Student loans have become incredibly predatory and the banks were the ones who had the information to realise these were bad loans, but they lobbied the government to make it so they had to do no due diligence. Now they've fucked up and unless something is done about the loans they are all going to start defaulting anyway.
The default rate is already growing[1]. Based on the number of people I know who are making minimum payments and waiting 20 years for the loans to be forgiven based on income levels, I expect a large portion of expected revenue on these loans is going to evaporate starting after 2028 when everyone who got bad terms and a shit job after the great recession start to become eligible.
It's already a house of cards and we should just deal with it instead of tying large portions of the population to these bad deals
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2017/10/06/student...
I guess the taxpayer is kind of screwed when it comes to Federal loans. I still think it is a bad idea to retroactively change laws even if the idea seems popular. As far as I understand, an individual's loan obligations don't automatically transfer to their surviving family members so if you have a massive student loan it will die with you.
If the loans were predatory, lets ban them going forward. If we find illegal activity and predatory behavior I am all for prosecuting bankers and throwing people in prison. In fact, I will go further and say we should rid of all the silliness of deductions and credits in income tax toward education loans as well.
New York made a good first step with its excelsior program. While I don't like the income ceiling for the program, I think overall this is the way forward. I think we should expand the program to allow people to go to school part time for free. Private schools can either compete with free public education or shut down.
> I'd say that a politician who stares at a problem head on and refuses to deal with it, because we didn't deal with it in the past, is the insane one.
I am all for dealing with the problem but I still firmly and politely OPPOSE any effort to make it easier to discharge existing loans with taxpayer money. I am not an expert on this matter though so I don't know much about it. All I know is we cannot give a handout to people who went to college by signing a loan letter and pay for it with resources that could have gone to people who didn't go to college.
I think the first good step is to make private education loans go away the same way as any other private loan going forward. I don't know how we can apply this to direct federal loans.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-federally-gu... According to this web page:
> As of June 30, 2010, Congress stopped the guaranteed student loan program for newly issued loans.
> If a borrower defaults on a guaranteed loan, the federal government pays the bank and takes over the loan. The federal government pays approximately 97% of the principal balance to the lender. At that point the federal government owns the loan and the right to collect payments on the loan.
Yeah, no. If you have a guaranteed loan (which apparently you can't get anymore), I say you are on the hook for it for life especially if you start making money later.
For federal loans, the position the US is in with them needs to be unwound. It's not even a choice at this point, it's worse than how inflated the housing crisis happened and if we don't deal with it on our own, it's going to just show up as a surprise.
That's not to say we need to wipe the slate clean at once. We could just do a 10% or 5% haircut on all loans every year and treat it the same way as an entitlement. We will need to fund it of course, and it will not be painless, but that's the position the countries gotten itself into.
Not doing something to cut down the massive amount of debt that is already dealing with large amounts of defaults is just be willfully ignorant of the risks.
>Yeah, no. If you have a guaranteed loan (which apparently you can't get anymore), I say you are on the hook for it for life especially if you start making money later.
The only things we saddle people with life for are prison sentences for murder and rape. Student loan debt shouldn't be at that level of seriousness. Think about it. If you had a debt from the government that followed you _forever_, why even be part of the system anymore? You are incentivized to either not work, or work and hide every bit of income. If you don't give people a path out of an issue, they aren't going to play by the rules anymore
I said that because I assumed the government can afford to suspend payments if your income goes below a certain level. I doubt an ordinary person has the ability to work and hide every bit of income. The good people at IRS work hard and those (bastards over at) state departments of revenue work even harder.
In practice, you're right. The taxpayer has to eat the cost. And I am sure how things will eventually happen when things eventually need to happen. Politicians hate saying no to their voters. The Republican nominee for POTUS in 2012 was at a debate or a town hall before the election and I remember him going on a rant about simplifying the tax code to a round of applause. One woman got up and asked what about credits and deductions with contributions toward their child's college fund and the nominee didn't have the strength to say he wants them to go away. Guess what if we want to simplify the tax code, we have to get rid of credits and deductions. If you can't say that to people who just applauded to you saying simplify the tax code, it will never happen. No politician wants to do that because that will destroy their career.
This is just what I think. I have no realistic way of influencing public policy. (:
Yes. None of these programs should exist if we can't offer them to 100% of the population. Both Democrats and Republicans use these programs as a vote bank and it polarizes our public discourse.
Ataturk's reply to this is dead below but I must agree with the (spirit of the) comment. While I support letting students discharge loans via bankruptcy, I VEHEMENTLY oppose making this applicable to loans already signed. This is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who supports this kind of position should be barred from public office on grounds of insanity.
EDIT: I also think income and means testing ought for any government program or service ought to be illegal. You cannot say "you must make below $n to be eligible for this government program". I know the economists in the audience will bellow and bicker and say that we have limited resources that we must allocate "logically" but guess what macroeconomics is nonsense anyway because out here in the real world people don't behave logically. We need to make it against the law to use income, means, or property testing for any government program or service. Can't afford to offer it to the entire population regardless of income? Either increase taxes or rollback the program. Can't have it both ways.