"Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, criticized Biden's plan — a $10,000 write-off for those making less than $150,000 per year, according to The Washington Post — on Twitter. Johnson suggested that the plan does not address a meaningful amount of debt, especially for Black borrowers, who are typically burdened by more of it."
What makes so strange is blacks who go to college likely do have more student debt, but most blacks do not graduate from college. About 42% do. This means most blacks will be subsidizing the minority of blacks who do.
This is in some sense even more unfair than the subsidy of recent law school and medical school graduates by people who either did not go to college or whose parents paid some or all of the costs.
We need to get that interstellar space program going so we can plunder blue jungle aliens of their untapped mineral resources. We have other people's bills to pay.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of people who have student loan debt but did not graduate.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally none of this discussion addresses the real abusive practice regarding student loans. A few years ago, the government outsourced collection on student loans to private companies, and handed them a huge pile of badly organized records from many years ago.
The collecting companies then issued repayment demands to anyone listed in these records as having had student loan debt, while making only cursory efforts to determine whether the loans had been repaid.
The way the law is written, these demands may not be disputed, unless the alleged debtor can produce clear evidence of repayment. Many of these loans are thirty to fifty years old. Who has paperwork from that long ago?
For ordinary debts, it wouldn't matter, because ordinary debts are discharged after a number of years of inaction. But not student loans.
The collectors have no incentive to find any mislaid records. But they can garnish income tax refunds and Social Security payments. They can declare a loan as in default years ago, then impose retroactive penalties and interest. A debt of a few thousand can be multiplied several-fold.
My sister took out about $3,000 in student loans around 1970. Around 1985, the debt was settled by our father. At that time she was having a breakdown, so she's unclear on the details, and no one said anything to me about it.
The zombie debt reappeared a few years ago. She has already had to pay several thousand dollars, and her SSI is docked $200/month.
And no lawyer will touch the matter.