Student loans
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@Larry said in Student loans:
I paid my own way through college. I worked. When i graduated I owed nothing.
I did that for undergrad in Canada (well partially, I had a few thousand in loans). Unless you get a full scholarship - that seems impossible for many schools in the U.S. now (The sticker price is $200K for many undergrad and professional degrees)
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@jon-nyc said in Student loans:
My parents paid for three state college 4 year degrees. They were comfortable but not well off. No way the equivalent position could do that today unless they were crazy savers most of their lives.
Yeah but the value of the education is so much greater these days. You get what you pay for.
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White House Plan: $10,000 per borrower
White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, after months of internal deliberations over how to structure loan forgiveness for tens of millions of Americans, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
President Biden had hoped to make the announcement as soon as this weekend at the University of Delaware commencement, the people said, but that timing has changed after the massacre Tuesday in Texas.
The White House’s latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, two of the people said. It was unclear whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse.Wiping out $10,000 of debt per borrower could cost roughly $230 billion, according to estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank. However, restarting payments for borrowers, which have been on hold since March 2020, would bring additional money into federal coffers. The think tank said in March that pausing payments had cost the federal government $100 billion and would run around $50 billion per year to maintain. The Washington Post had previously reported that the administration was considering making only undergraduate debt eligible for forgiveness.
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Wow, what an incredible waste of our taxes to score political points. This will have minimal impact on student debt, the rate of higher education costs, etc. What about those who just paid off their loans? What about those who might have a parent who makes $155,000 but also has 4 kids in college? So many questions...
If anything, a program could be implemented that forgives loans (or repays paid-off loans) for those who spend XX years in certain professions, like they do with teachers I think? Some program that really gets to the heart of the matter, not just mass-printed checks to those who qualify, regardless of circumstance, major, performance, etc.
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@jon-nyc said in Student loans:
They need to compete better on price and value rather than status and amenities.
The best way to do that would be to not have student loans be excluded from bankruptcy and to not have the federal backstop.
I agree with the first statement and the parts from the second statement about allowing student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy and not have federal backstop for student loans … but I don’t quite see how these two parts from the second statement are good ways to achieve the first statement. What am I missing?
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Money would be harder to come by putting general price pressure on the university system. Lenders would want to know someone is not putting themselves in an untenable spot so there would be some consideration of value of the degree and likelihood of completing it.
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This is illegal, and Biden knows it. The executive branch has no generalized power to forgive any amount of student debt for debt-holders of any income group. Asked about the idea last year, Nancy Pelosi confirmed simply that “the president can’t do it. That’s not even a discussion.” Do you know how patently illegal something has to be for Nancy Pelosi to acknowledge it’s illegal? The Department of Education came to the same verdict, determining that the executive branch “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.” Put simply: If Biden wants to do this, he must get Congress to agree. If he tries to bypass Congress to do it anyway, the courts must stop him. And if they don’t, he must be impeached.
If a policy is illegal, it’s illegal whether it is deemed good or bad by the president and his apologists. But it is worth reiterating nevertheless that the policy Joe Biden is pursuing here is revolting on its own merits. Despite the best efforts of the corrupt and self-dealing figures who are selling it, there remains no case whatsoever for the transference of student debt from the people who incurred it to the people who did not, and there remain hundreds of cases against. It is entirely unnecessary: not only do college graduates have the lowest unemployment rate in the country, they have already benefited from a two-year delay in repaying their loans. It is an arbitrary, one-time-only deal that creates a host of perverse incentives, is deeply unjust to those who have repaid their loans, and makes structural reform even harder. It is inflationary in a period of catastrophic inflation, as all measures that throw money at the demand side of the economy must be. And it is regressive, in that it forces poorer and less-credentialed Americans to pay the debts of rich people who went to college, simply because those rich, college-educated people want their debts paid off, and because they are important enough to Joe Biden and his staff to get it done.
“Don’t tell me what you value,” Joe Biden likes to say. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Okay. How about impeachable offenses? Joe Biden is proposing to break the law in order to hand $200 billion to people who make up to $300,000 per household. What sort of “values” does that indicate, I wonder? Surely, if good ol’ Scranton Joe were going to tear up the Constitution and the statute book, he’d want to do it to help poor people, or to write off small-business loans, or to subsidize mortgages for people who are struggling to stay in their homes? A man who truly had values wouldn’t make a mockery of his office in the first place. But to do so to enrich wealthy graduate students and placate the insatiable corruption of his White House aides? That’s beyond belief.
Or, at least, it would be beyond belief if one hadn’t witnessed the perplexing trajectory of the Democratic Party over the last decade. Once, Democrats prided themselves on being for the little guy. Now, their primary interest is in creating an endless slush fund for the benefit of upper-middle-class Elizabeth Warren voters. If Biden makes this move, it will complete the party’s transformation. And, after that, he’ll deserve every damn consequence.
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What does this mean for kids like Luke who accumulated Federal college loans during COVID but wouldn’t start paying them for another 3 years anyway? Not seeing a good explanation.