Biden, in public and private, tiptoes toward a 2020 run

[Sophia4]

13. Where does he stand when it comes to student loans?

The 2005 bankruptcy bill made it next to impossible if not impossible to declare bankruptcy on them.

What are students who owe so much in student loans supposed to do?

If you start a business, borrow money to fund your business, and it does not go well, you can find the opportunity to start again financially by declaring bankruptcy.

But if you get a degree and borrow money to get your degree, and you don't get a job, i.e., your career does not go well, you are stuck with the debt for your student loan.

Education should be less expensive in the first place, and student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Biden sponsored the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill.

Don't believe me?

As a senator from Delaware -- a corporate tax haven where the financial industry is one of the state’s largest employers -- Biden was one of the key proponents of the 2005 legislation that is now bearing down on students like Ryan. That bill effectively prevents the $150 billion worth of private student debt from being discharged, rescheduled or renegotiated as other debt can be in bankruptcy court.

Biden's efforts in 2005 were no anomaly. Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion of the struggling middle class -- a man who famously commutes on Amtrak and mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers -- the Delaware lawmaker has played a consistent and pivotal role in the financial industry's four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to shield themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s.

Biden's political fortunes rose in tandem with the financial industry's. At 29, he won the first of seven elections to the U.S. Senate, rising to chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, which vets bankruptcy legislation. On that committee, Biden helped lenders make it more difficult for Americans to reduce debt through bankruptcy -- a trend that experts say encouraged banks to loan more freely with less fear that courts could erase their customers’ repayment obligations. At the same time, with more debtors barred from bankruptcy protections, the average American’s debt load went up by two-thirds over the last 40 years. Today, there is more than $10,000 of personal debt for every person in the country, as compared to roughly $6,000 in the early 1970s.

http://www.ibtimes.com/joe-biden-backed-bills-make-it-harder-americans-reduce-their-student-debt-2094664

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/24/434331154/the-biggest-divide-between-joe-biden-and-elizabeth-warren

Biden is a likeable guy, but he has a serious problem. Let's see whether he does anything about it. And if he does, what?