Quote:
Originally Posted by Gwaihir
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And the post-hoc fact check from Gwaihir intuiting this accusation from the social consciousness says:
True
Private student loans were largely stripped of bankruptcy protections in 2005 in a congressional move that had the devastating impact of tripling such debt over a decade and locking in millions of Americans to years of grueling repayments.
The Republican-led bill tightened the bankruptcy code, unleashing a huge giveaway to lenders at the expense of indebted student borrowers. At the time it faced vociferous opposition from 25 Democrats in the US Senate.
But it passed anyway, with 18 Democratic senators breaking ranks and casting their vote in favor of the bill. Of those 18, one politician stood out as an especially enthusiastic champion of the credit companies who, as it happens, had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions – Joe Biden.
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This is one of the reasons I was okay with Biden. He isn’t afraid of going away from the Democrat party line and voting sensibly on fiscal issues. I believe he’s actually kinda close to center right fiscally.
Now, there is definitely a big crisis related to student loans, but it has nothing to do with this bankruptcy protection. The issue is that we’ve made higher education more available without making corresponding changes in our country such that there are actual jobs available for those people to use said higher degree. Then you couple that with the fact that wage growth has remained stagnant due to the large amount of people vying for those positions (I.e. you can get a quality employee for relatively cheap because they have no negotiating leverage since there are so many applicants) plus increasing cost of living across the board and you have a crisis where these people can’t afford to pay their loans off. It really is a significant problem that is going to affect us a lot in the very long term.
But allowing loans to be voided in bankruptcy would’ve only resulted in loans being nearly impossible to get or otherwise offered at such high interest rates that people wouldn’t be able to pay them off anyway.