Biden has done far better on student loans than most people are aware. While the big policy battles have been going on, he has been quietly chipping away, with $132b in debt forgiven for 3.5 million borrowers.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which the George W. Bush administration created in 2007 to encourage people to work for the government and nonprofits, has grown significantly during Joe Biden’s presidency. The Conversation asked economist William Chittenden to explain what this student loan program is, who is eligible and what has changed lately.
How does the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program work?
To qualify, borrowers must currently work for the government or a nonprofit.
Americans getting this debt relief include many nurses, teachers, first responders, Peace Corps volunteers and social workers.
Once enrolled, borrowers can have their remaining student loan balance forgiven if they remain employed in public service and make 10 years of monthly on-time payments.
The government can cancel only the balance of the direct loans the Department of Education makes through this program. Any student debt that borrowers owe private lenders remains outstanding.
Why are many more loans being forgiven now?
Borrowers began to apply in 2017, after the requisite decade of on-time payments, for their remaining balances to be forgiven. However, nearly all of these applications were rejected – about 98% of them.
The vast majority of these denials were due to technicalities. Many borrowers felt cheated after holding up their end of the deal but still finding themselves burdened with debts they didn’t believe they should have to repay. Some of them filed a class-action lawsuit, which the Biden administration settled in 2021. Recognizing these concerns, the government streamlined and overhauled the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
The Department of Education announced several important changes in 2021. The federal government expanded the types of loans that are eligible for forgiveness and gave borrowers a way to get credit for past payments.** However, most student loan borrowers did not see the impact of this change until October 2023, when student loan payments resumed for other borrowers after being paused starting in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.**
lmao amazing what some context can do. Loans that should’ve been forgiven years ago are only now being forgiven because the political cost of the other 40 million private borrowers resuming payments has to be covered-up somehow, so settling scores that should’ve already been settled is a good propaganda and optic boost for an admin that will never touch the 1.7 trillion in private loans
There’s 44 million Student loan borrowers carrying a total of 1.6 Trillion in student loans. That means Biden has forgiven about 8% of the total, and it has only reached 8% of the borrowers (worse than that if those numbers are recent and include what’s already been forgiven). Combine that with having actually started collection on the loans again, and just there you have policies which materially hurt millions more than they help but we’re all supposed to nod along and smile while we crank the blue lever on the “this machine kills Palestinian children” box.
That’s not even getting into the way Democrats negotiated themselves down from $50,000+ in forgiveness, or how they chose flimsy justifications for their policy instead of more solid legal grounds to allow it to be torpedoed in court.
$1.6 trillion seems to be around the amount we used to fund the NDAA and it’s nearly monthly expansions of spending for backing genocidal fascists such as Zelensky and Bibi and other purposes.
Student debt shouldn’t exist in the first place. Putting further education behind a paywall is a sign that the system is innately flawed.
We don’t want some of the current debt to be taken care of, we want it fixed at the systemic level. Just because I get my 70k of debt hand waved away doesn’t mean the next guy is gonna get the same. There is no point in alleviating a small bit of student loan debt when student loan debt is still going to be a chronic issue with the next generation of students while the next set of filthy rich white capitalists proceed to do whatever they can to get richer off the backs of us poors through predetory loan practices, profit prisons and unlimited wars against the global south.
Biden paying off that 8% of loans might as well be throwing money away. It would be better suited feeding the unhoused since he isn’t actually doing shit to fix the real issue at hand.
Of which will be used to berate anyone wanting to go further for the next at least 16 years as we already did something kiddo!
We could have had this. We still can, rather than blowing a trillion and a half a year on being the world’s largest terrorist. Heck it wouldn’t even interrupt us being a blood thirsty crime against humanity. It would have been “pragmatic” and the goons making stock trades would barely have noticed a blip. I do some trading and would not miss these costs as they are lower than a daily normal fluctuation.
Tax Wall Street Gambling to Cancel All Student Debt and Pay for College for All
We can guarantee higher education as a right for all and cancel all student debt for an estimated $2.2 trillion. To pay for this, we will impose a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy a decade ago. This Wall Street speculation tax will raise $2.4 trillion over the next ten years. It works by placing a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades.
Biden has done far better on student loans than most people are aware. While the big policy battles have been going on, he has been quietly chipping away, with $132b in debt forgiven for 3.5 million borrowers.
https://youtu.be/3Xe-Q8ORfWo?si=01NF7HCWenUMY1HC
The only “fix” to the student debt problem is free public college. That’s not something anyone expected a Biden administration to fight for.
lmao amazing what some context can do. Loans that should’ve been forgiven years ago are only now being forgiven because the political cost of the other 40 million private borrowers resuming payments has to be covered-up somehow, so settling scores that should’ve already been settled is a good propaganda and optic boost for an admin that will never touch the 1.7 trillion in private loans
So… Did Biden “forgive” any loans, or did he just allocate funding for a Bush-era program?
There’s 44 million Student loan borrowers carrying a total of 1.6 Trillion in student loans. That means Biden has forgiven about 8% of the total, and it has only reached 8% of the borrowers (worse than that if those numbers are recent and include what’s already been forgiven). Combine that with having actually started collection on the loans again, and just there you have policies which materially hurt millions more than they help but we’re all supposed to nod along and smile while we crank the blue lever on the “this machine kills Palestinian children” box.
That’s not even getting into the way Democrats negotiated themselves down from $50,000+ in forgiveness, or how they chose flimsy justifications for their policy instead of more solid legal grounds to allow it to be torpedoed in court.
$1.6 trillion seems to be around the amount we used to fund the NDAA and it’s nearly monthly expansions of spending for backing genocidal fascists such as Zelensky and Bibi and other purposes.
Student debt shouldn’t exist in the first place. Putting further education behind a paywall is a sign that the system is innately flawed.
We don’t want some of the current debt to be taken care of, we want it fixed at the systemic level. Just because I get my 70k of debt hand waved away doesn’t mean the next guy is gonna get the same. There is no point in alleviating a small bit of student loan debt when student loan debt is still going to be a chronic issue with the next generation of students while the next set of filthy rich white capitalists proceed to do whatever they can to get richer off the backs of us poors through predetory loan practices, profit prisons and unlimited wars against the global south.
Biden paying off that 8% of loans might as well be throwing money away. It would be better suited feeding the unhoused since he isn’t actually doing shit to fix the real issue at hand.
shut the fuck up liberal
Death to America
Awww a little pulverized stale crumb!
Of which will be used to berate anyone wanting to go further for the next at least 16 years as
we already did something kiddo!
We could have had this. We still can, rather than blowing a trillion and a half a year on being the world’s largest terrorist. Heck it wouldn’t even interrupt us being a blood thirsty crime against humanity. It would have been “pragmatic” and the goons making stock trades would barely have noticed a blip. I do some trading and would not miss these costs as they are lower than a daily normal fluctuation.
Tax Wall Street Gambling to Cancel All Student Debt and Pay for College for All We can guarantee higher education as a right for all and cancel all student debt for an estimated $2.2 trillion. To pay for this, we will impose a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy a decade ago. This Wall Street speculation tax will raise $2.4 trillion over the next ten years. It works by placing a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades.