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I think the Loan Forgiveness Plan as planned was just a very expensive stunt that fixed nothing. Instead they should work on reducing education cost (or at leas

• lamontcg 3y ago
  Well they should make public college tuition free combined with wiping out those loans. They also need to make student loans for private schools not guaranteed by the government and at risk of being dissolved in a personal bankruptcy. All the leeches involved in higher education and lending will never put up with that though. So the rent-seeking and indentured servitude will continue.
• crackercrews 3y ago
  Republicans have proposed laws to increase transparency to families regarding outcomes of graduates. They also want to make colleges accountable when graduates cannot pay off their loans. [1] I don't think there has been any support from Democrats. 1: https://www.nola.com/news/politics/gop-senators-introduce-bills-to-lower-college-loan-costs/article_0af35ce2-0ac8-11ee-92ac-13f581b6e7d0.html https://www.nola.com/news/politics/gop-senators-introduce-bi...
  • oddtuple 3y ago
    Because that’s just forces colleges to accept rich white kids who will be the less risky in regards to paying off their loans. Guys, y’all are supposed to be smart, really? You all can’t see through this bullshit?
    • crackercrews 3y ago
      Why stoop to baseless insults? Even if you don't want colleges to be accountable, surely you can't deny that transparency regarding student outcomes would be useful.
• oddtuple 3y ago
  What would it take to convince you otherwise? I mean this honestly, because I hear the above statement a lot and it’s very foreign to me. If anything it’s a long shot, sure, but the forgiveness is a great forcing function. We can tackle this from multiple angles. Nationalize state schools, write off current predatory loans, etc. There are very few downsides that are actually backed up by data that I can find. A lot of the arguments presented here (not you, others) are philosophical
• totony 3y ago
  Considering these loans are non forgivable because of the governement, I think they are responsible for the exponential growth in cost and should bear the blame
• EA-3167 3y ago
  You have to admit, dressing up a giant pile of money to schools this way was an incredibly shrewd political move. Even now that the plan has been blocked, that won't reflect badly on the administration which made the plan, it will just focus anger towards conservatives and the SCOTUS. This was something with no political downside.
  • clairity 3y ago
    that's an astute observation. i think the current administration designed this legislation for maximum airtime by trying to go all-in on debt forgiveness, without any conviction about whether it could actually withstand challenge. if they were interested in actually helping the disadvantaged, then there are plenty of workarounds, like forgiving the interest and fees on student loans rather than forgiving principal. this would be more impervious to the idea that the executive branch was trying to wholesale rewrite legislation, rather than tweaking it on the margin, which was part of the court's rationale in this case.
  • bavell 3y ago
    What a joke, we just wasted 2 years on an empty promise that was doomed to fail from the start and now all the people who have been waiting and suffering are getting nothing. All we get now is a blame-game of finger-pointing instead of any solutions. We got teased and led on for years. There is no alternative plan to the one proposed, all eggs in one basket on such a monumentally important issue. What a great victory!
    • rqtwteye 3y ago
      "All we get now is a blame-game of finger-pointing instead of any solutions. " That's how modern US politics works. They have given up on actually solving problems a long time ago. And people are stupid enough to buy into this nonsense.
      • EA-3167 3y ago
        Even a cursory study of human history reveals that this is how politics usually works, and always has. People are fundamentally the same as we've been for thousands of years, so the means to manipulate us are fundamentally similar.
• warning26 3y ago
  Exactly! The problem here is the predatory nature of student loans. A bit of forgiveness to them is a band aid that will do nothing to prevent the problem from just happening again. Personally, I think the cost of college should be capped, and in addition all forms of student loans should be outright banned, which should force the education industry to cut itself back to a reasonable amount of spending.
• epistasis 3y ago
  It fixes a lot for the people struggling with them right now. We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
  • bavell 3y ago
    Except it was rejected, so it didn't fix anything for anyone. It just wasted a bunch of time (it was doomed to fail from the start) and tricked people into thinking something was being done. Aka, politics as usual.
    • oddtuple 3y ago
      That’s patently untrue. We saved tens of thousands of dollars in the interest pause alone.
      • tivert 3y ago
        > That’s patently untrue. We saved tens of thousands of dollars in the interest pause alone. The interest/payments pause is not the same thing as the student loan forgiveness plan. They're entirely different things.
