Except it was rejected, so it didn't fix anything for anyone. It just wasted a bunch of time (it was doomed to fail from the start) and tricked people into thinking something was being done.
The interest rate pause and the loan forgiveness are different policies - one can exist without the other.
The interest rate pause was not declared unconstitutional today - and it will continue until the loans are scheduled to be started again in the next couple months.
Technically, but one does not exist without the other in its current implementation. Hence the continuation shortly as this forgiveness was struck down.
I don’t understand. The two policies were begun by different administrations. The pause did exist without the forgiveness policy; it was done first.
The pause will continue until September (it was not effected at all by this ruling) so it once again exists without the forgiveness policy.
Why do you think one cannot exist without the other? The pause is fine with or without the forgiveness, and the pause existing didn’t save the forgiveness.
The pause can also no longer be extended due to Congressional action:
> Congress recently passed a law preventing further extensions of the payment pause. Student loan interest will resume starting on Sept. 1, 2023, and payments will be due starting in October. We will notify borrowers well before payments restart.
Sure, but I know that YOU know that people talk about these items together. The general tone of this convo has been that nothing helpful has come from these actions, and that’s not true. It’s been stated it was all politics, and we know that’s not fair, as some good has happened as a result.
Now, if we’re going to argue about the very specific loan forgiveness being effective, then sure, it has been currently struck down. But I have trouble believing that nothing good has come from it, if only by forcing this convo, and convos like these taking place.
Sometimes you have to do something loud to get people’s attention; it certainly got yours.
> Sure, but I know that YOU know that people talk about these items together.
If I know anything, it's that "people" are often simply wrong about stuff. If a bunch of people wrongly thing two different things are the same, that doesn't make it so.
> The general tone of this convo has been that nothing helpful has come from these actions, and that’s not true.
I don't care about the general tone, I was only responding to the statement that A "did" good because different-thing B "did good."
My understanding is this thread is specifically about the student loan forgiveness plan that was just ruled unconstitutional, not some amorphous larger thing (which may be how you personally think about it).
You've written at least half a dozen comments linking to this study and claiming that it disputes everyone's opposition to the student loan cancellation plan. I'm skeptical that you've even read it. I just did. It says that the cancelation will not raise the deficit as much as naively would be expected (but will raise it some) because of the general economic benefits that will come from the people spending money on things other than student loan payments.
It doesn't say anything about the moral hazard of paying off student loans for those who haven't paid them, while ignoring those who have. Or about the likelihood that a student loan cancelation will need to happen again. Or that those two things together will encourage people not to pay their student loans in the future, hoping for another cancelation. Or that universities will be able to raise prices even more because they expect further cancellations.
Sure, the deficit may not go up as much as naively you'd expect it to. And we won't have to pay it off with taxes immediately. (we'll just have more debt instead). But you seem to not care about all of the reasons that people oppose this, and just throw a pdf in their face, hoping it'll shut them up even when it doesn't argue what you want it to argue. Please stop.
Sometimes band-aid solutions mess up the incentives to fix underlying problems. Personally, I think this is one of those times. It's like the debt ceiling thing; once you set the precedent that a problem can be "solved" by kicking it down the road until after the next election, there is essentially no incentive for anybody to ever fix it for real.
This is not a problem that is going to be solved by injecting more unaccountable government cash into the system. Students would just take on more debt, expecting more forgiveness, and schools would thus simply continue raising prices. Why would anybody do anything differently?
I dont even know where to start with this. How many times do we all have to have this same conversation. “Student loans being forgiven does not increase inflation, as no new money is being injected into the economy”. It’s either spent before being collected, or spent after being collected by the gov”.
Guys, seriously, we’re not talking about people taking loans out to do blow and hookers, they’re trying to get an education. You’re all acting like we’re just going to give out forgiveness and then throw our hands up and doing nothing after that.
I'm not sure you responded to the right comment here? I didn't say any of the stuff you seem to be responding to.
