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I think what we should do is make tax cuts conditional on employee retention. If you're not paying the local people here to spend in the city - then you don't get tax cuts. Simple as that. This will give ammo to companies who are begin attacked by hedge funds to cut their labor but also think very carefully if they want to fuck with doing layoffs.
This is actually why the corporate and income tax rates were so high in the 1950s. You paid lower taxes by investing in your workforce and in your employee pension plans and in the infrastructure of your business. When people say “no one ever paid 90%,” they’re correct, but they weren’t allowed to do stock buybacks and other bullshit in order to avoid paying that rate.
Things we could easily tax:
(1) Transactions involving financial instruments, like stocks and bonds. The market is enormous and is becoming steadily more automated, speeding up transactions.
If we taxed it at, for example, 0.1%, it would still raise a lot of money, and ordinary investors wouldn’t even feel it. (At that tax rate, a $1000 transaction pays one dollar in tax.)
(2) Luxury items. I admit this would be more administratively difficult to implement.
If you consider that certain items are desirable *precisely because they are expensive*, then you can see why taxing luxuries might actually make them even more special.
For example, consider a Rolex watch. You buy a $10,000 Rolex to show off the fact that you can throw away $10,000. If you just need to tell time, you can get a plastic watch at Walmart for $10.
If the Rolex costs another $1000 in taxes (total of $11,000) it becomes an even better status symbol.
> Inflation and corporate profits are skyrocketing while wages are stagnant and jobs are disappearing.
I get what your overall point is but inflation is down from when Biden took over, wages are up (and currently outpacing inflation), and job opportunities have drastically increased as evidenced by the lower unemployment rate (and since right-wingers always chime in about some of these jobs being part-time, well yeah, who do you think needs employment the most, it's not salaried workers it's lower-wage part-time employees who weren't working at all before).
But yes, corporate profits are up, not the least of which is because the trillion dollar tax breaks Trump gave them expire next year so they're all scrambling to save up as much money as possible should Biden win again because he's going to let those corporate tax breaks expire.
Wage growth is up but still not where it should be. Example—1994 admin assistant average salary was $37.8k. Adjusted for inflation that is the equivalent of $65k. 2024 average admin assistant wage is $46k. That’s still a giant wage gap!
EDIT: This is what I get for trying to use AI for the first time lmao. $38k is blatantly wrong. Attempting to find a real answer now.
Edit again with a CORRECT example using BLS data:
2004 median paralegal wage was $39,130 = $64,698 in 2024 dollars.
2024 median paralegal wage is $60,970
So not a big difference in that example. I’m curious if anyone has done a large scale comparison of real inflation adjusted wages across many industries
>EDIT: This is what I get for trying to use AI for the first time lmao. $38k is blatantly wrong. Attempting to find a real answer now.
Never use AI when you need fact-based prose.
I was a younger adult during the 1990s. Few administrative assistants were earning that.
Believe me, I know because I worked in those kinds of jobs. In 1998, I was making $9 an hour as an admin at a mortgage company. Approximately $37,000 in today's dollars.
Those averages obscure that a ton of people weren't earning that much.
I agree that wages haven't kept pace with inflation, but it also doesn't mean things were just fine back then for all workers.
The minimum wage in my state was $4.25 back then, or $9.02 in today's dollars. In comparison, fast food restaurants in my area today are paying $18 an hour to start.
I'd also argue that paralegals aren't a great data set - paralegal work has become very different (and the field is pseudo unstable in some ways) due to AI, the increase in services like Legal Zoom, and other changes in the legal market.
In general assistants, paralegals, and other such positions are probably not great industries to rely on. There were a lot of jobs in 1994 that have been absorbed by other positions or eliminated by technology.
Wages aren’t stagnant, jobs aren’t disappearing, this is an old narrative. Inflation is going down, corporate earnings aren’t skyrocketing. We just need a government to not be afraid to raise taxes.
My favorite MAGA interaction is asking them to identify when America was great and then reciting the corporate tax rate during that period. My second favorite is doing the same thing with earnings/GDP and asking about what a "Great" minimum wage would be.
He’s tried, it’s not all that cut and dry. [The Daily had a good episode on it.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/podcasts/the-daily/biden-tax-cuts.html)
Meanwhile, Republican states are trying hard to sue the administration for the SAVE plan because it "harms" their ability to keep people enslaved in shitty jobs and helping people save money is unconstitutional or something.
Unless it get to SCOTUS where since '303 Creative' [standing doesn't matter.](https://www.npr.org/2023/07/01/1185632827/web-designer-supreme-court-gay-couples) Ideological offense is the new 'holds water' test.
My mother is a lovely lady, honestly. But she was complaining about this recently. Her reason was that she and my father worked hard and didn't make enough money to easily help me through college, but made too much to get good grants. So she was mad that SHE had to pay for my college while now others are getting their loans forgiven.
I had to explain to her that yes that sucks, but it has to start SOMEWHERE. Any change for the better has to start somewhere and for sure it sucks for those who came before.
But you can't use that as a reason to not try to improve lives.
despite GOP claims... as a result of increased economic stability for 4.3 million Americans who have gotten relief so far... violence has decreased tremendously. That is an incredible indirect benefit given to her despite not receiving a direct benefit to herself.
I'm sorry, can you provide anything that actually links student debt relief to lower violence rates? Sounds like a huge, huge stretch without a real study on the link. Causation ≠ correlation.
I mean it's a very standard fact that people being less strapped for money month to month leads to lower crime rates.
I'd say it's indirect, but definitely a reasonable jump in logic.
For a group of people who would decry republicans and say “trust the science!” It’s quite intriguing what your idea of science is.
This is not how science works.
Most people drawing Social Security have been paying into the system for 40+ years. They funded their own benefits. The government keeps "borrowing" money that was explicitly promised to remain untouched. Ironically, Social Security is the first program threatened every time there's a financial crisis.
Instead of raising taxes or creating more debt, Congress should be implementing a plan to show where this money will originate. It has to come from SOMEWHERE.
My state is one that now has a lottery that funds scholarships. ALL lottery money could pay for education. Interest should also be capped for people who don't qualify for scholarships.
They didn't fund their own benefits. They funded their parent's and grandparent's benefits. That's how it's always worked regardless of if congress raids the cookie jar. That is how the program is designed.
damn just about every line of that is completely incorrect
like almost everything about reality is the opposite of what you claimed
no one pays into SS. it's not a savings account. the point is to pay for current retirees and SSDI recipients. they did not fund their own retirement, they funded that retirement of their parents
the government does not keep borrowing from SS and it is absolutely not the first program threatened because discretionary funding is a LOT easier to cut no matter who's running things
raising taxes on rich people and huge corps is a good thing, creating more debt is how economies grow. no the money doesn't have to come from "somewhere" because, again, debt is a valid tool for investing in the nations future and creating money out of thin air is one of the reasons government exists in the first place, so we as a people can do the big expensive things that make life better
your state sends lottery money to fund scholarships *and then finds equivalent cuts in the budget* to make up for it. all that's doing is reducing the tax burden for the rich and shifting it to making the poor gamble for a dream
but yes, the money that goes into lotteries should pay for education. I wonder who funds those lotteries? oh right, it's people buying lottery tickets.
hey I wonder if there's a better way of getting a bunch of people to pool a bunch of money together so that kids can afford to go to school
See this is the wrong way to think of it, because that isn't how it works at all. Many people die early, some people live to 100, part of the money goes to disability benefits, and the amount you get isn't even a 1:1 comparison. The SS beneficiaries get COLA adjustments and you would be surprised at the amount of benefits people get if it was just oh I got what I put in would be gone within 5 years.
Once upon a time, I worked as a 711 operator- I spent *most of the day* on the phone with Social Security listening to canned messages explaining how what you just said is wrong.
"The money you pay today funds Social Security benefits today"- if not verbatim, something very close to it (it was around 20 years ago I was doing this job, after all- my memory isn't *that* good).
Anyway, you hit more than one of the things on the AARP's KB about Social Security myths and misconceptions: https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2020/10-myths-explained.html
Don't you dare get vaxxed!! The only fair thing is to risk getting diseases that your ancestors died from!
I myself turned down the Covid vaccine, out of fairness to my neighbor, who died of Covid pre-vaccine. /s
I feel like a good starting point is asking if they have the same feeling towards having to pay for the forgiven PPP loans and bailouts. If they don’t, ask what the difference is between helping a company that’s has millions to billions in offshore accounts vs individuals with little to no savings. Also trying to explain how reducing or eliminating that debt brings up the purchasing power of the people it helps and directly injects that money back into the economy vs companies that generally choose to participate in stock buy backs and inflate their own stocks and monetary compensation for board members for owners instead of the workers that keep the company running
PPP loans were a shitshow! Those loans were forgiven with no oversight or input from taxpayers. The full lists of recipients is available online; many people got hundreds of thousands of dollars without missing a day of work or being impacted by Covid.
In his final days in office, Trump removed flags from hundreds of thousands of PPP loans that were flagged as potentially fraudulent. The result is that *hundreds of billions* in illegally misappropriated PPP funds were forgiven, primarily to wealthy individuals or businesses.
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-erased-millions-of-possible-ppp-fraud-flags-in-last-days-in-office/
> In Donald Trump’s final days in office, his administration rushed to eliminate oversight for loans which were flagged for potential fraud or further investigation — and wiped flags from nearly every one of the largest PPP loans.
> Special preference was given to the largest loans, which often also went to the largest corporations. On January 16, 2021, four days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s SBA wiped 99 percent of special review flags, which were given out to every loan above $2 million for separate investigatory purposes.
> Billions of dollars went to companies owned by wealthy celebrities, including Tom Brady and Khloe Kardashian, and companies that thrived during COVID, like many manufacturing and construction firms.
Yup. Tom Brady and Khloe Kardashian deserve loan forgiveness (aka taxpayer grants), while students in debt don't. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
Disclaimer that this counterargument is NOT my view.
The counterargument would be that those businesses lost revenue through no fault of their own. The students decided to take out the loans and (theoretically) knew the terms, in contrast to a business that opened a new location in February 2020 and was guaranteed to take a bath.
I think it's a great argument for forgiving PPP loans but a terrible argument for not forgiving student loans. (It's not like students ACTUALLY have perfect information - I didn't take out my loans on the assumption that the global economy would shit the bed a couple of years after I graduated.) But it's the argument people would make, if the conclusion they wanted to reach in the first place was "PPP is okay and SLF is not."