        • oddtuple 3y ago
          Sure, but I know that YOU know that people talk about these items together. The general tone of this convo has been that nothing helpful has come from these actions, and that’s not true. It’s been stated it was all politics, and we know that’s not fair, as some good has happened as a result. Now, if we’re going to argue about the very specific loan forgiveness being effective, then sure, it has been currently struck down. But I have trouble believing that nothing good has come from it, if only by forcing this convo, and convos like these taking place. Sometimes you have to do something loud to get people’s attention; it certainly got yours.
          • tivert 3y ago
• angry_moose 3y ago
  "We shouldn't give starving people food, instead we should embark on a multi-decade effort to reform farming so that food prices will begin to decline in the late 2030s". There are multiple ways to attack and ease the problem, its not an either/or approach. We could help people now, while tackling the long term issues.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    Details matter. It's not a good analogy. I definitely support the development of a policy designed to attack the short term problem of untenable student debt (to the extent there is a problem... I think income based repayment is already a good policy targeting this), while also targeting the underlying causes of the student debt situation. But this forgiveness policy was not that. It was a half-assed political gesture toward a campaign promise that the administration never seriously thought was going to solve any problems. They picked their legislative priorities intentionally (pandemic recovery, infrastructure, and climate), and explicitly chose not to include this one.
    • oddtuple 3y ago
      Seems like a good analogy to me
    • oddtuple 3y ago
      [flagged]
• oddtuple 3y ago
  You realize we can do both right? Forgive the loans AND tackle the rising cost of tuition by nationalizing? I swear it’s this same myopic response everyone, no one can ever imagine there’s a step two.
  • rqtwteye 3y ago
    "Forgive the loans AND tackle the rising cost of tuition by nationalizing? " Have you seen any efforts for tackling the rising cost? I haven't. They have spent a ton of energy on a one-off stunt and have done absolutely nothing to tackle real issue.
    • oddtuple 3y ago
      Yes, this has been a national issue with bills and campaigns for almost as long as I can remember. What do you mean?
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    Forgiving the loans makes any other legislative solution vanishingly unlikely. Politicians love to just kick cans down the road. Forgiving student loans at the beginning of every new administration would be much easier than pursuing an actual policy to attack the problem legislatively.
    • oddtuple 3y ago
      I honestly don’t know what to say to this. If the meat of your argument is “they’ll never do the right thing, they’ll just keep stalling “, it kinda feels like you just don’t have faith in our government at all. In which case there’s nothing I can do to convince you otherwise.
      • sanderjd 3y ago
        That isn't the meat of my argument. I think it is much more likely that they'll come up with new legislation that is actually targeted at the problem, if they don't just forgive the debt. I think people are more likely to do the democracy stuff - voting for and influencing representatives who have plans to fix this - if they still see it as a problem to be solved, rather than something that doesn't affect them due to their debt having been forgiven already.
• jfghi 3y ago
  Also a subsidy to landlords that would simply raise rent by the forgiveness amounts.
  • oddtuple 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • warning26 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • oddtuple 3y ago
        I thought we were talking about student loans?
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • jfghi 3y ago
      Why not? They have access to credit data and are able to adjust pricing close to what is affordable. Much of the rental market is consolidated by 10-figure firms running similar sets of algorithms.
      • oddtuple 3y ago
        Because there is no new money being created, no one is being paid more, that amount is already being charged because the students already have that money as they aren’t paying loans. Also, if they were paying loans, there would still be the same net amount of money in the system
• no_wizard 3y ago
  I wonder very much if Biden can instead mandate payments "going to zero" by mandating interest rate cuts to 0% and allowing borrowers by decree to just not pay. I've heard some trickles this is actually well within the rights of the Department Of Education to do. I've also seen some people advocating for a general student loan payment strike, but that feels dicey. Everyone would need to do it, basically, and there's no way to prove solidarity, it'd be a legal mess IMO. The 3rd, although more out there idea, has to do with setting up specialty bankruptcy support for student loans, allow them to be dismissed via proceedings, without it being reported negatively on a credit report. I don't think there's any good alternatives to legislating it, if one wants to pursue relief here, except removing interest rates or something of that nature. I myself am withholding my own opinions, other than to say I support student loan relief efforts. I'm just cataloging what I'm seeing in (anecdotally of course) large numbers online people talking about.
• soderfoo 3y ago
  Agreed that education costs should be driven down, but the strain on borrowers is very real. It's bothersome that the government prohibits relief in the form of bankruptcy. It's easy to be unsympathetic when something doesn't impact you personally. I'm not impacted by student loans, but I've heard enough stories from close friends to give me pause. I am very empathetic to their plight and worry we have knee capped a sizeable portion of a generation, which will impact the economy and society as well.
