by Steve Rhode
Can we be honest for a minute?
The entire issue of forgiving student loans with a one-time approach is stupid. It does not address the systemic breakdown of the cost of higher education or the realities of the BS schools selling students into debt for the corporation’s benefit.
If the Biden student loan forgiveness plan were to be allowed, it would clear the debt of many, and the cycle would start over again.
Here is the POV from the Department of Education:
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona issued the following statement after the Departments of Education and Justice filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court on the Biden-Harris Administration’s Student Debt Relief Program:
The Biden-Harris Administration remains committed to fighting to deliver essential student debt relief to tens of millions of Americans. As part of this commitment, today the Departments of Education and Justice filed a legal brief with the Supreme Court explaining our legal authority under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act to carry out our program of one-time, targeted debt relief. We remain confident in our legal authority to adopt this program that will ensure the financial harms caused by the pandemic don’t drive borrowers into delinquency and default. We are unapologetically committed to helping borrowers recover from the pandemic and providing working families with the breathing room they need to prepare for student loan payments to resume. As previously announced, student loan payments and interests will remain paused until the Supreme Court resolves the case because it would be deeply unfair to ask borrowers to pay debt they wouldn’t have to pay, were it not for meritless lawsuits.”
If the Department of Education, Administration, and lawmakers were so committed to resolving this problem, it would take one action, allow all student loans to be dealt with in bankruptcy as any other debt.
Until that happens, the gyrations from what we want, and you can’t have camps, is just a waste of human energy and time.
The current student debt problem is not about federal student loans alone. This didn’t arise with the pandemic. This has been an epidemic in college financing and has been growing for decades.
I would love for student loan debtors today to have solutions and prevent future students from winding up in the same cesspit.
Someone needs to wipe the lipstick off of this pig.
*****
This essay was originally posted on January 9, 2023, on the Get Out of Debt Guy website.
Steve Rhode is the Get Out of Debt Guy and has been helping good people with bad debt problems since 1994. You can learn more about Steve here.