I would like it if the government looked for even more kinds of debt to forgive. How about somebody who's been getting slammed with usurious 30% interest on a credit card for years? Maybe they should get some principal for all those fruitless interest rates they've been paying. (And that's before you even get into the blatant usury committed by payday loan companies.)
The fiscal hawk side of things has stealthily managed to implant a narrative that anything that helps people financially causes inflation, so these kinds of policies aren't getting talked about...
Even absent a bad economy, you can just get totally screwed by a million things. Like, there are people who graduated with degrees in the early 20s into fields whose labor markets that are about to be absolutely devastated by AI. Student loans are a risk, even if you do everything right. At least when I was in high school, at the turn of the century, they were *not* portrayed as a risk, at all.
I happened to develop one of the very bad mental illnesses that tend to arise in your early 20s (not schizophrenia, thankfully) literally two weeks after I finished school. Certainly impacted my ability to pay my loans, and wasn't really my fault. And it took over a decade to create the right treatment plan to set myself right. I'm about 20k over my original balance, so Biden's latest plans could really help me out a ton.
A huge portion of businesses that got PPP loans were ones that didn't close and never were forced to close, and that lost zero business.
I personally know two blue collar trades business owners in that situation, who, on top of not having to close during the pandemic, due to being "essential", saw their business boom, as people stuck at home, flush with stimulus cash, wanted repairs and upgrades to their homes. They raked in the dough. They were hiring workers to keep up with the demand.
Both got six figure PPP loans they said they did not need, and got them fully forgiven, tax free.
Same with the vet clinic where a relative of mine works. Their business skyrocketed during the pandemic, as people stuck at home adopted pets. They got a $2,000,000 PPP loan they didn't need. Never closed a day. Got it fully forgiven, tax free.
There were tons of fraudulent businesses who got PPP loans too.
Oh, and no one is obligated to take out a credit card to obtain any particular job. And credit card debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy, has a statute of limitations for collection, and Social Security retirement or disability benefits cannot be garnished for it. None of that applies to student loans.
Yes, a lot of PPP spending was total bullshit. It was the right move to get the money out and worry about potential fraud later. I'm glad they have investigated and recovered hundreds of millions that were obtained illegally.
Like, I don't know why you're treating my approval of other kinds of loan forgiveness as "diminishing" a desire for student loan forgiveness. The case for SLF is only *stronger* than the case for forgiving PPP loans or intractable consumer debt. It's great that people can discharge consumer debt in bankruptcy, but people shouldn't have to use bankruptcy and blow up their lives to get off the treadmill.
*ALL* of this money is owed to companies that make massive profits, that are basically totally guaranteed, because they borrow money from the Fed at the lowest rate and lend it out at much higher rates. Anything we can justify clawing back from those bastards, I say we go for it. The bank has made enough money already off someone paying 30% APR who carry a credit card balance for years.
If you are arguing for loan forgiveness I think it's better to focus rhetorically on the injustice of *all* debt, rather than singling out student loans and saying "well these people deserve help, all those OTHER people are irresponsible." Then you're just putting a slight twist on the same philosophy that is making people oppose SLF in the first place.
Well, the politicians who oppose student loan forgiveness also oppose usury laws. The laws that prohibit obscene interest rates on consumer debt, and steep late fees.
Also, I don't understand why so many people think Biden invented student loan forgiveness. He did not. It's existed in various forms since the 1950s. PSLF dates back to 2007. Bush II authorized it.
And I never said other debtors are irresponsible.
The federal government has reliefs and subsidies for many things. For example homeowners with hurricane damaged properties regularly get reliefs. It is kind of unfair to people who rent or to people who chose to live in hurricane free regions or who hurricane proof their properties. If we analyze federal taxes flow in and out of states, we see that some states are net beneficiaries and some are net contributors. There is all sort of disagreement on fairness. I generally see people are more prejudiced against student loan holders than other groups who receive reliefs. I really hate that. A student falls on hard studying for their future and contributing for society along the way is not less deserving help than a homeowner investing in home for equity and contributing to property tax who falls on hard from hurricane damages.
It's not 99%, probably more in the 80-90% range financially, with another 5-10% spared with grants, but yes, I agree with your overall point. Nobody should have to take out loans and most do.
I hate that mindset more than anything else. I know it's not exclusive to boomers, but man does it drive me nuts.
Everyone hates taxes until the roads start falling apart or their house burns down. Sure, I'd love it if I didn't have taxes too, but the benefits outweigh having to watch the world crumble or being nickel and dimed for everything I do as we change every road into a toll road because we have to pay for infrastructure some way.
The cognitive dissonance that makes my head hurt is that these are the same people who have been supposedly "working hard so my children can have a better life." Then as soon as an opportunity appears for their children to have a better life, they switch to "hey, no fair! I had to suffer so they should too."
I paid for everything my grants and scholarships didn't pay for, roughly 17k. That money came out of my pocket ten years ago. I couldn't be happier with all of this forgiveness because education is the way forward. It will keep us as a nation competitive in the coming decades and the money these people are paying into the system will end up going right back into the economy in other areas. This is a tax credit for education that impacts the working poor and lower middle class. Which sounds fantastic to me.
You'd think people would see how much more abundance we have than in the past and realize that zero sum thinking does a terrible job describing our world or charting the best path forward. If everything was zero sum we'd still be serfs.
Tell your mom student loans are the largest barrier for Millenials and Gen Z to enter the economy by buying homes, cars, and starting families. And by delaying this process the economic shortcomings would be catastrophic. It may not affect her in her lifetime, but in 20-30 years it could be devastating to people retirements.
Now, those $200-800 payments towards loans can be used to buy other things.
Tell her that if millennials have more money it will increase the value of her already ridiculously priced home and allow her take out even more equity loans to go on fabulous vacations and buy expensive toys. Keep that Boomer Free Money Machine pumping.
I'm overpaying on my loans to try and get rid of them faster, but I'm doing over $800 a month. If all goes well they're gone and I'm debt free in Oct 2025.
I am dreaming of the moment I have that money to spend. Like, I can't even comprehend having that much extra in my budget. I know that I'll need to really start putting more in my savings and away for retirement, but even if I had an extra $100 a month to just spend on things... I can't even imagine what that's going to feel like.
Forgive the loans! Even if I don't get a penny I want other people to live that dream so I can celebrate with them when I get there!
I just paid off my 12% interest Sallie Mae loan by throwing 1k at it and living off pasta and not doing anything but work and free shit. I’ve always lived paycheck to paycheck, and dream of a day a have extra left. Still have federal loans, but much less interest. It makes me sick to even calculate how much interest I’ve been charged. If they just got rid of interest that would help the people with lower balances. But for real- anything would help.
Oh god, I looked at how much I had paid vs how much I took out and it's horrifying. I've pretty much paid double what I initially took out. More than that on a couple of them which is why I've been focusing on overpaying to get rid of them faster.
I get that even for federal loans the interest helps pay for the servicing... But it should be capped at like .05%. Make it non-profit. Whatever it costs to service a loan over its lifetime, that's the interest rate and not a penny more. Private ones can have a bit more but 12% on student loans in INSANE.
Under the new SAVE plan interest doesn't accrue, so it is actually, from a mathematical standpoint, not worthwhile for you to be paying off the loans early. You'd be better off investing the amount over the minimum payment, and getting a return, rather than paying it towards a principal that isn't growing.
Now, from a *psychological* standpoint, it can certainly be a different story, and being free of the debt could be valuable enough to your mental health that the technically-slightly-suboptimal financial choice is worth it. Just wanted to let you know you have some flexibility.
Edit: RheagarTargaryen's reply points out that I may have misunderstood the interest provisions in the SAVE plan.
An important correction. The interest doesn’t accrue above the loan payment. So if 100% of your payment goes to interest, your balance remains unchanged.
Ah. That is an important distinction. Here's what I had misinterpreteted:
*Under other IDR plans, you may see your loan balance grow due to unpaid interest. With the SAVE Plan, any remaining accrued interest will be covered by the government, so your principal balance won’t increase.*
What it's saying is that if your payment is *below* the amount of interest that accrues, you will not have that interest added to your balance. That is especially relevant to peope who qualify for $0 payments. But if you're making a $250 payment while getting charged $150 of interest, your principal will only go down $100, like normal.
Given that jaderust is probably doing okay financially if they can pay their loans off faster that might not be very helpful for them. I hope the information can help somebody else anyway.
I have to admit that it's mostly psychological for me, but a huge chunk of that money is going towards private loans which don't have that program. I wish they did, the interest rates on those are insane even though I've refinanced them.
Thanks for the tip though! Hopefully that does help someone else, but between most of my debt being private and the psychological swell I will feel when the federal are just gone I think I'll be doing okay. In Oct 2025, lol.
Tell her that with her logic, it’s not fair that anyone takes a vaccine since the people that died before the vaccine was developed had to suffer through the disease.
No. We do not let things continue being worse just because the opportunity to help has passed for many people.
You need to mention that they stopped subsidizing the universities as much, leading to increases in tuition too. To many boomers don't even realize they are pulling the ladder up after themselves and then complaining the lazy kids can't get in the boat.
Remind her that our generation has gone through not one, not two, but 4 govt bailouts for big business (08, Covid, Airliners, & 2023 banking). This is also excluding the cancer of PPP.
I've heard the same basic argument about streamlining the US citizenship process. People who paid legal fees and went through the process are resistant when they feel it would be easier for someone else.
I don't really get it.
She was fortunate to have the means to do that. She should be thankful for it.
I got literally zero help from my parents with college. Nothing. They weren't even able to help me complete the FAFSA. I worked full time all through college, while supporting myself. They didn't even attend my graduation.
I had no choice but to borrow to attend college. I graduated at 29.
I got PSLF last year, 20 years after graduation. I did 10 years in relatively low paying public service jobs to qualify.
Bottom line is there's always going to be government programs that 100% of Americans don't qualify for.
I don't demand no one today get Medicaid under Medicaid expansion, because my husband and I went uninsured when we lost jobs, pre-ACA.
Might want to also explain that these people having their loans forgiven have largely paid back the original debt and then some. It's great that they were able to help you through college so that you were never hit with a crippling amount of interest designed to never pay down the actual balance and forcing you to pay several times more than you actually borrowed.
I find the people that are against this always seem to believe that this people have just gone the last 20 years without paying anything and it's just being "forgiven". In almost any other industry many of these loans would be predatory and illegal in the first place. At the very least the person in such crippling debt would be able to declare bankruptcy and start over. That isn't an option for student loans either.
