President Biden announced Friday that his administration is forgiving $5 billion in student debt for another 74,000 borrowers, marking the latest round of debt cancellation since the Supreme Court voided the president’s student loan forgiveness program.
Mr. Biden said that of the borrowers who can receive relief, nearly 44,000 are teachers, nurses, firefighters and others who are eligible for forgiveness after working 10 years of public service. Almost 30,000 of those who will have their debt wiped clean have been repaying their loans for at least 20 years, but did not get the relief they earned through income-based plans, the president said.
With the latest round of student loan forgiveness, more than 3.7 million Americans have had their debt erased under the Biden administration, Mr. Biden said.
It’s insane that they made 5b off of just 74k people in the first place
That’s nearly 70k per person. For education. That’s…that’s greed on an evil level
Yeah, now that you mention it, that’s fucking nuts. On average, $67,500 worth of outstanding balance for these people who went into public service. That doesn’t even take into account what they’ve already paid in principal and interest over the years.
Edit: it’s actually $72,892 per person being forgiven for people that have worked in public service for more than a decade.
And that’s the balance after paying it off for a decade or more.
Thanks, Reagan.
Careful, you might accidently summon him. No one knows the exact incantation to bring him back and frankly I’d rather add “reanimated corpse of Reagan appointed to state department” to the 2025 bingo card.
What’s insane is this is barely a drop in the bucket…
There’s over 1,770 billion in student loans debt.
When people say 1.77 trillion, it might not be immediate how little a few billion is to the larger issue.
But it’s only around 0.2% of total debt. Probably less because the 1.77 trillion is rounded, and at this scale that’s what 5 billion is. A rounding error they don’t even include that digit when talking about the total amount.
Let’s do all of it, and put in place a solution for all future student loans. They are robbing us blind right now, and costing future generations a chance at a debt free life.
He did do a lot more! I mentioned it in another comment a week ago, but look into what his save plan does. Lowers costs, lowers interest, increases forgiveness, etc. etc.
Save plan lowered my effective interest rate to around 2%. I’ll still have to pay a lot over the next 20 years, and if the tax bomb is not removed it will be another 100,000. However my cash flow is much improved and how much I pay total has decreased drastically.
Still fighting with my student loan servicer to set me up on the plan correctly, but that is a different can of worms. The servicers need to have their contracts nullified for how terrible they have been.
Definitely better than a kick in the teeth, but it’s a shame the Supreme Court nixed the bigger loan forgiveness plan. I’m glad to see Biden is still trying to live up to his promise as much as he can given the obstructionist Congress and Supreme Court.
Here in Australia, our student loans are given and managed by the Australian Tax Office, and while they technically don’t accrue interest they are “indexed” according to inflation (CPI specifically) once per year, every year. Our repayments just come out of or income like regular income taxes - that means that the repayments are tax-deductible too. We usually get indexed around 2-3% per year but last year it was almost 8% which hit really hard. Most degrees also fall under the Higher Education Commonwealth Support (HECS) program which drastically reduces their total cost too.
Yeah, but that’s progressive…
We keep electing democrats that think fixing something at once would be too disruptive.
So they stretch the smallest amount of progress as long as they can, even if that doesn’t make up for damage Republicans do.
Its been like 80 years since moderate Dems told FDR that it was too soon for universal healthcare and Americans had to wait a few more years to make sure it’s a good idea.
And they’re still fucking saying they need to look into it more. It’ll never be time. Student Debt relief shows every indication that it’s going to be the same thing.
This may be a shock to you, but there are other branches of government in the US. One of which is not elected and that’s the one that recently struck down Biden’s HEROS plan that would have eliminated $460B in student loan debt.
Good thing we elected a career politician who said his decades of Senate experience meant he could get Republicans in the Senate and house to vote for progressive legislation…
Oh, that’s right…
I forgot Dems had the Senate, House, and presidency for 2 years…
But that highly experienced career politician told us trying to change even a single politicians mind (even if they were in his own party) was an impossible task so he wouldn’t even try.
Welp, at least we’re not running him again since the whole reason he said he was the man for the job turned out to be something he was lying about…
That would seem like a terrible plan
How does having the House and the Senate for 2 years affect the Supreme Court’s decision?
he could get Republicans in the Senate and house to vote for progressive legislation
He said he could work with Republicans to get bipartisan legislation passed. And he has, including the Electoral Count Reform Act.
