Borrowers Got $127B in Student Loans Canceled
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
One valid way of looking at this is that the debt cancellation costs nothing: the value of the loan doesn't end up being paid by anybody else, it genuinely ceases to exist. The direct cost is $0.
But obviously, you've reduced the future income of the government by that amount: that necessarily means that at some future time, taxes must be raised or spending must be cut (or the deficit increased...) to preserve the status quo and cover the shortfall ($300B - $980B over the next decade for the original plan, according to the CBO).
The argument that forgiving the debt has no cost to society is disingenuous. But so is the argument that "the remaining value of the debt will have to be paid by other people". The reality is somewhere in between.
You entered into an agreement and then borrowed money. But now are expecting the country to pay your loan back?
I would’ve been ok with erasing the interest. Just not the principal.
Also if one knows how it all works it's obvious it's just a give away to the banking industry.
But again, I’d personally like to find that source to verify if this is true. And if it is, those loans had no business getting forgiven.
(I hit the highest marginal income brackets and support this policy; good policy is the interaction of compassion and pragmatism at scale)
I worked and saved to help my kids go to school, and they worked jobs to pay for their education.
I’m it paying for your kid’s education as well.
The right way to deal with this is go after the schools and get the money refunded, not force others to take on the debts.
I’m already playing in full for my kids college. Why should I have to pay for another person’s education too?
Alternatively, we could use that money to murder brown children overseas, as we usually do. Or, provide giveaways to the rich in the form of subsidies and preferential tax treatment for their unearned income which is always a favorite too.
Really, we should go back to free higher education like the older boomers had available to them, and is still available in many civilized countries. But, the right and far-right controls policy in the US.
I worked hard to save for my children’s schooling, as did they, taking part time bd full-time summer jobs. We chose the schools that did not require loans or that required minimal loans.
Funding education via individual ability to pay vs. taxation perpetuates class divisions from birth-- a defacto caste system. It sounds like you and your children chose your parents sufficiently well that this is not a concern for you. Lucky you.
I predict that the "Fuck you, I've got mine," attitude is, in large part, going to be what brings western society crashing down. And, I would argue that this attitude, and the policies that naturally flow from it, absolutely had a part in creating our fucked up system-- where people who did not choose their parents as well as you have to take on debt to get an education, in the first place.
> Many of the programs that the Biden administration is using have existed for years, sometimes decades, but were notoriously troubled, forcing borrowers to navigate complicated bureaucratic hurdles. By adjusting rules and temporarily waiving some requirements, Education Department officials have accelerated long-delayed relief.
> Public Service Loan Forgiveness... In 2007, Congress passed a law intended to entice more college graduates into public service careers: Those who worked for government agencies or nonprofit organizations would, after 10 years of monthly loan payments, have their remaining federal student loan balance eliminated... But the program’s complex rules turned it into a quagmire that rejected 99 percent of applicants — and an effort in 2018 to apply patchwork fixes became another debacle.
> Income-Driven Repayment Adjustment... Income-driven payment plans are designed to eliminate any remaining balance after a set period of repayment, typically 20 years. Even for borrowers who never enrolled in those plans, the Education Department decided to count virtually any payment, for any amount, as a qualifying one — and it added to its tally many months in which borrowers made no payments at all because they had a long-term deferment or forbearance. The department chose to apply those adjustments automatically for all borrowers, no application needed. The result was that hundreds of thousands of borrowers abruptly discovered that their loans had reached the 20-year mark and been eliminated. The first notification letters were sent on July 14.
> Borrower Defense to Repayment and Closed-School Discharge... The Obama administration began to build a system for handling those requests, but it ground to a halt during the Trump administration. When Mr. Biden assumed office, tens of thousands of claims — some that had been languishing for as long as six years — were pending, and over 130,000 others had been summarily rejected. In 2022, the Biden administration agreed to settle a class-action claim that covered 200,000 borrowers who had attended more than 150 schools.
> Total and Permanent Disability... Borrowers who are permanently disabled are eligible to have their federal student loans eliminated. The process had long been a bureaucratic obstacle course, requiring doctors’ notes — which were often rejected, with little or no explanation, because of documentation errors — and years of income-monitoring and other compliance requirements. Many who would have qualified for relief never bothered to apply. But two government agencies already had data on people who were fully disabled: the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. By creating automatic data-matching programs with both agencies and eliminating some income documentation requirements, the Education Department significantly expanded the number of borrowers who gained relief.
1. Discharging loans against colleges that have filed bankruptcy and closed
2. People that have taken jobs in the public service sector qualify for student loan forgiveness
3. Getting rid of fees and loans that were accumulated due to predatory behavior on the part of the servicers.
Maybe discuss the specifics rather than the generals of the article.
We need better laws and repercussions against screwing over the working class.
It's not like the risk of was ever disclosed to the purchaser. Oh wait.
We continue to bail out and incentivize poor decision-making, then wonder why the proportion of poor decisions seems to be increasing.
How exactly is being approved for a loan to buy a first home the fault of the purchaser?
We can shop in any grocery store trusting that the products are safe to consume. Meanwhile, banks are allowed to legally sell financial poison?
Sure, compare rates, terms, insurance, etc. But financial time bombs like you describe should be illegal. The banks should suffer the consequences of their greed. And the working class should not be left homeless as a consequence.
3rd parties will both be lacking in information and have obligations beyond just seeing the loan paid back.
Who bailed out the home owners? No-one. They lost their homes, their credit was ruined. Decades worth of setback. But they deserved it? Please. It was a trap in the name of shareholder profits.
The problem is systemic and blaming the consumer is myopic at best.
Let the US remain free where consumer choices matter. You can take a risk with an ARM mortgage and might hit it big, but you might also have to pay the price. That's freedom. People can always downgrade homes, foreclosures are not necessarily a bad thing when there is limited housing supply.
You will rarely catch me defending the banking industry... but what you're calling "financial poison" here is just how mortgages work in most of the world. A variable rate loan isn't inherently predatory, that's how most loans work.
There are many legitimate reasons a buyer might prefer a variable rate mortgage: the trade off is easy to understand. It takes ten seconds to do an internet search for "interest rates past 30 years" and see the risk. I refuse to accept that most people with ARMs were taken advantage of.
School loans should not be modeled after payday loan sharks.
I distinctly recall talking to a loan officer when I made my 100k+ student loan, and the paper had in very large numbers, amount loaned, loan duration, per month loan cost, the interest rate, and total loan cost.
I want to see a student load agreement where the minimum monthly payment simply does not create an expected end date for the load.