Although the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness program in late June, his administration has found ways to cancel more than $48 billion in debt since then.
The cancellations have come through existing federal student loan forgiveness programs, which are limited to specific categories of borrowers, such as public-sector workers, people defrauded by for-profit colleges, and borrowers who have paid for at least 20 years.
These programs are separate from the rejected forgiveness plan, which would have canceled about $430 billion of the $1.6 trillion of outstanding federal student loan debt all at one time.
The Biden administration has been granting student loan forgiveness through these existing programs on a rolling basis since coming into office and has discharged a total of $127 billion for nearly 3.6 million people to date.
Loans aren’t meant to help people. They are meant to generate interest. People who invest in the lenders are technically going to lose money here. But it ain’t you and me investing in the profits of student loans. And if you are, you need a smarter portfolio that doesn’t rely on the world burning.
If you’re investing, your principal is not guaranteed. Every fucking broker has that written in bold font on their website.
I’m so fucking tired of investors privatizing their profits but socializing their losses. I shouldn’t have to pay some greedy asshole just because they overextended themselves.
This is something that came to a head in the 2008 recession. Most people, left and right leaning, were not happy with the fact that banks got our tax money, and the homeowner got virtually nothing. This was one of the reasons Occupy Wall Street protests started, and it was one aspect of the Tea Party’s organization with there protest of the TARP Program. Though they were arguing for a different solution, less spending overall.
But this idea that the government is more than willing to throw money at large, “to big to fail”, businesses but are loathed to do the same for the individual was more universal than what is seen today.
Anecdotally I’ve talked with people that have much more conservative views on spending and government debt but the one place that seems to have an agreement is that the American people got screwed in 2008 - 2009. While there are many ideological things that divide people in America I believe that this feeling that the American government is more willing to help out large companies (legally, monetarily, and even militarily) than it is to it’s citizens is more ubiquitous than is played out in the major media outlets.
We need to provide welfare to corporations and the investor class! We need to think about them and the children! They all clearly need help unlike those dirty, poors. The poors can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. /s