In addition to bipartisan legislation he has also passed progressive legislation, but as everyone expected that was along party lines.
I’m not a fan of him either. Though he hasn’t done much of what I’ve wanted, he’s been more progressive than I expected. Tbh it sounds like he would have been better off politically if he hadn’t touched student loans. Im finding other progressives aren’t realistic on this issue and do not seem to want to encourage behavior they want from politicians. Way to encourage other politicians not to make attempts like this. Biden would be getting raked over the coals less if he had done nothing. That doesn’t mean dont be critical when its warranted, but don’t expect anybody to take you seriously when you claim he didn’t try. Were you a fly on the wall listening in? You not being there doesn’t mean conversations didnt happen. Its an unfounded claim that doesn’t acknowledge the good changes he HAS accomplished. You just don’t care about those because you weren’t personally impacted. No different than every other selfish voter who gave us Trump.
You are foolish if you think individual politicians can make more progressive shit happen on their own. So many “progressives” only care about the end results and how they are personally helped. That makes you no different than any other voter and its also why we will never make progress until people like you cut the crap and grow up. Incremental progress is still progress. The only time it is not is when its something like setting up a healthcare program and underfunding it so bad it makes the masses hate it. In cases where shit is already fucked, making it slightly less fucked is a good thing.
Personally I actually want politicians to move left. So I celebrate when they make steps in that direction. You are playing into exactly what the Supreme Court was trying to accomplish with its bs decision. The point was to hurt him politically. If you do not reward politicians for moving left and are extra critical of any who make attempts to do what you want, you are only telling them not to bother.
He wasn’t my choice but he’s what we have. We may as well try to use him instead of throwing a tantrum about what could have been. Most neolibs wouldn’t have done anything and he surprised me when he did. The primaries are the place for idealism. The general is the place for realism.
Oh, but what more could you ask of him? He tried once and the Supreme Court said no, and that’s all he can do. Sure, when Trump wanted to ban Muslims from the country and the Supreme Court told him no he just changed one or two small details and issued the same order again and again and again until the Court gave up, but Biden couldn’t possibly do something like that here because it wouldn’t be very polite. You don’t want a rude president, do you?
/s
LOL, That’s quite literally what Biden is doing now in bits in pieces while keeping SCotUS out of it entirely.
more than 3.7 million Americans have had their debt erased under the Biden administration, Mr. Biden said.
But no, you want what you want & you want it NOW.
I forgot Dems had the Senate, House, and presidency for 2 years…
Either you are lying & hoping no one would notice or you are even more politically ignorant than I first realized.
That’s quite literally what Biden is doing now [except for how he isn’t doing it at all and is instead occasionally dropping much smaller scale things that are mostly just implementing things that got passed years ago and hoping everyone forgets that he promised to help everyone]
lol indeed
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Biden has passed a lot of bipartisan laws. This is a dumb comment.
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I’m not sure why this comment is so controversial. It’s exactly what’s happening. We’ve been talking about this now for forever and almost nothing is happening. It’s wonderful that 74,000 people get some relief but that’s a drop in the ocean. I want it badly but I’ve almost accepted the fact that it’s probably not going to happen.
74,000 in addition to the 3.4 million people who already had student loans forgiven. That’s not nothing.
Including me under the TEPSLF. I was on track to hopefully finish paying off my loans at age 63, but with the TEPSLF it counted the ten years I had already done so they were forgiven after the ten years of public service work I did.
Thank you House/Senate Dems and president Biden!
Sure, I agree the extra 3.4 million people have gotten relief or forgiveness is not nothing, but out of the 45.3 million people (quick Google search) with student loan debt that’s only 13%. It’s great, we’re on the path, but 87% of people still haven’t seen any kind of help, and were drug along being promised help for the last 3 years.
“It’s only 13% and not 100%, so it doesn’t count!”
The Supreme Court blocked his attempt last year to forgive debt for another 43 million people, which was set to take effect before repayments started back up. He’s trying to help but is being blocked by conservatives who want him to fail so Trump can be reelected.
The supreme court stopped them forgiving 460 billion a wide acope. Instead, his admin has forgiven 141 billion in a narrower, but still huge, scope. Its far, far more than any other admin has ever forgiven, and still going.
