Student loans in default to be referred to debt collection, Dept of Ed says
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The US Department of Education is known for their aggressive collection tactics, including garnishing of wages, taking tax returns and seizing homes and cars. I even heard of a single mother who had her child support taken away because she owed money to a fraudulent vocational school.
The US government is openly hostile to those who do business with them, and to their citizens and should be avoided at all costs.
Further, the FBAR reporting requirements. I have retirement money in Canada that makes no financial sense to divest yet, and I spent 5-6 hours filing an FBAR this year because the online form doesn't support OSX at all, and I simply could not get an Adobe Acrobat Reader to install on Apple silicon, so I had to rebuild a crappy Dell laptop in order to meet my legal requirements.
Now, I get requiring some sort of reporting requirements to stop tax evasion and the like, but the tax filing requirement is not based on anything like net worth, but rather if you are a US citizen you must file (US is one of I think 2 countries in the world with this requirement). And the FBAR requirement is anything up to or over $10k in a foreign bank.
For real?
If I sound like I am complaining, why don't you walk a mile in my moccasins.
#Edit - fixing an autocorrect typo.
Regardless of debt collection issues, as a taxpayer it's best to set your withholding so that you don't get a tax refund. A refund essentially means you were giving the government an interest free loan.
The deal was “if a business spends a percentage this money on payroll, it will be forgive”. It was designed to keep businesses afloat for a set amount of time as we locked down for COVID.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821457551/whats-inside-the-se...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/coronavirus-stim...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/small-businesses-face-nightm...
That's a good to society as well. Arguably one with likely better payoff given that a lot more college graduates succeed in getting a degree than businesses succeeded in paying their PPP loans.
One is based on reason, where people look for contradictions (like you're doing right now) in order to better understand truth.
The other is based on authority or faith, where people look to authority figures, such as parents, priests, pundits, or politicians, in order to understand "truth".
These are incompatible. You can't point out contradictions to an authority oriented person and expect them to care. While you are using your words, they have already made off with the money. Your reason got you nowhere, while their power got them $50k+ loans. They could do what they did with action while you are soothing yourself with words.
One thing authority oriented people understand is that actions matter most and that the highest truth is found within action on the physical world.
I guess it doesn't help me solve it, but baby steps.
What Trump has done is make his followers feel they are the brand. They are MAGA. That means it doesn't matter what system of truth you adhere to, because you will always go with your identity, which is MAGA.
Yes, this is exactly how cults work.
As the authority figure deviates further and further from reality, it makes them increasingly hostile to those who reason, but it also creates a cost to acknowledging reality. The cultists would have to acknowledge they were suckered or otherwise deficient. All those contradictions that were ignored protect their alternative reality because they represent pain that must be overcome. Without being willing to face the pain of being wrong and all those you have harmed through being wrong, you must stay in your alternative reality.
One group looks to the abstract to try and make inferences. The other group looks to behavior to try and discern patterns.
To me, the first group seems overwhelmingly naive. It assumes that groups of people all act according to a unified principle across time and space.
The second group understands that behavior is circumstantial, based on the changing people and incentives involved. Government is not an ideologically uniform monolith.
I don't agree with this, since people who hold this belief generally ignore second order effects and are immune to hypocrisy/contradiction based arguments. Without respect of contradictions, there is no basis for truth only for feelings and actions, which I think I would call "genetic truth."
Clearly this group is evolutionary conserved, and there must be some truth to that ideology for that to be true.
The first group has to deal with the Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, which is the rigorous description of what you just said. It requires constant maintenance and adjustment against selfishness and decay, it requires enforcement of universalized principles (assimilation of specific ideas).
The second group must deal with having beliefs that directly contradict reality and freedom and reality asserting itself.
Both groups have different fundamental strategies for the prisoner's dilemma and different failure modes for their strategy.
The first group says there is one theoretically correct strategy, to always trust/cooperate because from a mathematical perspective, under conditions of abundance and an assumption of universality, that is provably the correct strategy.
The second says that if you can win by defecting, you should.
The first group fails when they fail to defect in response to people defecting against them. The paradox of intolerance can be restated in prisoner's dilemma terms: if you think cooperation is always right, then how do you justify defection?
The second group fails by failing to get out of zero sum thinking. They can never be greater than the sum of their parts, they also generally create a ruggedly darwinistic society you wouldn't want to be a part of.
If a business fails we have no problem bailing them out. It isn't the businesses fault. It's the current economic situation.
If an individual fails then they made mistakes and failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm being a bit hyperbolic but really, America loves corporate welfare.
Look at the south: they'll sell themselves down the river for 20 oil refinery jobs but the second someone needs food stamps they're a loser.
A lil bit of it is also the "not yet a millionaire" mentality that a lot of Americans have. They believe that one day they'll also be rich so we shouldn't punish the rich, it may be them one day.