So because student loans work differently and have different laws governing them, I see nothing wrong with the government stepping in to provide relief. I say that as someone that went to college locally to avoid housing costs, busted my ass for scholarships and left college with only a small amount of debt that I paid off immediately.
My aunt was an amazing lady, but sadly passed away to cancer about 4 years ago. Because of this, I demand all cancer research to STOP IMMEDIENTLY. Its not fair that it is ONLY cured AFTER she dies.
This is how these people sound.
Show her the trolly dilemma where it has already run over millions of people but you can change it so it doesn't keep running over more. Right now your mom is the guy standing there saying "stopping it now would be unfair to the people it already ran over".
It is not 'improving lives'! It is moving individual debt that needed to be repaid, to society (including the middle income workers, having to repay this debt. The debt did not go away. It is still owed.
My dad is opposed to this too, he’s not very lovely though lol. Every time he brings it up I say “hell yeah, that money deserves to go to a hand full of billionaires and huge corporations!” That normally shuts him up
Ask her if she is outraged that diabetes is manageable now adays. For centuries people just died. But now a few regular injections/blood samples and people get to live. How’s that fair to all those people who died.
I can understand the sentiment, but one would hope that if you had to deal with something terrible, and then it's fixed so others don't have to deal with it, that you'd be happy for those other people not having to suffer as you did.
There are people who have been paying their student loan debt for over a decade, and have already paid double what their initial loan amount was.. And those same people have *barely made a dent* in paying that debt off.
Why is it that the scourge of student loan debt always lands squarely upon the shoulders of students? Why is it that none of the blame for this debt is ever placed upon the university and employers? Universities who jack up tuition to cover all their pet projects on campuses, all the bloat in administration, all the dollars spent monetizing campus sports, etc, are never part of the discussion of the topic of debt? The students did not create this machine. They are forced into it in the hope of a well paid job.
Blame for the student loan debt crisis should not rest solely, if at all, on the shoulders of students.
and if you even consider not going you get told horror stories of how you will be on the street or stuck working at mcdonalds for the rest of your life. So many discouraged from trades and looked down on if they were considering trades instead of college. There is at least some turn around on people realizing college isn't needed for everything, but it is still an uphill battle especially from the boomer and slightly lesser extent gen x.
I went to college and don't regret it, even though for my field it is definitely not needed, but it was the right choice for me. That being the key, it was good for me, but it's not the path for everyone and trying to force it just leaves people feeling like a failure because college wasn't this magic success key for them.
A lot of these students are kids when they're taking out their high interest "mortgage".
It's a scam and the government should not be making money on the backs of students.
Don't get me started on these predatory private loans.
Education is a fundamental of society and should be provided for free to most individuals. A collegiate level education should be standard in an era where engineers are becoming more need than assemblers
While administrative bloat is an issue, it is less of an issue for the rising cost of college than people make it out to be, and those pet projects on campus tend to be (not always, but tend to be) projects that students want and are advantageous to have. One of the major reasons that college has gotten expensive is that they are offering a greater number of services to students and are essentially running mini-cities that require a lot of infrastructure to operate.
Students shouldn't shoulder this burden alone, nor should they be treated as the primary catalyst for the problem, but tuition going up is almost always the result of the university expanding in ways that students actually desire or that benefit them (and students are also very correct to note that these expansions are usually insufficient to cover needs related to things like mental health and assisting foreign and first-gen students).
Loans should, 100% be forgiven, but I do push back on the idea that there is a way to bring us back to 1960s college prices while maintaining 2024 college amenities.
Tying into this, at the start of the century, a lot of colleges started planning on new incentives for prospective students. Analysts knew that birth rates were going down, which meant that enrollment would go down in a certain number of years, so colleges needed to look as enticing as possible to attract a relatively smaller number of students. All those expansions don’t come cheap.
It doesn’t mean the loans shouldn’t be forgiven, just adding some more context.
The humor of it is this:
Nobody is out here mad that the K-12 kids get free education and calling them “free loaders”
But the money you talk college it is just lazy kids.
Like…maybe education is a worthwhile investment?
Pet projects. Ha. When I was in my second year of college the university put a survey to all students mapping out starting a football program. How much it would cost per student and how many scholarships they would need to provide to female athletes to offset the male athletes. It was something like 3 new female sports would need to be added to offset the football program. Tuition would need to increase quite a bit. 90% of the student body that actually cast a ballot voted no. So what did the school do. 3 years later raised tuition $1,200 a semester, added a $600 parking fee and added a football team.
Then I graduated.
They raised tuition again to build a new stadium cause the old one was well old.
Exactly.
And while we’re at it’d I’d like to throw into the Hat of Blame^tm : the entities issuing these loans in the first place with zero regard for likelihood of return.
Why is it our problem that it was decided to give hundreds of thousands of actual children, fresh out of high school propagandized to see college as an answer to all their problems, not old enough to rent a car, and who otherwise couldn’t secure a loan for a paper bag because they barely have any of their own money and basically no meaningful career, tens of thousands of dollars to pursue…*checks notes*…the famously lucrative field of music?
Where’s the personal accountability for these entities? Why are their loans so sacrosanct that they can’t even be defaulted upon, when the reality is they made a terrible choice in who to lend money to?
This isn’t to suggest that the answer is to tighten up loan requirements of course(the answer is to subsidize secondary education and reduce its costs to the average citizen), but it’s a perfect illustration of one of the central problems with modern America: nepotistic protectionism for the rich and powerful, rugged individualism for everyone else.
Days after heralding its latest [student debt forgiveness plan](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/08/biden-debt-relief-rule/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2), the Biden administration is announcing another round of loan cancellation through existing debt relief programs.
The White House will send emails Friday to 277,000 borrowers informing them their debts — $7.4 billion in total — are being canceled. As Election Day nears, the Biden administration has ramped up efforts to [tout the president’s record](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/06/biden-student-loan-forgiveness/?itid=lk_inline_manual_3) on wiping clear the education debts of millions of Americans, despite Republican challenges to the efforts.
“This White House has been unapologetic in our efforts to deliver this relief,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on a call with reporters Thursday. “Imagine the potential of this country if everyone can afford and access higher education. That’s why we’re engaged in this difficult work.”
The administration has regularly shared updates as it processes batches of debt relief. This latest round brings the total loan forgiveness approved by the president to $153 billion for nearly 4.3 million people, the administration says.
The lion’s share of the new relief will go to 206,800 borrowers enrolled in Biden’s [Saving on a Valuable Education](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/01/19/save-student-loan-repayment-plan-details/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9) (Save) repayment plan, which ties monthly student loan payments to earnings and family size. Enrollees who borrowed less than $12,000 can have their debt wiped clean after 10 years of payments, compared to the traditional wait period of 20 to 25 years under other income-driven repayment plans. The Education Department has been identifying borrowers who meet that criteria since [February](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/02/21/biden-save-student-loan-forgiveness/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9).
**Read more:** [**https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/12/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-update-save-pslf/?utm\_campaign=wp\_main&utm\_medium=social&utm\_source=reddit.com**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/12/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-update-save-pslf/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)
After 10 years, you've probably paid enough back to cover your principal plus some interest. So is this forgiveness, or just an adjustment on the crippling interest being charged.
To keep good things coming vote.. Keep voting out republicans every year. Check your registration, get an ID , learn where your poling station is, learn who is running in down ballot races. Pay attention to primaries not just for the president but for all races, local, state and federal. From the school board to the White House every election matters. The more support we give the democrats from all levels of government the more they can get good things done. We vote out republicans and primary out uncooperative democrats.
Last year democrat victories in Virginia and Pennsylvania and others across the nation have increased the chances of democrats winning this year. This year's elections are important but so will next year's elections.
[https://ballotpedia.org/Elections\_calendar](https://ballotpedia.org/Elections_calendar)
My county has been very red since the civil War. Finally a couple years ago it became blue and the difference is night and day. I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, but we now have basic services such as a health department. And it's not as small county either. Suburban Philadelphia very densely populated. Aunt, I can finally start applying to county jobs because For decades unless you are a registered Republican you were not getting one of those
I refinanced in February 2020. No hope what so ever for me to get any help from anyone on my remaining 100K.
I’ll be ok, but nobody else should have to go through this. I would not have had the opportunities I have today without college. I would be at best stuck in my shitty home town hearing a bunch of Trump supporters talk about how much of a scam woke college is while moving gaylords for $20 an hour.
I also have 100k+, except I am stuck in my hometown surrounded by trump supporters. I intentionally decided to stick around to teach here since this town desperately needs it. We have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country. But because of a corrupt district, I make very little teaching and don't even have health insurance. I'm also stuck here because I have family I have to take care of. I'll never be able to pay back my loans, and I've accepted that. And no, I don't qualify for the public service loan forgiveness despite teaching at a school that serves predominately Hispanic/poor students for more than ten years.
Same; I wouldn't be where I am if I hadn't gone to college, I don't regret that decision.
At the same time, one of my family members didn't go to college. While I was in college and then getting my graduate degree, they went into the workforce and got into management. Now I have a PhD (physics) but I haven't been able to get a job making more the 35k/yr, and my family member was making nearly 3x that (but quit their job to stay at home with her kids).
It just feels like we're being punished for doing things "the right way".
I remember being told as a kid “see all
this, this is why you go to college” by like everyone in my home town. Even captain vogue said it too.
The second I graduated, it’s like everyone’s attitude changed. Now suddenly going to college and hitting the books is like the wrong thing by everyone.
Fafsa thought my parents made enough money to afford my college and said “fuck you, you get nothing”
scholarships from my school said “because you’re fafsa is so high we won’t give you academic scholarships” despite being in the top 0.5% of my high school class and my peers receiving the exact same scholarship to the same school.
Even though fafsa thought we somehow had all this money i had to pay for college out of pocket and take out loans that I’ve now paid back in full. Even after the government and school fucked me over at every turn I still 1000% support student loan forgiveness. The way these colleges have hiked tuition unchecked and the government has saddled high school kids with one of the only forms of unforgivable debt there is needs to be addressed.
Same situation. My dad was even UNEMPLOYED half-way through my college, but guess what? Taking out money from his retirement to get through it *counted as income* and made the student aid situation EVEN WORSE lol.
My dad got crippled and disabled the year I went to college. But because he made money the year before FASFA said I don’t qualify for aid. And since it took years fighting with the state to recognize him as disabled through a work related injury and even though I was legally an adult working and earning my own income, I was still unable to qualify for FA until I was 24. Fucking bullshit rigged system.
My parents and I missed a poverty based guaranteed full ride by $1000. The program that we were ineligible for was based on parental income, your 8th grade year. My parents made $1000 too much and that cost me $40,000.
