So as an election year gambit, President Biden has announced he's going to spend between $300-600 billion to forgive $10-$20 thousand of many students current federal student loans.
This of course rewards his progressive university educated base who lack financial literacy and likely never took a personal finance class with a cool extra ten (to possibly twenty) thousand dollars in their pockets, paid for by everyone else.
Apparently, it's unfortunate that I worked and paid off my loans timely. Had I waited, I could have gotten $10,000 forgiven - now I and all other taxpayers get to pay for those who chose or otherwise did not do so.
Of course, this is naught but an election year trick and does not fix the problem of the cost of higher education.
It does nothing to reduce the actual cost of college, which will likely go up by around ten thousand dollars given this incentive. Nor does it ensure future students student loans are reduced, and it may encourage people to take out even more loans hoping for further political forgiveness stunts.
But even spending $300-$600 billion is not enough for some.
The Detroit News: Who gets student loan forgiveness? Relief prompts joy, angst
Lots of stories of those both happy to get the 10k, but many ingrates claiming its not enough to pay off their debts, debts they freely entered into in return for an education that no one forced them to undertake.
Amazingly, in one case we have a lawyer -- who clearly looks like she never missed a meal in her life -- claiming the $10,000 forgiveness is not enough for people of color like her:
Dallas attorney Adwoa Asante borrowed $147,000 in federal loans to
attend Emory University School of Law. She graduated in 2015 and has
since paid back about $15,000. With interest, she still owes $162,000 — a
debt that she says has limited her career options.
That means she's only paid around $2,200 per year -- less than $200 a month toward her debt. Of course the debt is not going to go down much when you only pay off 10% of it in seven years.
Did anyone force Ms. Asante to go to law school?
Anyone force her to take out student loans to go there?
I highly doubt it. Ms. Asante you're a lawyer, presumably you understand how a contract works. You entered into one to borrow money, which you promised to repay, in return for an education. You got the education so why should someone else pay for it on your behalf?
And, to top Ms. Asante, we have an illegal immigrant featured in the story, complaining the forgiveness program won't work for her because she's an illegal and lacks a social security number - otherwise if she had a social security number she'd get the 10-20k forgiven at American taxpayer expense.
Giglio, 20, is in the country without legal
permission and doesn’t qualify for federal loans because she doesn’t
have a Social Security number. She won’t receive any benefit from
Biden’s debt cancellation plan.
Giglio, who
expects to borrow a total of $150,000 in private loans by the end of her
four years studying graphic design at Suffolk University, is already
paying nearly $400 a month to pay off the 12% interest on the money she
borrowed to finance her first two years of school.
“It’s frustrating. It’s 10 times harder for me to go to school, to earn money," she said. "There’s no help for us.”
She's paying an estimate $150,000 to get a degree in graphic design? Who the heck thinks that's a good deal? And she can't even legally work here? What exactly was she thinking doing that? Who the heck even gave an illegal a loan to go to university?
You know she had one heckuva an option to save money beyond choosing a cheaper school here - she could go to any other country in the world and get a cheaper education. She darn well could have gone back to Chile or Italy to do so. But for some reason she did not.
Yep my sympathy for the ingrates complimenting in the article is someone between zero and SFA.
So a quick couple questions:
1. If you didn't go to college, possibly because you couldn't afford it, or wanted to do something else, or didn't want to take on debt, are you happy that you'll be paying a lawyer's (and the other people in the article's) student loans for a political stunt?
2. If you paid off your loans for your education and spent years saving and faithfully paying them off, not using the money for more fun things, making do with less and delaying gratification, how do you feel about others getting 10,000 to 20,000 in forgiveness (or about $2,000+ of the taxes you're personally going to pay this year) to try to buy votes for the midterms?