  • qup 3y ago
    I chose to become a self-taught developer, vs going to school, to avoid having student loans plague me. I weighed the options and didn't like the math. The two paths were hard forks. It was a big decision. I'm still "paying" the price in the form of reduced wages, surely. Student loans weren't a great option, so I didn't take them. Why does everyone else take them, and then pass the blame and responsibility to the government?
    • fullstop 3y ago
      Do you feel the same way about disaster relief, since you chose not to live that area? I haven't had student loans since the early 2000s and I'm fine with forgiving them or at least reducing interest rates to something very low.
      • qup 3y ago
        Yes, I do. I lived in an active hurricane zone for most of my life, fwiw, and half my family just got screwed in 2022. They've all variously moved away and come back. Hurricanes are a price you pay for coastal views. If I could put a beach in the landlocked state I live in now, it would probably generate incredible value. I haven't taken a position on loan forgiveness, I've only taken a position on people blaming others for their own choices.
        • fullstop 3y ago
          There's more than hurricanes, though. What of forest fires, floods, and tornadoes? You can't fault people for living within proximity of trees, rivers, and flat areas.
• uoaei 3y ago
  What's expensive is locking up citizens' purchasing power so that they are beholden to these institutions, instead of giving them the option to put money into their community, particularly their fellow citizens' pockets, by shopping and eating.
• bastardoperator 3y ago
  Nobody seemed to have an issue with giving loan forgiveness to businesses. Why do we allow businesses to socialize their losses and privatize their profits? Nobody batted an eye when the last administration created an additional 3T in deficit. Investing in Americans education is single handedly the best investment America can make as a country. I rather see bad business models fail and watch educated Americans fill in the gaps.
  • gruez 3y ago
    >Nobody seemed to have an issue with giving loan forgiveness to businesses. Why do we allow businesses to socialize their losses and privatize their profits? Which loan forgiveness program are you talking about? The PPP loans was explicitly designed from the outset to be forgiven, if they were used for payroll. In the end it was a roundabout way for the government to ensure people continued to get paid during lockdowns, not a way to "socialize their losses and privatize their profits".
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    You're right I didn't have a problem with it in 2020 when those loans intended to keep businesses from permanently shuttering were forgiven. But I would certainly dislike the same policy now. Things are super different today than they were three years ago...
  • adventured 3y ago
    > Nobody seemed to have an issue with giving loan forgiveness to businesses. Well that's obviously false. I had a problem with it. And if you dared to say it during the pandemic, you were likely to get stoned by the wildly emotional pandemic mob. The solution to the cost of education is the US, is to realize the cost somewhere, ie make someone actually responsible for the fact that very young adults with next to zero credit / income / responsibility are borrowing rather insane sums of money they can't actually afford to borrow. Society can debate who gets to be responsible (banks, universities, taxpayers, borrowers), someone has to be, otherwise the upward spiral (of debt) will just continue until it becomes an outsized economic threat (it's getting there). For decades the can has been kicked down the road intentionally, nobody wants to take responsibility. Biden and the Democrat approach is just more debt via loan forgiveness, which will result in an even bigger loan forgiveness after that. It's identical to the healthcare cost problem in the US. The Democrats want to solve healthcare via universal healthcare, and they want to pretend it can be done without fixing the cost problem. They never talk about dramatically reducing the cost of healthcare, and how many millions of jobs need to be vaporized to do it, and how many medical professionals need to take a big pay cut to do it. The gravy train has to end, and that means millions of nurses, doctors, hospital workers get slashed pay; millions of related industry jobs vanish (in insurance, medtech, pharma, et al.), and the middle class and higher incomes that go with them. Big education - the government borrowing pact with universities and their freewheeling ability to spend - is a gravy train for admin and universities generally, and has been for decades. It has to end just the same as big healthcare's gravy train has to end. Salaries have to be smashed, jobs have to be destroyed en masse, everything has to be squeezed, cut, slashed. Which is exactly how most of Europe manages their healthcare systems - tight rationing, tight controls.
• __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  A debt jubilee isn't the kind of thing you just do. Like tipping over a vending machine: - you gotta get it rocking first - it might kill you if you do it wrong I view this as a preliminary wobble.
• julienchastang 3y ago
  > very expensive stunt that fixed nothing. I agree. The universities can charge whatever they want, they get paid upfront, and when the student defaults on the loan they bear no consequence. The current system is deeply broken and in much need of reform. The scale of the problem is immense with tens of millions of American adults in student debt. You want to forgive student loans? Great. But at least fix the root problem.