Maybe you're responding to what I said about unaccountable government cash? But you seem to be thinking I'm saying it's the students who lack accountability and whose incentives are screwed up by the government cash?
That's not it at all, it's not the students' incentives that are a mess under the current system and an even worse mess under the perpetual forgiveness system. It is schools whose incentives are messed up. They have no reason to keep from raising tuition and fees indefinitely because they are guaranteed to be paid. It's that problem that setting a precedent for forgiveness makes worse.
It has nothing to do with what people with student debt spend their money on.
That's one potential solution, I'm not against it a priori, but would be interested in the exact details of it.
But it is not the only potential solution.
But the availability of other actual potential solutions does not make the non-solution of one-time blanket forgiveness that we're discussing here any more appealing to me.
Supports what? That paper seems to be narrowly about the economic impact of loan forgiveness, not about nationalizing higher education or about other potential solutions to the causes of student debt.
Pardon, this was deeper linked, but your previous comments describe the overall forgiveness as a bandaid, or generally not helpful. That is not supported by the research.
I do think it is a bandaid and generally not helpful, even if it is not economically damaging. Economic benefit or damage is only one aspect of the question.
Why? Because a lot of people don't support counter-productive band-aids and would rather advocate for policies that solve actual problems? That doesn't seem like our issue to me...
Our public colleges are essentially privately funded at this point. The amount of public funding in most states (with a small number of notable exceptions) is very small.
What you are describing is called "moral hazard". When the incentives of a program or law encourage more bad behavior by removing risk it is a moral hazard.
Don't worry, sugar daddy government's got your back Jack.
More often than not, politics is about optics, not solutions. This was doomed to fail from the beginning and I bet they knew it. Status quo continues, crisis remains, talking points for the next election cycle established. Sorry guys, we couldn't get it through this time, but next time, trust us, we'll succeed.
> More often than not, politics is about optics, not solutions. This was doomed to fail from the beginning and I bet they knew it. Status quo continues, crisis remains, talking points for the next election cycle established. Sorry guys, we couldn't get it through this time, but next time, trust us, we'll succeed.
Also points scored in the last election. IIRC, this plan was announced a single month before the 2022 election. They got to benefit from the votes of people who thought they were getting their loans forgiven, without ever actually doing that.
Only because the plan was opposed on equally political grounds. The idea was a welcomed one by the people who voted for the politicians in favor of it, and not welcomed by the ones they didn't vote for, so the points went where they belonged.
If it was so certain that they had no intention of going through with it, why not call their bluff and turn the responsibility for killing it back on them?
> If it was so certain that they had no intention of going through with it, why not call their bluff and turn the responsibility for killing it back on them?
That's the wrong question. It was never if they had "intention of going through with it," it was about if they would be able to actually pull it off. The GGP stated "This was doomed to fail from the beginning and I bet they knew it," and I have to agree. Their plan to push this through purely via executive action was very likely to fail (and did), and the lawyers and politicians who formulated almost certainly knew the odds.
Do you REALLY think an executive order had any chance of succeeding? Think about it for a minute. You think the SC would be ok with the president having the ability to forgive loans on a whim?
I'd love to know more about the strong legal argument. It seems pretty obvious to me that the SC wouldn't be ok with the president having the ability to just erase debt like this.
If it's just about people struggling with their finances today, why not forgive any type of debt? Money is fungible after all. Suppose a grad has a net debt because they routinely spend more than they earn and like to go on all inclusive destination vacations every year. Now suppose you have someone who didn't take out student loans but had some unfortunate life circumstances that caused them to be in the same amount of debt.
Forgiving either person's debt will improve each one's finances, but won't affect whether they've gone to college in the past.
Edit: in case it wasn't obvious, the question is rhetorical. I'm not advocating for forgiving any kind of debt.
Because much of student debt is federally owned and they have the authority to forgive it, while they don't have the authority to force Visa to forgive someone's credit card debt that was incurred due to unfortunate life circumstances.
It'd be fair to ask why student debt vs other kinds of federally held debt, but why notmall debt is pretty clear.
