Biden wants to give more student debt relief in bankruptcy court. Not everyone's on board.
Biden wants to give more student debt relief in bankruptcy court. Not everyone's on board.
For years, erasing student loans through bankruptcy court has been a long, often unsuccessful process. Biden promised to make it easier, but has he?
Life led Elizabeth Hadzic and Kim Coles to bankruptcy court.
Hadzic, 50, a psychotherapist in Maryland, doesn’t make enough to support herself and her adult son, whose health struggles set her back thousands of dollars. Coles, an accountant in Oregon in her late 60s, was laid off last year.
Both have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Although they have been making payments on those loans for years, they no longer can. And both, in the absence of an alternative, have resorted to taking the costly, typically unsuccessful route of trying to get their loans discharged in bankruptcy court.
That’s where things diverge.
For Hadzic, bankruptcy is proving to be the answer to her financial woes. After months of litigation, she’s on track for a full discharge. In Coles’ case, the government is putting up a fight − though she is of retirement age − against discharging the balance of a loan she’s been paying down for more than a decade.
“I always paid my student loans,” Coles said in an interview. “I was never late.”
The disparity in how the government is treating their cases is indicative of the intractability of one of the country’s most extreme and inaccessible forms of student debt relief, as the Biden administration grapples with finding alternatives to the kind of sweeping student loan forgiveness option that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
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LOL, the irony. Biden is a HUGE part of why student debt can't be discharged. OH, how he happily wants to forget about his past in Congress.
Biden co-sponsored bankruptcy exemptions under Regan and more. HE was PIVOTAL in fucking over students. The guy is a severe piece of shit. And we won't talk about his anti-choic activities and associates in the past.
The difference between the parties explicitly in economic terms is zero. There are two capitalist parties who are lock in step with their billionaire donors.
People can change, my man. Forty years is a long time.
When people change magically at the same time their approval has cratered, on one of the issues wrecking his approval (again, that he helped architect but doesn't own up to as a mistake), then it's important to be suspicious or get duped.
"magically"
Well, be fair. This wasn't how he wanted to deal with student loan debt relief. But Republicans sued the federal government, and the stacked courts served their masters well by preventing the loans from just being discharged outright. Now we have yo try and find all these bullshit, overly complex, and deficient mechanisms to try and help people. We do still want our presidents to follow the law,
even ifespecially when they don't want to.
I find it hard to decry someone trying to correct his past mistakes. There are too many people on the hill willing to endlessly hard-line their past stances in spite of them being proven wrong or ineffective. I'd rather criticize them or Biden for his current on going mistakes than for things he's turned the corner on.
If he was doing that saying "I fucked students over for rich assholes. I regret it. I want to change it."
Sure.
But he's pretending he had nothing to do with it. And counting on people too young to know he's an architect of fucking students financially.
That's something totally different than correcting his past mistakes. Especially since he's in dire political trouble, and this is a pandering move.
Okay, so what would you rather happen instead? Biden... not look for ways to relive student debt? Hope to vote for a 3rd party candidate that won't get elected? Or you could vote for Trump or another Republican, who want to charge back interest for the student debt pause during the pandemic?
I'm just trying to figure out where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish with your rage.
Rage is your characterization. Just like I'd characterize you participating in their political theater as being naive and gullible.
I don't see a peaceful path forward out of any of the mess with two capitalist parties who have near identical economic policies. Combined with an illegitimate Supreme Court whos tossed out precedence and rule of law, and adding to that, a comprised legislature that literally has traitors in it...
I'm just prepping for the collapse and going to do my best to stay out of the way. There's nobody for me to fight for. There's no Socialist party or even a left leaning party for that matter in our rigged two party system. And I'd never get involved in a civil war to fight for capitalists. LOL.
Man, let people grow. If you keep holding everyone to what they did so many years ago, they got no reason to do better now.
If the dude wants to overwrite things from the past, using his powers of the present, I say good.
Actions are worth more than words though, so time to start making changes
Biden definitely doesn’t want people juding him on actions.
From day one he could have done all the student debt relief via executive order. Yes it was debateable among scholars, but plenty of laywers and academics believed it consitutional.
Worst case scenario it would have spent ages in the courts, meanwhile the reprecussions from countering the executive order would have snowballed to where it would have been nearly impossible to unwind it.
Trump and Bush have showed the Dems the new norm over and over. You do what you want, worst case it spends years in court while staying in effect, THEN if you lose in court, you do the same thing but so slightly differently that the effect is the same and you start another cycle of years and years of living with it.
This was an easy and clear strategy to deal with the student loan crisis. But again, as an architect of preventing students from discharging loan debt via bankruptcy—his actions speak loud and clear (just like you said).
And I’m fine if people learn from their mistakes. But when they seek to rewrite or burry history that’s not learning from their mistakes. Nor is catastrophcially crashing in the polls and needing the younger voters so suddenly this is a priority.