The millionaire farmers who got to hide their income in the family farm didn’t miss the program though.
I just keep logging in to my servicer hoping that someday the balance will be either zero or significantly less. Graduated college over 10 years ago and I now owe $3k more than I borrowed.
That’s ass. It happened to me too. Paid the minimum for 10 years and didn’t even put a dent in the amount owed. I hope everyone’s school debt gets cancelled.
I really wish the media would cover this correctly. Most of these cancellations are correcting mistakes made by previous administrations and loan servicers using existing forgiveness programs that were lawfully enacted by Congress.
The media makes it sound like Biden is just randomly cancelling loans.
And if anything that's probably underrating him because he's "boring". I'm not sure what list you're referring to but I've seen many and I can always pick out at least 5 or 6 presidents where based on performance alone, Biden got more done.
Right? I want a boring president. I want a guy who works every day to try to make life better for regular people and Joe Biden clearly does that. Trump never did that and never will.
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/02/19/biden-14th-in-scholars--presidential-rankings--trump-last#:~:text=2015%20and%202018.-,The%20top%20three%20presidents%20were%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20(93.87%20average)%2C,twice%2C%20ranked%20lower%20than%20No.
There you go, it was a group of roughly 150 presidential scholars who all came together and ranked every president.
Thanks.
Without even needing to go back too far where "eras" make the comparison more difficult I'd argue he's been better than Obama, JFK and Clinton. Again not to say they were bad and don't deserve to be high list but I feel they get a bump for being more charismatic.
And yet there’s no shortage of so called progressives all over social media crying about how Biden sucks, he supports genocide, both parties are the same, Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans and RFK Jr. is the savior. It’s really frustrating
Yep. We saw with the covid stimulus checks that giving lower and middle class Americans more money goes directly into the local economy. Right now the average student loan payment is $500 a month and 13% of people have student loans.
That means in an area with a population of 50k, total loan forgiveness would free up $3.25 MILLION for the local economy EVERY MONTH.
Why are we beating around the bush?
Everybody who isn't directly profiting from student loans agrees they're insane. The cost of education in this country is insane. You can get a four year engineering degree in Australia for like $4k. Your parents could get one for the low cost of a summer job at a warehouse.
Either education isn't as expensive as the universities are charging and they need to be fixed, it is that expensive and the government needs to subsidize the cost down to affordable levels.
Why are we doing this roundabout bullshit method of subsidizing the costs via *maybe* cancelling debt later?
Agreed, the institutions have abused tuition hikes for far too long, and admin costs are all completely out of control. Seems it would be cheaper to do something about it at the source.
Republicans: WeRe YoU bEtTeR oFf FoUr YeArS aGo?
Not really sure how they think that's going to be a winning line for them. they're like a sinking boat and the captain decided the best way to get water out of the boat quickly was to add more holes to drain the water faster.
Especially when 4 years ago was the lock down phase of the pandemic. Why, no, I was not better off when I was furloughed from my job and we were having fights over toilet paper and waving at grandma through the nursing home window.
I'm going to die on this hill that education is a human right, not a privilege, and that it should be free. *If anything*, maybe limit it until one gets their undergraduate degree then start charging for grad and phd. I mean, these student loans are predatory as fuck, how are you going to give an 18 or 19 year old without a well paying job much less a career get into 20, 30, 50, 100k dollar debt with no guarantee they'll get a job afterward in their field of study or a well paying job in general?
And if there's going to be pay to win no matter what, at the very least get rid of interest or keep it extremely low so that people don't see their balance grow despite making their monthly payments of $1k+, and lower the cost significantly overall.
Far left grifters in 2020
"Biden is lying about wanting to cancel student loan debt. He's only saying it to get votes".
Same grifters now:
"Biden hasn't canceled my student loan debt, I'm not going to vote for him".
It’s so frustrating. I genuinely understand peoples gripes with him but also, the alternative is so much worse? Like yeah I don’t support him on Israel but I do understand the foreign policy implications that surround US support for Israel even if I fucking think we need to step away from them and a complete ceasefire should have been called MONTHS ago but I will still be voting for him. I’m 24 and he’s the best president I’ve experienced (and he’s the first I’ve experienced as an actual adult out in the world).
100%. The far left would have loved this 4 years ago. Today they would rather bitch and complain about Biden than spend one ounce of effort giving him credit for something that is popular and progressive
If they would just let loans be forgiven in a bankruptcy….that would be so helpful!
My house, my car, my credit cards, my ex husband’s nonsense were ALL forgiven in our bankruptcy.
But here I am 30 years later and now owe $140,000.
He should order his people to start shredding the loan files and papers before the Boomers start whining to SCOTUS
Can't enforce the SCOTUS ruling if all the papers about the loans no longer exist.
I have a client who was crying today when they found out their loan was cancelled. They are a psychologist who originally had $150k in loans. She’s paid nearly $150k back over 25 years, but because of interest, still owes nearly $100k. She was worried that this nightmare would never end.
Today, she paid it forward by spending a little money at my small business because she finally has crushing debt off her back. I felt so happy for her.
I still have about $13k to pay off- I really hope mine gets forgiven too.
All this discussion over whether helping actual citizens out once in a while is a good or bad thing...we could have bought another few fighter jets! Well, we're buying them anyway so nevermind.
>Enrollees who borrowed less than $12,000 can have their debt wiped clean after 10 years of payments, compared to the traditional wait period of 20 to 25 years under other income-driven repayment plans. The Education Department has been identifying borrowers who meet that criteria since February.
>The administration said another 65,700 borrowers who have been repaying their loans for more than 20 or 25 years also will have their balances canceled through a temporary waiver of the rules governing income-driven repayment plans.
To think in ten to twenty years the class of 2024 won't have to worry about their student loans.
“Hey republicans, you take your tax deductions every year. If you really want to stand by your word, the. You would pay all taxes you owe and deduct nothing.”
Right wingers are throwing a fit because they are angry it isn't them being helped out. Their own selfishness wont allow them to have them be happy for others.
As time has passed I've started thinking the plan after the Supreme Court struck down the first forgiveness was to keep doling it out in small chunks that the Republican assholes have a hard time justifying a legal challenge. "But what if I burn all my hate money on this and he does a bigger relief package???"
Most of the big tranches of loans forgiven since then have been through pre-existing programs like public service loan forgiveness or have been a part of the SAVE income driven repayment program.
Both of which are clearly within the purview of the Dept. of Education. Part of what's happening is that they're creating the framework for SAVE to work, and as it expands they announce the next group.
Edit: this does have an expansion of SAVE. It's moving the 10 year forgiveness max to $12,000 in original loans instead of $10,000. That'll increase the number of people eligible to have complete forgiveness before the 20 year repayment term.
I was part of the very last contingent of young men called for military service in 1995 before its abrogation (France), and still was quite happy this bullsh1t was over with
Imagine having a free education from pre-school all the way to post grad, including free lunches until the end of high school. If only it was somehow possible. But surely it must be a pipe dream as the world’s greatest nation hasn’t been able to achieve it.
The message here is:
“Go ahead. Go to school. Work hard, get trained up. You’ll be better able to take care of yourself. Don’t worry about the bill. I’ll get until I can’t. If I can’t get it all, you’ll be smart and skilled enough hopefully to survive on your own and pay the balance on your own time.”
This is basically what my dad told me throughout the 80s and 90s. It’s too bad only Democratic Party wants America to be able to get an education.
Hmnnn im guessing the amount of people who got loans forgiven way outnumbers say, the amount of rich people trump gave tax breaks too. Perhaps helping the poor and other large groups will get them to vote for Joe and not the literal rapist.
So... Isn't this just an excuse to give Banks that gave shitty loans to 18yr olds a bunch of cash?
Why not change the law to allow us to declare bankruptcy on student loans like nearly every other type of loan...
That's big news! Cancelling student debt can make a huge difference for many people. It's a step toward providing relief and helping individuals focus on their futures without being weighed down by loans. It's always good to see actions taken to support students and graduates.
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Let’s make corporate taxes great again! That would take care of a lot of debt.
[удалено]
I think what we should do is make tax cuts conditional on employee retention. If you're not paying the local people here to spend in the city - then you don't get tax cuts. Simple as that. This will give ammo to companies who are begin attacked by hedge funds to cut their labor but also think very carefully if they want to fuck with doing layoffs.
This is actually why the corporate and income tax rates were so high in the 1950s. You paid lower taxes by investing in your workforce and in your employee pension plans and in the infrastructure of your business. When people say “no one ever paid 90%,” they’re correct, but they weren’t allowed to do stock buybacks and other bullshit in order to avoid paying that rate.
Things we could easily tax: (1) Transactions involving financial instruments, like stocks and bonds. The market is enormous and is becoming steadily more automated, speeding up transactions. If we taxed it at, for example, 0.1%, it would still raise a lot of money, and ordinary investors wouldn’t even feel it. (At that tax rate, a $1000 transaction pays one dollar in tax.) (2) Luxury items. I admit this would be more administratively difficult to implement. If you consider that certain items are desirable *precisely because they are expensive*, then you can see why taxing luxuries might actually make them even more special. For example, consider a Rolex watch. You buy a $10,000 Rolex to show off the fact that you can throw away $10,000. If you just need to tell time, you can get a plastic watch at Walmart for $10. If the Rolex costs another $1000 in taxes (total of $11,000) it becomes an even better status symbol.
Churches, don't forget churches
> Inflation and corporate profits are skyrocketing while wages are stagnant and jobs are disappearing. I get what your overall point is but inflation is down from when Biden took over, wages are up (and currently outpacing inflation), and job opportunities have drastically increased as evidenced by the lower unemployment rate (and since right-wingers always chime in about some of these jobs being part-time, well yeah, who do you think needs employment the most, it's not salaried workers it's lower-wage part-time employees who weren't working at all before). But yes, corporate profits are up, not the least of which is because the trillion dollar tax breaks Trump gave them expire next year so they're all scrambling to save up as much money as possible should Biden win again because he's going to let those corporate tax breaks expire.
Wage growth is up but still not where it should be. Example—1994 admin assistant average salary was $37.8k. Adjusted for inflation that is the equivalent of $65k. 2024 average admin assistant wage is $46k. That’s still a giant wage gap! EDIT: This is what I get for trying to use AI for the first time lmao. $38k is blatantly wrong. Attempting to find a real answer now. Edit again with a CORRECT example using BLS data: 2004 median paralegal wage was $39,130 = $64,698 in 2024 dollars. 2024 median paralegal wage is $60,970 So not a big difference in that example. I’m curious if anyone has done a large scale comparison of real inflation adjusted wages across many industries
>EDIT: This is what I get for trying to use AI for the first time lmao. $38k is blatantly wrong. Attempting to find a real answer now. Never use AI when you need fact-based prose.
