Biden administration cancels student loans of more than 150k borrowers | Hacker News Reader

Biden administration cancels student loans of more than 150k borrowers

nbcnews.com

18 pointsmikhael24 comments

Does this mean that the debts are practically moved to being US debt? And universities get to keep all the money they swindled with all these schemes?

I don't know, man. Doesn't sound right exactly.

Amazing how many hateful people require others to suffer just as they did.

It reeks of ladder-pulling.

How is that fair to those that repaid?

How is curing a disease fair to those who already died from it?

Doesn't that completely miss the point? No one has died and it's not a disease. People took loans, some have repaid and some not, and you're rewarding the latter at the expense of the former. You don't see any moral issues whatsoever, even if you played devil's advocate?

No.

I look forward to whatever US states decide to interpret the Sixteenth Amendment like D.C., California, and New York interpret the Second Amendment.

This is one of the most brazen (and reprehensible) attempts to court votes that I’ve ever seen in the USA.

Clientelism in its purest form. The elite giving handouts to the elite.

> The elite giving handouts to the elite.

Families struggling to pay off a <10k loan for years are now the elite.

This is the extend of the ridicule these discussions succumbed to. Pure despair straight from the firehose of falsehood.

Why do you think that cancelling student debt is reprehensible?

Edit: is this question worth this many down votes?

Because subsidizing the top 25% of earners in the country with the taxes of everyone else seems fundamentally unjust, especially when they voluntarily took on the debt.

> Because subsidizing the top 25% of earners in the counttry (...)

I don't think your assertion adds up, or stands any scrutiny. Not all higher education degrees lead to high-paying careers, and definitely those who struggle to pay off their student loans after over a decade of payments will clearly not represent people who are well off.

Also, it sounds highly hypocritical to put up such a emotionally-based strawman for student loans when tax breaks and tax benefits for mega-corporations and and the very wealthy don't even come up as causes for concerns,in spite of eclipsing anything related to student loans. It's as if this student loan obsession is manufactured rage.

But that as much is clear, given your concern is that canceling student loans might convince some people to vote for a candidate,as if that's your actual problem.

Concern about the justness of an action the government is taking is not an "emotional strawman"; if you cannot differentiate claims of justice from feelings, you probably should avoid voting.

>But that as much is clear, given your concern is that canceling student loans might convince some people to vote for a candidate, as if that's your actual problem.

This is an absolute mindread, isn't accurate, and comes off as childish.

The rest of your comment is useless whataboutism - no one was talking about "tax breaks for mega corporations and the very wealthy". You have no idea if my position on those things is consistent or hypocritical because I haven't said a word about either.

> Concern about the justness of an action the government is taking is not an "emotional strawman";

It is clearly a very obvious emotional strawman. It's not about fairness otherwise your complain would be about how all student debt should be forgiven. It is not. Also, if you cared about fairness in how governments treated people it would be expected that you'd care about citizens having to carry government-mandated debt for decades while struggling to pay it off. But apparently that concern never crossed your mind.

OP's complain was very explicitly how this policy could lead people to vote for a candidate. There is no way around it. This blend of criticism is not about fairness, the economy, the role of government, even education policies. It's about political pettiness following a logic of cutting the nose to spite the face. It's the same logic that led a political party to throw out the window the best border deal in generations just because a prospective candidate was concerned it would make the incumbent look good.

>It's not about fairness otherwise your complain would be about how all student debt should be forgiven.

"If you don't believe what I believe you don't care about justice."

No, it's that you cannot argue your point from any remotely rational basis. It's just whining because you think a political group might benefit if they do the right thing. It's purely cutting the nose to spite the face.

There is no world in which using taxpayers' money to pay off debt that people VOLUNTARILY took on is "the right thing to do". When someone enters into a legal agreement, they complete their obligation - not beg the referee to let them cut and run. From where I'm standing there is no moral standing for your position but I at least attempt to understand it as you conceive of it, something you clearly can't do for mine.

It's just bullshit meant to sow division "These are the top 25% earners.

So he's going against SCOTUS?

"Supreme Court strikes down Biden student-loan forgiveness program. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority last year when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans."

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-dow....

How can he do that?

This is technically a different loan forgiveness program, so it would need to go before the court on its own merits.

> How can he do that?

Because the Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch is allowed to cancel student loans, just "not that many all at once".

How many is too many? They didn't say.

They'll know it's too many when the ghosts of the founding fathers get riled up and start throwing sugar packets around the Supreme Court breakroom.

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