The federal government could do this in the form of a check in the mail once you provide your credit card statement. For the purposes of the argument, I don't see why it would matter if the individual actually uses it to pay the debt or not. It has the same affect on their ability to cope with the struggle that parent poster was referring to, and it costs the same to the taxpayer. (Although, I'm sure that they could make some kind of law to accomplish this.)
But this is going into the weeds and not really addressing the point of the argument.
I'm sorry. I assumed you were trying to make a counterpoint and not simply naming factual information. When I asked, "why not forgive any type of debt," I was making a point about how there's no reason we would judge either debt to be more worthy of forgiveness if we accept parent poster's claim that this was just about peoples' present-day financial struggle.
Bankruptcy is very different than student loan forgiveness. For example, 91% of people hire an attorney to do the bankruptcy, there are court fees, you take a huge hit on your credit score, you can't get credit, you either get put on a payment plan or you have to liquidate your assets, etc. Compared to that, student loan forgiveness is basically a freebie. When I asked, "why not forgive any type of debt," I meant it in the same kind of way that student loan forgiveness works.
Then the question would become: why should the system give such harsh repercussions for those who must file bankruptcy while those who get student loan forgiveness have no repercussions? What's more: those who get student loan forgiveness are much more likely to have a degree and have a higher income. In addition, student loan forgiveness applies to everyone with the debt, not just those who are in financial distress.
> It fixes a lot for the people struggling with them right now.
> We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
But this plan stretched the law past its breaking point, which why it was struck down. IIRC, the plan would have been OK if Congress had only passed a law explicitly granting the authority to forgive the loans, which it didn't even when Democrats controlled Congress.
IMHO, They'd fix the student loan issue immediately if Congress passed a law to allow the debt be discharged in bankruptcy (but maybe with some kind of delay or different fix to prevent the previous abuses of bankruptcy that led to the current regime), and perhaps added a claw-back from the schools for future government loans.
There wasn’t really a legal basis for striking this down, because the plaintiffs did not actually suffer damage.
Same for the discrimination case where the plaintiffs had neither suffered damage, nor prior restraint, nor were actually engaged in the line of business in which they claimed to be.
The court is now accepting purely hypothetical cases when it’s convenient for them - this was someone who might start a web business and might suffer adverse action. The action that might be punished hasn’t even occurred yet, let alone any governmental response, nor is their even any bona fide movement towards the action that might be restrained, let alone any indication the government might restrain it.
It’s extremely damaging to our legal fabric to have this double-standard applied across the system. This is calvinball territory, the court is changing the rules of the game for different participants. Different people get an entirely different process based on which group you fall into, and the process difference is so drastic it effectively determines the outcome of the case.
Prove it. Sans evidence this is nothing but an attempt to paint the Supreme Court in a negative light simply for disagreeing with you. The last three decisions of the Supreme court have been absolutely in line with the Constitution. If you don't like it, convince the rest of us to change the Constitution.
I feel like the Supreme Court is finally doing its job holding the legislative and executive branches to their granted authority.
> Disagree, this is a lot of word salad to justify not helping people.
Come on. It's not no "unintelligible, extremely disorganized speech or writing manifested as a symptom of a mental disorder" to disagree with you.
Furthermore, framing this as just about "not helping people" is simple-minded. There are almost always trade-offs between different goods, and maintaining separation of powers is an important good as well. There are serious, serious problems with allowing small provisions of law meant to solve small problems to be re-interpreted to allow the executive to unilaterally make massive policy changes.
You’re the one approaching this like it’s some incredibly complex issue, it’s really not. But okay, let’s play your game. Describe the real material harm caused by this forgiveness. Is it inflation? There’s a lot of research saying that’s bogus. Is it an overstretching of powers? Seems pretty minimal compared to existing powers, and it seems like this is right up the executive and DOE alley… what exactly are you upset with in the real tangible sense? What concrete harms are happening that are backed by data and not just a myopic world view? Please, really, enlighten me
We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.