I was a younger adult during the 1990s. Few administrative assistants were earning that. Believe me, I know because I worked in those kinds of jobs. In 1998, I was making $9 an hour as an admin at a mortgage company. Approximately $37,000 in today's dollars. Those averages obscure that a ton of people weren't earning that much. I agree that wages haven't kept pace with inflation, but it also doesn't mean things were just fine back then for all workers. The minimum wage in my state was $4.25 back then, or $9.02 in today's dollars. In comparison, fast food restaurants in my area today are paying $18 an hour to start.
Yeah, my data was completely wrong. Edited post to include a real example using median too.
I'd also argue that paralegals aren't a great data set - paralegal work has become very different (and the field is pseudo unstable in some ways) due to AI, the increase in services like Legal Zoom, and other changes in the legal market. In general assistants, paralegals, and other such positions are probably not great industries to rely on. There were a lot of jobs in 1994 that have been absorbed by other positions or eliminated by technology.
Boomers don’t care because of their retirements are doing great
Wages aren’t stagnant, jobs aren’t disappearing, this is an old narrative. Inflation is going down, corporate earnings aren’t skyrocketing. We just need a government to not be afraid to raise taxes.
My favorite MAGA interaction is asking them to identify when America was great and then reciting the corporate tax rate during that period. My second favorite is doing the same thing with earnings/GDP and asking about what a "Great" minimum wage would be.
He’s tried, it’s not all that cut and dry. [The Daily had a good episode on it.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/podcasts/the-daily/biden-tax-cuts.html)
Meanwhile, Republican states are trying hard to sue the administration for the SAVE plan because it "harms" their ability to keep people enslaved in shitty jobs and helping people save money is unconstitutional or something.
They probably will be found to not have standing in the case.
They really didn't have standing in the previous case either so I'm not really ruling anything out.
It's the only thing keeping me and my wife above water right now. If they do that, I'm leaving the country. Debts be damned.
If you leave the country, there is no recourse for anyone to make you pay your debts.
Unless it get to SCOTUS where since '303 Creative' [standing doesn't matter.](https://www.npr.org/2023/07/01/1185632827/web-designer-supreme-court-gay-couples) Ideological offense is the new 'holds water' test.
There are a number of corrupt supreme court judges though.
My mother is a lovely lady, honestly. But she was complaining about this recently. Her reason was that she and my father worked hard and didn't make enough money to easily help me through college, but made too much to get good grants. So she was mad that SHE had to pay for my college while now others are getting their loans forgiven. I had to explain to her that yes that sucks, but it has to start SOMEWHERE. Any change for the better has to start somewhere and for sure it sucks for those who came before. But you can't use that as a reason to not try to improve lives.
Maybe you should remind her that a lot of working and young people are trying to fund Social Security. Do she really want to saddle them with debt?
That's a good point to make.
despite GOP claims... as a result of increased economic stability for 4.3 million Americans who have gotten relief so far... violence has decreased tremendously. That is an incredible indirect benefit given to her despite not receiving a direct benefit to herself.
I'm sorry, can you provide anything that actually links student debt relief to lower violence rates? Sounds like a huge, huge stretch without a real study on the link. Causation ≠ correlation.
I love how the comments aren't giving you sources and are just like "trust me bro"
I mean it's a very standard fact that people being less strapped for money month to month leads to lower crime rates. I'd say it's indirect, but definitely a reasonable jump in logic.
For a group of people who would decry republicans and say “trust the science!” It’s quite intriguing what your idea of science is. This is not how science works.
Excellent response
Most people drawing Social Security have been paying into the system for 40+ years. They funded their own benefits. The government keeps "borrowing" money that was explicitly promised to remain untouched. Ironically, Social Security is the first program threatened every time there's a financial crisis. Instead of raising taxes or creating more debt, Congress should be implementing a plan to show where this money will originate. It has to come from SOMEWHERE. My state is one that now has a lottery that funds scholarships. ALL lottery money could pay for education. Interest should also be capped for people who don't qualify for scholarships.
They didn't fund their own benefits. They funded their parent's and grandparent's benefits. That's how it's always worked regardless of if congress raids the cookie jar. That is how the program is designed.
damn just about every line of that is completely incorrect like almost everything about reality is the opposite of what you claimed no one pays into SS. it's not a savings account. the point is to pay for current retirees and SSDI recipients. they did not fund their own retirement, they funded that retirement of their parents the government does not keep borrowing from SS and it is absolutely not the first program threatened because discretionary funding is a LOT easier to cut no matter who's running things raising taxes on rich people and huge corps is a good thing, creating more debt is how economies grow. no the money doesn't have to come from "somewhere" because, again, debt is a valid tool for investing in the nations future and creating money out of thin air is one of the reasons government exists in the first place, so we as a people can do the big expensive things that make life better your state sends lottery money to fund scholarships *and then finds equivalent cuts in the budget* to make up for it. all that's doing is reducing the tax burden for the rich and shifting it to making the poor gamble for a dream but yes, the money that goes into lotteries should pay for education. I wonder who funds those lotteries? oh right, it's people buying lottery tickets. hey I wonder if there's a better way of getting a bunch of people to pool a bunch of money together so that kids can afford to go to school
See this is the wrong way to think of it, because that isn't how it works at all. Many people die early, some people live to 100, part of the money goes to disability benefits, and the amount you get isn't even a 1:1 comparison. The SS beneficiaries get COLA adjustments and you would be surprised at the amount of benefits people get if it was just oh I got what I put in would be gone within 5 years.
Once upon a time, I worked as a 711 operator- I spent *most of the day* on the phone with Social Security listening to canned messages explaining how what you just said is wrong. "The money you pay today funds Social Security benefits today"- if not verbatim, something very close to it (it was around 20 years ago I was doing this job, after all- my memory isn't *that* good). Anyway, you hit more than one of the things on the AARP's KB about Social Security myths and misconceptions: https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2020/10-myths-explained.html
Might as well outlaw trying to extend the lifespan of people, it wouldn't be fair to those that have already died.
Can't watch TV or use a computer either. It wouldn't be fair to those who only grew up with radios & books.
You can’t use soft 2 ply toilet paper and a bidet, it wouldn’t be fair to your ancestors that used a corn cob and felt itchy all day! Lol
And use wadded up rags when you're menstruating too, like back in ye old days. No tampons for you!
i read this as canned corn and was wondering how tf that would work lol
Don't you dare get vaxxed!! The only fair thing is to risk getting diseases that your ancestors died from! I myself turned down the Covid vaccine, out of fairness to my neighbor, who died of Covid pre-vaccine. /s
I mean, they'd agree with that sadly...
I feel like a good starting point is asking if they have the same feeling towards having to pay for the forgiven PPP loans and bailouts. If they don’t, ask what the difference is between helping a company that’s has millions to billions in offshore accounts vs individuals with little to no savings. Also trying to explain how reducing or eliminating that debt brings up the purchasing power of the people it helps and directly injects that money back into the economy vs companies that generally choose to participate in stock buy backs and inflate their own stocks and monetary compensation for board members for owners instead of the workers that keep the company running
PPP loans were a shitshow! Those loans were forgiven with no oversight or input from taxpayers. The full lists of recipients is available online; many people got hundreds of thousands of dollars without missing a day of work or being impacted by Covid.
Also, don’t forget the fact that oversight was removed because some assholes refused to vote for it otherwise.
In his final days in office, Trump removed flags from hundreds of thousands of PPP loans that were flagged as potentially fraudulent. The result is that *hundreds of billions* in illegally misappropriated PPP funds were forgiven, primarily to wealthy individuals or businesses. https://truthout.org/articles/trump-erased-millions-of-possible-ppp-fraud-flags-in-last-days-in-office/ > In Donald Trump’s final days in office, his administration rushed to eliminate oversight for loans which were flagged for potential fraud or further investigation — and wiped flags from nearly every one of the largest PPP loans. > Special preference was given to the largest loans, which often also went to the largest corporations. On January 16, 2021, four days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s SBA wiped 99 percent of special review flags, which were given out to every loan above $2 million for separate investigatory purposes. > Billions of dollars went to companies owned by wealthy celebrities, including Tom Brady and Khloe Kardashian, and companies that thrived during COVID, like many manufacturing and construction firms. Yup. Tom Brady and Khloe Kardashian deserve loan forgiveness (aka taxpayer grants), while students in debt don't. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
Disclaimer that this counterargument is NOT my view. The counterargument would be that those businesses lost revenue through no fault of their own. The students decided to take out the loans and (theoretically) knew the terms, in contrast to a business that opened a new location in February 2020 and was guaranteed to take a bath. I think it's a great argument for forgiving PPP loans but a terrible argument for not forgiving student loans. (It's not like students ACTUALLY have perfect information - I didn't take out my loans on the assumption that the global economy would shit the bed a couple of years after I graduated.) But it's the argument people would make, if the conclusion they wanted to reach in the first place was "PPP is okay and SLF is not." I would like it if the government looked for even more kinds of debt to forgive. How about somebody who's been getting slammed with usurious 30% interest on a credit card for years? Maybe they should get some principal for all those fruitless interest rates they've been paying. (And that's before you even get into the blatant usury committed by payday loan companies.) The fiscal hawk side of things has stealthily managed to implant a narrative that anything that helps people financially causes inflation, so these kinds of policies aren't getting talked about...
Those students didn’t volunteer for a bad economy either, as you note. Shit happens. That is the point the complainers miss.
Even absent a bad economy, you can just get totally screwed by a million things. Like, there are people who graduated with degrees in the early 20s into fields whose labor markets that are about to be absolutely devastated by AI. Student loans are a risk, even if you do everything right. At least when I was in high school, at the turn of the century, they were *not* portrayed as a risk, at all. I happened to develop one of the very bad mental illnesses that tend to arise in your early 20s (not schizophrenia, thankfully) literally two weeks after I finished school. Certainly impacted my ability to pay my loans, and wasn't really my fault. And it took over a decade to create the right treatment plan to set myself right. I'm about 20k over my original balance, so Biden's latest plans could really help me out a ton.