If 30% of “an ocean” is just “a drop,” thats one hell of a drop.
Hell, if he had just promised to forgive the equivalent of 10k like he intended on the campaign trail, his admin would be more than half way there, and climbing.
3.4 million people total have had their debts forgiven (so far) out of a potential 45.3 million. That’s around 7.5% of all people who held student loans.
NOAA estimates that the oceans hold around 1.335 billion cubic kilometres of water, which is around 1.335 sextillion litres (1.335e18 litres) or 353 quintillion gallons (3.53e17 gallons). Estimates put annual human water usage at around 4 trillion m^2 per year (4 quadrillion litres or 1.057 quadrillion gallons).
If the student loans forgiven were merely ‘a drop in the ocean’, that ‘drop’ would contain 100 quintillion litres or 26.4 quintillion gallons. That ‘drop’ would weigh 100 quadrillion tonnes and would be twenty-five times the amount of water all human being use globally every year. Dumped over the contiguous United States, that would form a layer of water 12.5km (7.8miles) deep.
That’s a hell of a drop.
Sources:
This burn is so wet, I’m literally drowning just seeing it.
Lots of moderates want to keep copying the Republican party, even the part where no one is allowed to question any politician who has the right letter next to their name.
They think it’s better to live with the problems and not talk about them let alone solve them.
Which is pretty much the whole problem.
You’re allowed to ask questions. You just don’t like the answers.
In this case, the answer is that debt forgiveness is happening, but you weren’t paying attention.
There’s 1.77 trillion in student loan debt…
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-statistics/
Do you think enough is being done?
Especially when every year a shit ton of students enter college into the same shit show?
I couldn’t find a source for how much total Biden has forgiven, but I’d be shocked if the percentage doesn’t start with a decimal point.
Before you can forgive $1.77 trillion, you need to forgive $136 billion.
80 years ago moderates said before we could all have universal healthcare, we should settle for orphans, widows, and those with disabilities.
And that in a few years we might get it for everyone else after they looked into it.
Couple generations later and moderates are still saying they’re looking into it…
Why do you think Student Loan debt will be different?
I couldn’t find a source for how much total Biden has forgiven, but I’d be shocked if the percentage doesn’t start with a decimal point.
It’s north of $136B in total. If you couldn’t find that, you may not have looked today, as it’s definitely been reported. I’ll let you work out the percentage, but it certainly doesn’t begin with a decimal point.
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Forgiving 5B in student debt VS inciting riot to overthrow our government…
bOtH sIdEs aRe tHe sAmE!!!
well one side didn’t go to college so this is basically a nothing burger to them
BUT IF I DID AND I ALREADY HAD PAID IT ID BE JUST AS PISSED AS I AM NOW THAT I CANT DRAG ANYONE ELSE DOWN
DRAG??? WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF FREAK?!
My lender has been sitting on my application for PAYE since September. And I doubt it ever gets processed as it won’t help their bottom line.
Biden should have left the debt pause indefinitely and fight judges who ruled against himself. The courts allow delays. This would gain him back a lot of support and it would cost him zero political capital.
Yep. He told Republicans he would stop pausing it to pass funding for the government.
He should have lied like they would.
I mean, yes?
It’s time to fucking play hardball with these creeps instead of this milquetoast turn the other cheek bullshit.
They want to play the game like that, so they are setting the ground rules. Acting like we have to keep one hand tied behind our back during a fight with them is fucking stupid. Get that arm out and throw sand in their fucking eyes.
Pocket sand!
The thing is, we don’t need to stoop to make this even. Just start making the courts somewhat even again and arrest these clowns. We don’t have to be peices of shit because they are.
In principle I agree. In practice idk.
Not a bad move from Biden here.
It is according to Lemmy purists. If an action doesn’t tick all their boxes and perfectly solve a complex problem then fuck you.
For a second I thought this said Biden is forgiving $5 and assumed this is the onion.
I might be included in one of the recent rounds of forgiveness (the one where if you have under 12k in loans taken out and have kept up with payments for over 10 years). I’ve paid off all but about $250 of it, and even making the minimum payment, I’ll have it paid off in around 4 months anyway. Unless they move at breakneck speeds by government standards, by the time they actually get everything processed, $5 sounds about right. Which hey, if that ends up being how it goes, I get a free ice cream cone on Uncle Joe. Can’t complain about that.
