination case where the plaintiffs had neither suffered damage, nor prior restraint, nor were actually engaged in the line of business in which they claimed to be.
The court is now accepting purely hypothetical cases when it’s convenient for them - this was someone who might start a web business and might suffer adverse action. The action that might be punished hasn’t even occurred yet, let alone any governmental response, nor is their even any bona fide movement towards the action that might be restrained, let alone any indication the government might restrain it.
It’s extremely damaging to our legal fabric to have this double-standard applied across the system. This is calvinball territory, the court is changing the rules of the game for different participants. Different people get an entirely different process based on which group you fall into, and the process difference is so drastic it effectively determines the outcome of the case.
The law already allows the debt to be discharged in bankruptcy, though it sets more difficult terms than for debt generally.