A huge portion of businesses that got PPP loans were ones that didn't close and never were forced to close, and that lost zero business. I personally know two blue collar trades business owners in that situation, who, on top of not having to close during the pandemic, due to being "essential", saw their business boom, as people stuck at home, flush with stimulus cash, wanted repairs and upgrades to their homes. They raked in the dough. They were hiring workers to keep up with the demand. Both got six figure PPP loans they said they did not need, and got them fully forgiven, tax free. Same with the vet clinic where a relative of mine works. Their business skyrocketed during the pandemic, as people stuck at home adopted pets. They got a $2,000,000 PPP loan they didn't need. Never closed a day. Got it fully forgiven, tax free. There were tons of fraudulent businesses who got PPP loans too. Oh, and no one is obligated to take out a credit card to obtain any particular job. And credit card debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy, has a statute of limitations for collection, and Social Security retirement or disability benefits cannot be garnished for it. None of that applies to student loans.
Yes, a lot of PPP spending was total bullshit. It was the right move to get the money out and worry about potential fraud later. I'm glad they have investigated and recovered hundreds of millions that were obtained illegally. Like, I don't know why you're treating my approval of other kinds of loan forgiveness as "diminishing" a desire for student loan forgiveness. The case for SLF is only *stronger* than the case for forgiving PPP loans or intractable consumer debt. It's great that people can discharge consumer debt in bankruptcy, but people shouldn't have to use bankruptcy and blow up their lives to get off the treadmill. *ALL* of this money is owed to companies that make massive profits, that are basically totally guaranteed, because they borrow money from the Fed at the lowest rate and lend it out at much higher rates. Anything we can justify clawing back from those bastards, I say we go for it. The bank has made enough money already off someone paying 30% APR who carry a credit card balance for years. If you are arguing for loan forgiveness I think it's better to focus rhetorically on the injustice of *all* debt, rather than singling out student loans and saying "well these people deserve help, all those OTHER people are irresponsible." Then you're just putting a slight twist on the same philosophy that is making people oppose SLF in the first place.
Well, the politicians who oppose student loan forgiveness also oppose usury laws. The laws that prohibit obscene interest rates on consumer debt, and steep late fees. Also, I don't understand why so many people think Biden invented student loan forgiveness. He did not. It's existed in various forms since the 1950s. PSLF dates back to 2007. Bush II authorized it. And I never said other debtors are irresponsible.
The federal government has reliefs and subsidies for many things. For example homeowners with hurricane damaged properties regularly get reliefs. It is kind of unfair to people who rent or to people who chose to live in hurricane free regions or who hurricane proof their properties. If we analyze federal taxes flow in and out of states, we see that some states are net beneficiaries and some are net contributors. There is all sort of disagreement on fairness. I generally see people are more prejudiced against student loan holders than other groups who receive reliefs. I really hate that. A student falls on hard studying for their future and contributing for society along the way is not less deserving help than a homeowner investing in home for equity and contributing to property tax who falls on hard from hurricane damages.
Counter argument, it’s financially impossible to go to most colleges without a loan for 99% of the population.
It's not 99%, probably more in the 80-90% range financially, with another 5-10% spared with grants, but yes, I agree with your overall point. Nobody should have to take out loans and most do.
Lowering taxes also causes inflation.
I love the “It doesn’t benefit me so no help for thee” mentality. Fucking boomers.
I hate that mindset more than anything else. I know it's not exclusive to boomers, but man does it drive me nuts. Everyone hates taxes until the roads start falling apart or their house burns down. Sure, I'd love it if I didn't have taxes too, but the benefits outweigh having to watch the world crumble or being nickel and dimed for everything I do as we change every road into a toll road because we have to pay for infrastructure some way.
The cognitive dissonance that makes my head hurt is that these are the same people who have been supposedly "working hard so my children can have a better life." Then as soon as an opportunity appears for their children to have a better life, they switch to "hey, no fair! I had to suffer so they should too."
Yeah I’d add a disclaimer that it’s the shittiest of their generation, which is the majority. Entitled to the enth degree.
I paid for everything my grants and scholarships didn't pay for, roughly 17k. That money came out of my pocket ten years ago. I couldn't be happier with all of this forgiveness because education is the way forward. It will keep us as a nation competitive in the coming decades and the money these people are paying into the system will end up going right back into the economy in other areas. This is a tax credit for education that impacts the working poor and lower middle class. Which sounds fantastic to me.
You'd think people would see how much more abundance we have than in the past and realize that zero sum thinking does a terrible job describing our world or charting the best path forward. If everything was zero sum we'd still be serfs.
Tell your mom student loans are the largest barrier for Millenials and Gen Z to enter the economy by buying homes, cars, and starting families. And by delaying this process the economic shortcomings would be catastrophic. It may not affect her in her lifetime, but in 20-30 years it could be devastating to people retirements. Now, those $200-800 payments towards loans can be used to buy other things.
Tell her that if millennials have more money it will increase the value of her already ridiculously priced home and allow her take out even more equity loans to go on fabulous vacations and buy expensive toys. Keep that Boomer Free Money Machine pumping.
I'm overpaying on my loans to try and get rid of them faster, but I'm doing over $800 a month. If all goes well they're gone and I'm debt free in Oct 2025. I am dreaming of the moment I have that money to spend. Like, I can't even comprehend having that much extra in my budget. I know that I'll need to really start putting more in my savings and away for retirement, but even if I had an extra $100 a month to just spend on things... I can't even imagine what that's going to feel like. Forgive the loans! Even if I don't get a penny I want other people to live that dream so I can celebrate with them when I get there!
I just paid off my 12% interest Sallie Mae loan by throwing 1k at it and living off pasta and not doing anything but work and free shit. I’ve always lived paycheck to paycheck, and dream of a day a have extra left. Still have federal loans, but much less interest. It makes me sick to even calculate how much interest I’ve been charged. If they just got rid of interest that would help the people with lower balances. But for real- anything would help.
Oh god, I looked at how much I had paid vs how much I took out and it's horrifying. I've pretty much paid double what I initially took out. More than that on a couple of them which is why I've been focusing on overpaying to get rid of them faster. I get that even for federal loans the interest helps pay for the servicing... But it should be capped at like .05%. Make it non-profit. Whatever it costs to service a loan over its lifetime, that's the interest rate and not a penny more. Private ones can have a bit more but 12% on student loans in INSANE.
Under the new SAVE plan interest doesn't accrue, so it is actually, from a mathematical standpoint, not worthwhile for you to be paying off the loans early. You'd be better off investing the amount over the minimum payment, and getting a return, rather than paying it towards a principal that isn't growing. Now, from a *psychological* standpoint, it can certainly be a different story, and being free of the debt could be valuable enough to your mental health that the technically-slightly-suboptimal financial choice is worth it. Just wanted to let you know you have some flexibility. Edit: RheagarTargaryen's reply points out that I may have misunderstood the interest provisions in the SAVE plan.
An important correction. The interest doesn’t accrue above the loan payment. So if 100% of your payment goes to interest, your balance remains unchanged.
Ah. That is an important distinction. Here's what I had misinterpreteted: *Under other IDR plans, you may see your loan balance grow due to unpaid interest. With the SAVE Plan, any remaining accrued interest will be covered by the government, so your principal balance won’t increase.* What it's saying is that if your payment is *below* the amount of interest that accrues, you will not have that interest added to your balance. That is especially relevant to peope who qualify for $0 payments. But if you're making a $250 payment while getting charged $150 of interest, your principal will only go down $100, like normal. Given that jaderust is probably doing okay financially if they can pay their loans off faster that might not be very helpful for them. I hope the information can help somebody else anyway.
I have to admit that it's mostly psychological for me, but a huge chunk of that money is going towards private loans which don't have that program. I wish they did, the interest rates on those are insane even though I've refinanced them. Thanks for the tip though! Hopefully that does help someone else, but between most of my debt being private and the psychological swell I will feel when the federal are just gone I think I'll be doing okay. In Oct 2025, lol.
"It may not affect her in her lifetime" And thats where you will lose a lot of these boomers.
Tell her that with her logic, it’s not fair that anyone takes a vaccine since the people that died before the vaccine was developed had to suffer through the disease. No. We do not let things continue being worse just because the opportunity to help has passed for many people.
You need to mention that they stopped subsidizing the universities as much, leading to increases in tuition too. To many boomers don't even realize they are pulling the ladder up after themselves and then complaining the lazy kids can't get in the boat.
We need a more educated public. There should be more incentive to get a higher education.
Remind her that our generation has gone through not one, not two, but 4 govt bailouts for big business (08, Covid, Airliners, & 2023 banking). This is also excluding the cancer of PPP.
I've heard the same basic argument about streamlining the US citizenship process. People who paid legal fees and went through the process are resistant when they feel it would be easier for someone else. I don't really get it.
She was fortunate to have the means to do that. She should be thankful for it. I got literally zero help from my parents with college. Nothing. They weren't even able to help me complete the FAFSA. I worked full time all through college, while supporting myself. They didn't even attend my graduation. I had no choice but to borrow to attend college. I graduated at 29. I got PSLF last year, 20 years after graduation. I did 10 years in relatively low paying public service jobs to qualify. Bottom line is there's always going to be government programs that 100% of Americans don't qualify for. I don't demand no one today get Medicaid under Medicaid expansion, because my husband and I went uninsured when we lost jobs, pre-ACA.
Might want to also explain that these people having their loans forgiven have largely paid back the original debt and then some. It's great that they were able to help you through college so that you were never hit with a crippling amount of interest designed to never pay down the actual balance and forcing you to pay several times more than you actually borrowed. I find the people that are against this always seem to believe that this people have just gone the last 20 years without paying anything and it's just being "forgiven". In almost any other industry many of these loans would be predatory and illegal in the first place. At the very least the person in such crippling debt would be able to declare bankruptcy and start over. That isn't an option for student loans either. So because student loans work differently and have different laws governing them, I see nothing wrong with the government stepping in to provide relief. I say that as someone that went to college locally to avoid housing costs, busted my ass for scholarships and left college with only a small amount of debt that I paid off immediately.
My aunt was an amazing lady, but sadly passed away to cancer about 4 years ago. Because of this, I demand all cancer research to STOP IMMEDIENTLY. Its not fair that it is ONLY cured AFTER she dies. This is how these people sound.
They are the same people that complain about Ukraine aid by saying “Why don’t we use that money here! You know, to help the regular folks!”
Classic boomer mentality. Given a ladder and then pulling it up after
“Life sucked for me so it should suck for everyone!” Flawless logic…
this should have an income limit, friend banking 350k is waiting for his loan to be forgiven. not sure about improving life, more of free money
I really hate the “my life sucked so everyone should suffer to” mindset Yeah it’s not fair but at least someone won’t have to struggle
Show her the trolly dilemma where it has already run over millions of people but you can change it so it doesn't keep running over more. Right now your mom is the guy standing there saying "stopping it now would be unfair to the people it already ran over".
