Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) issued a statement on Wednesday urging President Joe Biden to take “executive action” to cancel student loan debt after the president was pressed on his plans to remove student loan debt during a CNN town hall on Tuesday night.
Hasn’t he already said Na Ga Happen?
I think any JB reluctance was relative to the amount forgiven, not the concept, but I could be wrong.
Tuition should be free to anyone who wants an education. It’s an investment in the country.
Well, I think he’s right, I don’t think it can come from an Executive Action.
Personall wiping out 50K in dept is stupid if you don’t go after the interest rate, that’s what’s killing them.
If it was up to me, I’d wipe out the interest, reduce and lock in a low interest rate 0.9%. They should also allow for refinancing options, its BS that you’re locked in to a loan with no alternatives. I can refinance a mortgage, I can roll my auto loan into my mortgage, etc. However, with a student loan your stuck…at least that was how it was on my student loans 20 years ago
Biden is willing to cancel $10,000 in student debt----but not $50,000.
I know there is opposition, but I believe it is the right thing especially at this particular time.
This is a crisis period like few others
And lower payments. 15% of a graduate’s monthly income on an IBR plan is painful for many.
How much would this cost?
According to this it would be a trillion dollars for $50,000
$10,000 would be almost $400 billion and cancel almost 30% of borrowers altogether.
How about a compromise? 25K?
Biden’s got the right approach. People with $50k in debt skew towards the already-advantaged who are in pursuit of masters and doctorates. They’ve got enough legs up in jobs and everything else, no need to give free handouts for what was an investment on their part with significant returns.
Only about 14% of adults have student loan debt.
This massive handout to a few does exactly zero for the other 86%.
All the reasons you cite are great reasons to get more relief out there to a far broader swath of the population, not one to help a chosen few.
I know that loan forgiveness is the hot topic but I want to know what the country is going to do about post secondary education on the go forward. In state undergraduate degrees ought to be free.
“I’m prepared to write off a $10,000 debt, but not 50,” Biden added, referring to a proposal by the White House indicating that the President would sign a bill removing $10,000 of student loan debt if Congress passed a bill.
But Biden suggested the larger sum couldn’t be cancelled with presidential action.
Either he can or cannot cancel student loan debt, there is no formal limit like Biden is suggesting here.
And its pretty clear that the Secretary of Education has broad powers to cancel debt:
Many Democrats and progressives are calling for Biden to cancel some or all debt through executive action, namely, a “settlement and compromise” provision that they argue would allow for debt to be canceled through executive authority.
“The law is pretty clear that the secretary of education has the authority to compromise — that’s the term — which means effectively cancel any individual debt of up to $1 million,” said Ramamurti, who helped devise the plan Warren ran on.
If they start out with $50,000 in debt that’s true but there are a lot of people who didn’t and through circumstances have ended up with more than that.
Probably no effective way to parse that out though when distributing aid.
It’s purely anecdotal but I do know of people who used student aid to get masters degrees but then hit hard times, couldn’t find jobs in their field and ended up stuck in adjunct positions, not even in their specialty, and are stuck with loans that ballooned to an amount way more than $50,000 at this point which they’ll never get paid off.
I have no idea the actual percentage in the country that fit into that category, but I doubt it’s that small a percentage.
it’s been so long i can’t remember, i think i had 21K in loans and was paying $200 a month? Oh and that’s another thing, i think you have 10 years to pay them off? Maybe that’s changed but, why not 15, 20 or 30 years depending on size of the loan?
I also think all public/state schools should be free (2 and 4 years) as well as vocational schools. If you opt to go private then you have to pay.
And while we are at it, how about a rebate to those of us who already paid off our student loan debt?
That’s the trap of student loans.
People get conned into thinking that since the interest rate is low they won’t pay that much.
But the exact thing you don’t want to do if you can avoid it is extend the length of the loan.
That effectively makes the total interest you pay on the last part of the principal way higher than the advertised rate.
Low interest rates for extended periods are only a good thing if you get some actual collateral out of it (like in a house purchase).
The problem with the alleged collateral of an education is that it doesn’t always work out that way to be actual collateral and then you’ve got no way to trade in the collateral to get out of the loan like you can do with an actual piece of property.
I thought about this a lot and ran a lot of Excel charts for my own use to run comparisons and figure out what to pay off first when I was in the process of digging myself out of debt and getting free from my student loans.
That’s true, even with a low interest rate you’re going to pay more in interest with longer loans.