Biden Forgives Some Student Debt, As The Memers Rejoice And Criticize
President Biden announced a student loan debt forgiveness on Wednesday, eliminating at least $10,000 of debt for all borrowers and $20,000 for those who took out a Pell Grant to pursue their education.
The total amount of debt canceled is around $300 billion out of $1.6 trillion owed in student loan debt by Americans. The forgiveness is also accompanied by new rules governing the repayment of debt.
For those who borrow less than $12,000, all will be forgiven in 10 years (not 20, like it used to be) and monthly payments will be capped at 5 percent of income. The pause on pandemic payments is also extended to January 1st, 2023 (although the government says this will be the last pause).
The move comes after months of deliberation by the Biden administration and directly ahead of the 2022 midterms.
The response across social media has already been massive, as meme-makers online rejoiced with an influx of student loan forgiveness memes.
Others were less enthusiastic, wishing Biden and his administration had taken more action. Other Democrats have been pressuring the President to forgive all debt, or at least a larger amount of it. Some feared that forgiving more debt would increase inflation, but by considerably less than the Federal Reserve bailouts of Wall Street and major companies during the COVID-19 pandemic did.
Reporter: ‘Is this debt relief unfair to people who paid their student loans?’Biden: ‘Is it fair to people who … do not own multi-million-dollar businesses … to give them all these tax breaks? What do you think?’I love seeing the little guys get a win!#BidenDeliversAGAIN pic.twitter.com/Jn4XvHtKUw
— LA Blue Dot in GA 🌊💔 (@namwella1961) August 24, 2022
For about 8 million borrowers, the forgiveness will kick in automatically. For those whom the government doesn’t have a lot of information on, the administration will launch an application in the next few weeks and you can sign up for the email notification when that happens here.
"Canceling student loan debt is a gift to the wealthy" my brother in Christ, wealthy people don't have student loan debt. They have wealth.
— Barred and Boujee (@AudreLawdAMercy) August 22, 2022
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This is a bandaid that more or less does nothing to fix the actual problem and might make it worse.
Tuition is high in the first place because the feds are giving out more or less infinite loans so they can charge whatever the fuck they want. This is going to make students more willing to take more loans which will allow the schools to charge even more tuition and get away with it.
The student loan programs as they exist in the Anglosphere should be abolished. Either 1) treat post-secondary school as a public utility to be provided to the public at the lowest cost to taxpayers as it is in continental Europe with the decrease in quality associated with that, or 2) privatize it entirely and accept that not everyone will have access to it, but that not everyone will need access to it and it will stop being treated as that thing every employer wants their employees to have for their shitty desk job. If companies want employees to have degrees, THEY can foot the bill.
Either is preferable to mortgaging another generation.
HumbleWaterFilterMerchant
Anomalocaris20
I guess this is a good thing in a utilitarian sense, higher education should be inexpensive to begin with, though as someone who did pay off their student loan I'm admittedly a little salty that I could be $10,000 richer right now if I hadn't paid it off.
ImperatorZor
Does it solve all issues? No.
Does it help people? Yes.
What does this mean? We need MORE of it.
ObadiahtheSlim
Where does this money come from? The money printer at the federal reserve. Which means more inflation and you lose out in the long run. If we had more of it, we'd be going full Venezuela mode.
The only winners are the politicians who win an election thanks to this transparent vote buying.
Panuru
This is the opposite of printing more money; it's making money disappear. People owe money to the government…poof they no longer owe it. That monetary value has ceased to exist.
MCC1701
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Spaztastic Man
I'm pretty middle-ground about this, I'm thankful it's shaving a sizable chunk off my loans, but I didn't really have that much cause of the college I went to, and I've been paying off the principal since the pandemic started. Even if we weren't getting anything I'd still think I'd be okay with starting up payments again thanks to the post-pandemic job market boom, managed to land a pretty good position cause of a really cool PM.
But I also consider my situation a bout of incredible luck that I most definitely couldn't pull off again. I know for a lot of people though their situations are absolutely terrible. And many are rightfully upset that they're only getting a meager $10k off with how shitty and expensive everything is right now. This seems like if Biden actually utilized any amount of time to put some thought into this other than the last minute, it could've come with a little more flexibility.
HomogenousSmoothie
There's a lot more bundled with the announcement that is genuinely very helpful past this point:
for income based repayment plans, your contribution per month is capped at 5% of discretionary income, down from 10%
if you pay your plan for 120 months, and have less than 12k debt at the end of it, the loan is forgiven
if your income is below 225% FPL, then your minimum payment per month is $0.For those curious, this is about 27k for a single person.
As long as you make the minimum payments every month, your loan will not accrue interest. This is a big change that can help debtors actually pay off the principal.
Trust me, there was a good chunk of thought put into this, more than just a casual shave off of $10k. It is not comprehensive restructuring of tuition, but to a lot of people like me who grew up poor it is a huge deal.
Fallenangel700
I dunno much about economics, but that all sounds really good.
PatrickBateman96
This was my mom's logic. "I had to pay for it so people now should have to also".
TerribleTrike
Lots of people falling for the crab in the bucket mentality, unfortunately.
PatrickBateman96
Never heard of that one before.
TerribleTrike
If you have a bunch of crabs trapped in a bucket, the ones that try to climb out will be dragged down again by the ones they leave behind.
It's usually used as a metaphor when you have people who drag others into their misery when they try to improve.
Examples include how education is shunned in certain dysfunctional circles, people who are against making life easier because everyone else needs to suffer if they did, and isolated cultures that pressure people into staying instead of expanding their horizons.
Victreebong
Sucks for the generations way ahead of you guys who never thought they’d hear this. Sucks for you current loan payers because admission costs are much higher than when I was in college. $10,000 is a semester at a decent state school.
Trust me; this wasn’t even a thought in 2008 when I went into loan counseling. And times were even harder with NO jobs.
*sigh*
That last tweet is kind of dumb, of course it's a gift to the wealthy, it's loan forgiveness, not loan refunds. The student/ex-student isn't getting any money, it's all going to the wealth-sucking megalopolis that is the US education system, a multibillion dollar enterprise as it is. All this will do is incentivize those schools to jack up tuition even more with the excuse to fall back on of "well hey if you end up completely drowning in debt just complain about it hard enough in 5 years and the government will pay it off for you", which simultaneously does not solve the problem and as create all the reason in the world to make it worse.
A Concerned Rifleman
As much as I rejoice on our administration improving things by doing the bare fucking minimum, which in itself is cause for celebration, this unfortunately isn't addressing the main issue that students are getting in this situation to begin with. But hey, whatever buys votes just in time for the midterm, I guess.
MCC1701
Sadly it's a Band-Aid that is more likely to make things worse over time than better. More people will put themselves in the hole with the logic of "the government will forgive some of it" which I'm not sure is right or wrong but regardless will exacerbate the problem. More people willing to put themselves in a deeper hole also means universities can jack up their prices even further without hurting enrollment.
To your point, any institution receiving government funding should have regulations in place to not be as predatory, but I'm not holding my breath. It would also be helpful for us to all collectively realize how useless a college degree is in a world where tons of jobs didn't even exist a decade ago, but I don't see that happening either.
No One Is Immune to Bias
As someone in his senior year of college who has been working overtime many a week as part of an effort to live independently and graduate without debt, this really sucked to hear. Specifically the part about it not applying to student loans taken after June 30th; god I wish I could just ride this last year out on a government handout.