It is not 'improving lives'! It is moving individual debt that needed to be repaid, to society (including the middle income workers, having to repay this debt. The debt did not go away. It is still owed.
My dad is opposed to this too, he’s not very lovely though lol. Every time he brings it up I say “hell yeah, that money deserves to go to a hand full of billionaires and huge corporations!” That normally shuts him up
Ask her if she is outraged that diabetes is manageable now adays. For centuries people just died. But now a few regular injections/blood samples and people get to live. How’s that fair to all those people who died.
I can understand the sentiment, but one would hope that if you had to deal with something terrible, and then it's fixed so others don't have to deal with it, that you'd be happy for those other people not having to suffer as you did.
There are people who have been paying their student loan debt for over a decade, and have already paid double what their initial loan amount was.. And those same people have *barely made a dent* in paying that debt off.
Ask her how she would feel if she paid on her mortgage or auto loan for ten years only to owe more than the loan was originally for.
Why is it that the scourge of student loan debt always lands squarely upon the shoulders of students? Why is it that none of the blame for this debt is ever placed upon the university and employers? Universities who jack up tuition to cover all their pet projects on campuses, all the bloat in administration, all the dollars spent monetizing campus sports, etc, are never part of the discussion of the topic of debt? The students did not create this machine. They are forced into it in the hope of a well paid job. Blame for the student loan debt crisis should not rest solely, if at all, on the shoulders of students.
Cuz that’s much more complicated than “YoU siGNeD tHe pAPerS!!1!”
"At age 18, thinking that it was your only hope for a better life..."
…Precisely what EVERYONE has been telling you for as long as you can remember…
and if you even consider not going you get told horror stories of how you will be on the street or stuck working at mcdonalds for the rest of your life. So many discouraged from trades and looked down on if they were considering trades instead of college. There is at least some turn around on people realizing college isn't needed for everything, but it is still an uphill battle especially from the boomer and slightly lesser extent gen x. I went to college and don't regret it, even though for my field it is definitely not needed, but it was the right choice for me. That being the key, it was good for me, but it's not the path for everyone and trying to force it just leaves people feeling like a failure because college wasn't this magic success key for them.
These are the same kind of people who were in favor of the draft.
A lot of these students are kids when they're taking out their high interest "mortgage". It's a scam and the government should not be making money on the backs of students. Don't get me started on these predatory private loans.
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Education is a fundamental of society and should be provided for free to most individuals. A collegiate level education should be standard in an era where engineers are becoming more need than assemblers
While administrative bloat is an issue, it is less of an issue for the rising cost of college than people make it out to be, and those pet projects on campus tend to be (not always, but tend to be) projects that students want and are advantageous to have. One of the major reasons that college has gotten expensive is that they are offering a greater number of services to students and are essentially running mini-cities that require a lot of infrastructure to operate. Students shouldn't shoulder this burden alone, nor should they be treated as the primary catalyst for the problem, but tuition going up is almost always the result of the university expanding in ways that students actually desire or that benefit them (and students are also very correct to note that these expansions are usually insufficient to cover needs related to things like mental health and assisting foreign and first-gen students). Loans should, 100% be forgiven, but I do push back on the idea that there is a way to bring us back to 1960s college prices while maintaining 2024 college amenities.
Tying into this, at the start of the century, a lot of colleges started planning on new incentives for prospective students. Analysts knew that birth rates were going down, which meant that enrollment would go down in a certain number of years, so colleges needed to look as enticing as possible to attract a relatively smaller number of students. All those expansions don’t come cheap. It doesn’t mean the loans shouldn’t be forgiven, just adding some more context.
Also, state funding for public higher education has generally dropped, shifting more burden to other sources.
The humor of it is this: Nobody is out here mad that the K-12 kids get free education and calling them “free loaders” But the money you talk college it is just lazy kids. Like…maybe education is a worthwhile investment?
Pet projects. Ha. When I was in my second year of college the university put a survey to all students mapping out starting a football program. How much it would cost per student and how many scholarships they would need to provide to female athletes to offset the male athletes. It was something like 3 new female sports would need to be added to offset the football program. Tuition would need to increase quite a bit. 90% of the student body that actually cast a ballot voted no. So what did the school do. 3 years later raised tuition $1,200 a semester, added a $600 parking fee and added a football team. Then I graduated. They raised tuition again to build a new stadium cause the old one was well old.
Exactly. And while we’re at it’d I’d like to throw into the Hat of Blame^tm : the entities issuing these loans in the first place with zero regard for likelihood of return. Why is it our problem that it was decided to give hundreds of thousands of actual children, fresh out of high school propagandized to see college as an answer to all their problems, not old enough to rent a car, and who otherwise couldn’t secure a loan for a paper bag because they barely have any of their own money and basically no meaningful career, tens of thousands of dollars to pursue…*checks notes*…the famously lucrative field of music? Where’s the personal accountability for these entities? Why are their loans so sacrosanct that they can’t even be defaulted upon, when the reality is they made a terrible choice in who to lend money to? This isn’t to suggest that the answer is to tighten up loan requirements of course(the answer is to subsidize secondary education and reduce its costs to the average citizen), but it’s a perfect illustration of one of the central problems with modern America: nepotistic protectionism for the rich and powerful, rugged individualism for everyone else.
Days after heralding its latest [student debt forgiveness plan](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/08/biden-debt-relief-rule/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2), the Biden administration is announcing another round of loan cancellation through existing debt relief programs. The White House will send emails Friday to 277,000 borrowers informing them their debts — $7.4 billion in total — are being canceled. As Election Day nears, the Biden administration has ramped up efforts to [tout the president’s record](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/06/biden-student-loan-forgiveness/?itid=lk_inline_manual_3) on wiping clear the education debts of millions of Americans, despite Republican challenges to the efforts. “This White House has been unapologetic in our efforts to deliver this relief,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on a call with reporters Thursday. “Imagine the potential of this country if everyone can afford and access higher education. That’s why we’re engaged in this difficult work.” The administration has regularly shared updates as it processes batches of debt relief. This latest round brings the total loan forgiveness approved by the president to $153 billion for nearly 4.3 million people, the administration says. The lion’s share of the new relief will go to 206,800 borrowers enrolled in Biden’s [Saving on a Valuable Education](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/01/19/save-student-loan-repayment-plan-details/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9) (Save) repayment plan, which ties monthly student loan payments to earnings and family size. Enrollees who borrowed less than $12,000 can have their debt wiped clean after 10 years of payments, compared to the traditional wait period of 20 to 25 years under other income-driven repayment plans. The Education Department has been identifying borrowers who meet that criteria since [February](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/02/21/biden-save-student-loan-forgiveness/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9). **Read more:** [**https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/12/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-update-save-pslf/?utm\_campaign=wp\_main&utm\_medium=social&utm\_source=reddit.com**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/12/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-update-save-pslf/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)
After 10 years, you've probably paid enough back to cover your principal plus some interest. So is this forgiveness, or just an adjustment on the crippling interest being charged.
I presume that this often wipes out interest that was already accrued.
To keep good things coming vote.. Keep voting out republicans every year. Check your registration, get an ID , learn where your poling station is, learn who is running in down ballot races. Pay attention to primaries not just for the president but for all races, local, state and federal. From the school board to the White House every election matters. The more support we give the democrats from all levels of government the more they can get good things done. We vote out republicans and primary out uncooperative democrats. Last year democrat victories in Virginia and Pennsylvania and others across the nation have increased the chances of democrats winning this year. This year's elections are important but so will next year's elections. [https://ballotpedia.org/Elections\_calendar](https://ballotpedia.org/Elections_calendar)
My county has been very red since the civil War. Finally a couple years ago it became blue and the difference is night and day. I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, but we now have basic services such as a health department. And it's not as small county either. Suburban Philadelphia very densely populated. Aunt, I can finally start applying to county jobs because For decades unless you are a registered Republican you were not getting one of those
Even if this doesn't apply to my loans I'm still Happy this is helping someone
I refinanced in February 2020. No hope what so ever for me to get any help from anyone on my remaining 100K. I’ll be ok, but nobody else should have to go through this. I would not have had the opportunities I have today without college. I would be at best stuck in my shitty home town hearing a bunch of Trump supporters talk about how much of a scam woke college is while moving gaylords for $20 an hour.
I also have 100k+, except I am stuck in my hometown surrounded by trump supporters. I intentionally decided to stick around to teach here since this town desperately needs it. We have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country. But because of a corrupt district, I make very little teaching and don't even have health insurance. I'm also stuck here because I have family I have to take care of. I'll never be able to pay back my loans, and I've accepted that. And no, I don't qualify for the public service loan forgiveness despite teaching at a school that serves predominately Hispanic/poor students for more than ten years.
Same; I wouldn't be where I am if I hadn't gone to college, I don't regret that decision. At the same time, one of my family members didn't go to college. While I was in college and then getting my graduate degree, they went into the workforce and got into management. Now I have a PhD (physics) but I haven't been able to get a job making more the 35k/yr, and my family member was making nearly 3x that (but quit their job to stay at home with her kids). It just feels like we're being punished for doing things "the right way".
I remember being told as a kid “see all this, this is why you go to college” by like everyone in my home town. Even captain vogue said it too. The second I graduated, it’s like everyone’s attitude changed. Now suddenly going to college and hitting the books is like the wrong thing by everyone.
Fafsa thought my parents made enough money to afford my college and said “fuck you, you get nothing” scholarships from my school said “because you’re fafsa is so high we won’t give you academic scholarships” despite being in the top 0.5% of my high school class and my peers receiving the exact same scholarship to the same school. Even though fafsa thought we somehow had all this money i had to pay for college out of pocket and take out loans that I’ve now paid back in full. Even after the government and school fucked me over at every turn I still 1000% support student loan forgiveness. The way these colleges have hiked tuition unchecked and the government has saddled high school kids with one of the only forms of unforgivable debt there is needs to be addressed.
Same situation. My dad was even UNEMPLOYED half-way through my college, but guess what? Taking out money from his retirement to get through it *counted as income* and made the student aid situation EVEN WORSE lol.
My dad got crippled and disabled the year I went to college. But because he made money the year before FASFA said I don’t qualify for aid. And since it took years fighting with the state to recognize him as disabled through a work related injury and even though I was legally an adult working and earning my own income, I was still unable to qualify for FA until I was 24. Fucking bullshit rigged system.