Averages out to be 67,567.56 per.
Cool, but will that solve anything? Greedy universities still win in this scenario.
Greedy universities
Banks, thousands of other kinds of predatory businesses that prey on students: “Ha, yes, yes! ‘Geeedy universities,’ that’s the ticket!”
It’s the universities that charge these astronomical prices for tuition, not the banks. So yes, greedy fucking universities.
It’s both. The loans are absurdly special status, so the lenders are incentivized to give out more and bigger ones, and the availability of more and bigger student loans means universities can charge more and take in more people
It’s a very tangled system with all sorts of perverse incentives
It’s a small measure but it’s better than nothing. We need free public universities but that’s outside of a presidents unilateral authority.
“It’s not perfect, so we should do nothing”. FFS…
recognizing an issue exists and taking some steps towards acknowledging it and helping people
“Right, but it doesn’t solve everything so it’s completely worthless.”
Bidens list of achievements on behalf of the American people is entirely irrelevant to his re-election.
It doesn’t matter what he does, the narrative is set. The bullshit about genocide Joe just proves that. If anyone thinks Trump or any Republican would be different on that file, they’re a fucking retard. If they think Trump or any Republican would be better for the economy and them individually, they’re ignorant of history and they’re likely captured by right wing news outlets that feed those lies.
Y’all are fucked. Try to keep it internal this time, the world still hasn’t recovered from last round.
Dude I vote as hard as I can but I’m not a Republican so I only get to vote once.
Good call, but we need to fix the underlying problem that is the ridiculous price for higher education. With every piece of information online I find it very hard to believe we can’t get average annual tuition down from 20k a year.
Wow, thx Joe!
What about people who decided to go to a cheap college? Do we get any money?
“We are taking steps to help people in a shitty situation”
“WELL WHAT ABOUT THOSE OF US NOT IN SHITTY SITUATIONS HUH?! WHAT DO WE (I) GET?!”
Maybe they are in a shitty situation too and that’s why they are asking? It fucking sucks when you’re drowning to see you don’t qualify for a life preserver.
Maybe they are in a shitty situation too and that’s why they are asking?
Maybe they should be asking for help with their shitty situation then? Instead of seeing someone getting helping and saying “Why should I care that shitty situation? They aren’t ME!”
Well, I’d imagine the people who went to cheap colleges are probably the ones who are in shitty situations.
You’re basically telling me that I shouldn’t be allowed to have relief payments, even after I had to forfeit having a real college experience? Guess I could’ve just went to a expensive college and begged for the government to save my ass.
Choosing to go to a expensive college is 100% that persons choice, why should we be obligated to pay their debt? What are you on about?
why should we be obligated to pay their debt? What are you on about?
What are you on about? They’ve paid their debt, they’re still paying the interest on the debt. These are people in the public sector, went into debt to help make society better, and the people profiting off that debt are profiting a little less.
That’ll really cut down the 1.7 trillion dollar student loan problem.
So you’d rather he do nothing? I know it is a drop in the bucket but let’s not let good be the enemy of perfect.
I’d rather he do more, but my expectations aren’t high considering Biden was critical in creating this problem:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/02/joe-biden-student-loan-debt-2005-act-2020
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-student-loans/
Either way, don’t expect me to cheer on a jackass who barely makes a dent in a problem he created.
Should just let it trickle down from the billionaires like usual smh
fuck you biden for again putting a stipulation on your promises and only helping a select few
either forgive it all or just forget about it tired of my hopes going up every time a biden is living up to his campaign promises article comes
silent joe waited until election year to have anything to say
justice delayed is justice denied
You didn’t read the article you’re replying to, did you? Biden tried to forgive student debt for all Americans; SCOTUS shot it down. That was around the middle of last year, and Biden has been having to eke out student loan forgiveness in whatever ways he can since then. I don’t know that Americans are gonna see student loan debt forgiveness or any other serious and free social support on the scale you want until there is a reckoning with the English Poor Law mentality.
He want these younger votes so bad, lets see if this continues after he get elected second term.
He wants a second term, so he’s… improving people’s lives? Not sure what you’re mad about. Trump wants a second term, so he’s taking up the culture-war nonsense, and saying he’ll attack his political enemies…