More the case that America is run (directly or indirectly) by the ultra-rich and they designed a system that works for them and sucks for everyone else.
Hello, 2008, my old friend I've come to talk with you again…
Student loans are an odious conflict of interest. People will hold themselves in disbelief that we offered predatory "no risk" loans to literal children, burdening their entire futures with decisions made before they had the faculties to consider it. The moral hazard of protecting a class of loans from completely irresponsible lending alone is enough before even looking at the consequences for the people who took them.
Then you have second and third order effects... Authoritarians don't consult experts believing they know better so Nth order effects of short sighted policy are authoritarian kryptonite. Nth order effects have a way of asserting themselves into reality and breaking through authoritarian denial about the state of reality and nobody is happy when reality asserts itself.
Frankly, the direct federal student loan program was probably a mistake. We shifted everything from private loans with federal guarantees to direct federal loans because of the perception that it benefited banks over citizens, but all we ended up doing is shifting animosity from banks to the government.
Worse, the easy availability of student loans has made it easy for States to substantially reduce subsidies, shifting the burden onto students while jacking up rates along with private colleges.
I thought she was only hired to shut it down…
They wouldn’t just lie to us, guys?
I was lucky enough to grow up and go to university in another country. The magnitude of the financial decisions I was making at the time were < 1k and I remembered how much money that felt like.
IMHO blaming people for 100k bad financial decisions made under duress just as they entered adulthood is victim blaming.
Especially when the implied social contract broke down--i.e low wages, horrific increases in the cost of living, limited opportunities.
It's pretty common to find people that regret taking the loans to go to school and got little value from their education.
If we’re going to keep speed running the decline of the US, it’s a fine strategy. The people making these choices will be long dead by the time the consequences arrive.
How come?
[argument withdrawn]
> I’m sure you’d have no problem burning millions of dollars of VC funding on a low value business idea, as if that would be of superior economic value.
You know absolutely nothing about me.
> “Involuntary collections will not occur before 2025," a White House spokesperson said in a statement. "Defaulted borrowers won’t see collections until 2025.”
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024/10/biden-adm...
[1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-d...
In other states, for example Texas, it’s a little over $3000 a year on average for in state:
https://www.communitycollegereview.com/tuition-stats/texas#:...
That’s much cheaper than the tens of thousands for a public 4 year university.
And we should point out that for trades, you are getting paid in an apprenticeship. That’s better than cheap or free.
Many of these loans are handed out predatorily to people classified as children, 6-8 years before their higher level thinking pre-frontal cortex fully develops, with no life experience, little work experience, a wide range in quality of parenting and childhood, with a society that has said "this is how you achieve the American dream of doing better than your parents."
The loans themselves shield the lender from consequences and put risk squarely on the the loan taker.
The seeming goal of these loans being the same for most of the structure of American society, to ensure desperate workers that have no freedom and no ability to say no to businesses.
When society offered these loans to people who in no way would have been able to get them on fundamentals, which was already a failure of society to invest in the future, there was an implicit promise that they would lead to a better life and they didn't.
You can't blame societies young for believing what their elders and even society at large tells them.
Universities failed their students, society failed students and universities, our own culture decayed in terms of earning vs receiving credentials, and the people you want to pay the cost of that are the people that the system victimized the most?
Seems like most reasonable first step to take.
There's no easy solution to this, it's structural, it's systemic, the model the USA uses for higher-ed funding is structurally unsound and unsustainable. Replacement the model can only be done through a measured policy change but I don't see much of that coming from the US in the past 10-15 years, it's mostly flailing around with no clear vision for what it wants to be in the future, just an everlasting chase for GDP growth no matter how, at some point this narrow objective comes crashing down.
We don't make people take out loans for K-12. Education is an investment. It should be funded, just not in a way that is so rife with conflicts of interest. Everyone benefits from an educated society except priests and other kinds of authoritarians.
This is a myth. The prefrontal cortex doesn't appear to ever stop developing.
Early brain development studies involving MRIs simply only looked at people up to the age of 25 and the findings that they "develop until at least 25" turned into this myth that they stop developing and are "fully mature" at 25.
The age of majority was a conservative choice based on society's view of when the vast majority of people were capable of the level of self-sufficiency required to do things like enter into contracts. If most are incapable of self-sufficiency without a parental guardian, then the age of majority should be increased.
That said, we also ignored our own rationale and started allowing minors to apply for student loans. This is a travesty.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/brain-myth-25-developme...
Could it be that many in DC benefited from that free money, and are also benefitting from the status quo of unaffordable education?
And the obvious answer is that the COVID era loans being discussed were designed from the beginning to be forgiven if certain conditions were met. Those that accepted the loans did so with that understanding. Student loans are also issued under specific terms which those that accept the loans agree to. In both cases the government is living up to the terms of the loans when issued and expecting the borrowers to do the same.
Just sayin’