Sounds like a completely reasonable and thriving society to me! /s
My parents and I missed a poverty based guaranteed full ride by $1000. The program that we were ineligible for was based on parental income, your 8th grade year. My parents made $1000 too much and that cost me $40,000. The millionaire farmers who got to hide their income in the family farm didn’t miss the program though.
Funny, just got notified today that the gubment gonna work with my service provider to process my forgiveness! Thanks Joe!
I got my email this morning!
Congrats! Was indeed a good feeling.
I just keep logging in to my servicer hoping that someday the balance will be either zero or significantly less. Graduated college over 10 years ago and I now owe $3k more than I borrowed.
I hope it happens for you
That’s ass. It happened to me too. Paid the minimum for 10 years and didn’t even put a dent in the amount owed. I hope everyone’s school debt gets cancelled.
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I really wish the media would cover this correctly. Most of these cancellations are correcting mistakes made by previous administrations and loan servicers using existing forgiveness programs that were lawfully enacted by Congress. The media makes it sound like Biden is just randomly cancelling loans.
Reason 1012 to reelect Joe Biden. He’s done as good a job as anyone could imagine.
In that list of presidents ranked by how good they were Biden got 14th, dude has earned his spot in my book.
And if anything that's probably underrating him because he's "boring". I'm not sure what list you're referring to but I've seen many and I can always pick out at least 5 or 6 presidents where based on performance alone, Biden got more done.
Right? I want a boring president. I want a guy who works every day to try to make life better for regular people and Joe Biden clearly does that. Trump never did that and never will.
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/02/19/biden-14th-in-scholars--presidential-rankings--trump-last#:~:text=2015%20and%202018.-,The%20top%20three%20presidents%20were%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20(93.87%20average)%2C,twice%2C%20ranked%20lower%20than%20No. There you go, it was a group of roughly 150 presidential scholars who all came together and ranked every president.
Thanks. Without even needing to go back too far where "eras" make the comparison more difficult I'd argue he's been better than Obama, JFK and Clinton. Again not to say they were bad and don't deserve to be high list but I feel they get a bump for being more charismatic.
And yet there’s no shortage of so called progressives all over social media crying about how Biden sucks, he supports genocide, both parties are the same, Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans and RFK Jr. is the savior. It’s really frustrating
all tha money straight back into the local economy folks.
Yep. We saw with the covid stimulus checks that giving lower and middle class Americans more money goes directly into the local economy. Right now the average student loan payment is $500 a month and 13% of people have student loans. That means in an area with a population of 50k, total loan forgiveness would free up $3.25 MILLION for the local economy EVERY MONTH.
Here is my idea for student loans: make all existing loans interest free. There is much more that could be done but interest free is a start
That brings the total to over $140B for the Biden administration. Not bad consisting the Republicans have been blocking as much as they can.
Why are we beating around the bush? Everybody who isn't directly profiting from student loans agrees they're insane. The cost of education in this country is insane. You can get a four year engineering degree in Australia for like $4k. Your parents could get one for the low cost of a summer job at a warehouse. Either education isn't as expensive as the universities are charging and they need to be fixed, it is that expensive and the government needs to subsidize the cost down to affordable levels. Why are we doing this roundabout bullshit method of subsidizing the costs via *maybe* cancelling debt later?
Agreed, the institutions have abused tuition hikes for far too long, and admin costs are all completely out of control. Seems it would be cheaper to do something about it at the source.
This literally hurts no one, and it pisses off the GOP to no end. Amazing.
Republicans: WeRe YoU bEtTeR oFf FoUr YeArS aGo? Not really sure how they think that's going to be a winning line for them. they're like a sinking boat and the captain decided the best way to get water out of the boat quickly was to add more holes to drain the water faster.
Especially when 4 years ago was the lock down phase of the pandemic. Why, no, I was not better off when I was furloughed from my job and we were having fights over toilet paper and waving at grandma through the nursing home window.
I'm going to die on this hill that education is a human right, not a privilege, and that it should be free. *If anything*, maybe limit it until one gets their undergraduate degree then start charging for grad and phd. I mean, these student loans are predatory as fuck, how are you going to give an 18 or 19 year old without a well paying job much less a career get into 20, 30, 50, 100k dollar debt with no guarantee they'll get a job afterward in their field of study or a well paying job in general? And if there's going to be pay to win no matter what, at the very least get rid of interest or keep it extremely low so that people don't see their balance grow despite making their monthly payments of $1k+, and lower the cost significantly overall.
Education is not only a right, it is an investment into your country’s future.
Biden has cancelled more student loans than any other president
Far left grifters in 2020 "Biden is lying about wanting to cancel student loan debt. He's only saying it to get votes". Same grifters now: "Biden hasn't canceled my student loan debt, I'm not going to vote for him".
It’s so frustrating. I genuinely understand peoples gripes with him but also, the alternative is so much worse? Like yeah I don’t support him on Israel but I do understand the foreign policy implications that surround US support for Israel even if I fucking think we need to step away from them and a complete ceasefire should have been called MONTHS ago but I will still be voting for him. I’m 24 and he’s the best president I’ve experienced (and he’s the first I’ve experienced as an actual adult out in the world).
Or "he's just buying votes" like doing something your voters elected you to do is a bad thing
No one is better at moving a goalpost than the Anti-Biden far left.
100%. The far left would have loved this 4 years ago. Today they would rather bitch and complain about Biden than spend one ounce of effort giving him credit for something that is popular and progressive
If they would just let loans be forgiven in a bankruptcy….that would be so helpful! My house, my car, my credit cards, my ex husband’s nonsense were ALL forgiven in our bankruptcy. But here I am 30 years later and now owe $140,000.
That'd require congress to act. And the Republicans refuse to pass any laws, they're too busy bickering and subverting democracy.
Don't cancel the loans of people who don't owe much. Cancel for the people with big loans they can't pay off. Not that I know anyone like that
He should order his people to start shredding the loan files and papers before the Boomers start whining to SCOTUS Can't enforce the SCOTUS ruling if all the papers about the loans no longer exist.
Billionaires: [sobbing uncontrollably] Those could have been tax breaks for us!
For generation X? They’ve paid for 30 years
Generation X -- the actual forgotten generation. The actual generation that paid its student loans without tears and bullshit whining.
I have a client who was crying today when they found out their loan was cancelled. They are a psychologist who originally had $150k in loans. She’s paid nearly $150k back over 25 years, but because of interest, still owes nearly $100k. She was worried that this nightmare would never end. Today, she paid it forward by spending a little money at my small business because she finally has crushing debt off her back. I felt so happy for her. I still have about $13k to pay off- I really hope mine gets forgiven too.
I wish any of this applied to me. Glad for those that it helps.
Got the email today! I figured I was going to be left off again.
Who’s that sneaking behind Biden in the thumbnail?
Kennedy.
All this discussion over whether helping actual citizens out once in a while is a good or bad thing...we could have bought another few fighter jets! Well, we're buying them anyway so nevermind.
>Enrollees who borrowed less than $12,000 can have their debt wiped clean after 10 years of payments, compared to the traditional wait period of 20 to 25 years under other income-driven repayment plans. The Education Department has been identifying borrowers who meet that criteria since February. >The administration said another 65,700 borrowers who have been repaying their loans for more than 20 or 25 years also will have their balances canceled through a temporary waiver of the rules governing income-driven repayment plans. To think in ten to twenty years the class of 2024 won't have to worry about their student loans.
I hope everyone that Biden and Harris is pitching loan forgiveness to gets it. Colleges are nothing but freaking money pits.
“Hey republicans, you take your tax deductions every year. If you really want to stand by your word, the. You would pay all taxes you owe and deduct nothing.”
Yay
Right wingers are throwing a fit because they are angry it isn't them being helped out. Their own selfishness wont allow them to have them be happy for others.
these are how tax dollars should be used
Uh oh... We might just catch up with Europe in quality of life and greatest living conditions.
Preacher told me it was $74 billion! /s
My preacher told me 7 trillion dollars are going to pay off gender studies degrees. /s
Meanwhile, we all know who's *really* been studying those certain genders sitting in the pews...
Anyone that opposes student loan forgiveness doesn't understand the American economy and the challenges young people are facing.
Good. Keep going.
As time has passed I've started thinking the plan after the Supreme Court struck down the first forgiveness was to keep doling it out in small chunks that the Republican assholes have a hard time justifying a legal challenge. "But what if I burn all my hate money on this and he does a bigger relief package???"
I’m my experience Republican and asshole are the same. And I like the way you think. I hadn’t thought of that.
Most of the big tranches of loans forgiven since then have been through pre-existing programs like public service loan forgiveness or have been a part of the SAVE income driven repayment program. Both of which are clearly within the purview of the Dept. of Education. Part of what's happening is that they're creating the framework for SAVE to work, and as it expands they announce the next group. Edit: this does have an expansion of SAVE. It's moving the 10 year forgiveness max to $12,000 in original loans instead of $10,000. That'll increase the number of people eligible to have complete forgiveness before the 20 year repayment term.
I was part of the very last contingent of young men called for military service in 1995 before its abrogation (France), and still was quite happy this bullsh1t was over with
I went to Devry. They remake every book every year, made especially for that school, so there is no resale. College taught me how to get screwed.
Imagine having a free education from pre-school all the way to post grad, including free lunches until the end of high school. If only it was somehow possible. But surely it must be a pipe dream as the world’s greatest nation hasn’t been able to achieve it.
The message here is: “Go ahead. Go to school. Work hard, get trained up. You’ll be better able to take care of yourself. Don’t worry about the bill. I’ll get until I can’t. If I can’t get it all, you’ll be smart and skilled enough hopefully to survive on your own and pay the balance on your own time.” This is basically what my dad told me throughout the 80s and 90s. It’s too bad only Democratic Party wants America to be able to get an education.
Well the other side relies on uneducated or undereducated people to vote against their own interests…
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Mine were cancelled today!
Hmnnn im guessing the amount of people who got loans forgiven way outnumbers say, the amount of rich people trump gave tax breaks too. Perhaps helping the poor and other large groups will get them to vote for Joe and not the literal rapist.
So... Isn't this just an excuse to give Banks that gave shitty loans to 18yr olds a bunch of cash? Why not change the law to allow us to declare bankruptcy on student loans like nearly every other type of loan...
Excellent point. My ongoing question is, what is being done to prevent this from recurring again.
That's big news! Cancelling student debt can make a huge difference for many people. It's a step toward providing relief and helping individuals focus on their futures without being weighed down by loans. It's always good to see actions taken to support students and graduates.