Elizabeth Warren Is Right About Student Debt Relief [View all]

[BlueMTexpat]

The government missed an opportunity to modify mortgages during the housing crisis. It shouldn’t repeat its mistake.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-22/elizabeth-warren-is-right-about-student-debt-relief

Good op-ed from Joe Nocera, who among other things, is a business commentator for NPR's Weekend Edition.

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Today, having struggled to pay off my loan, I would be well within my rights to demand that the current crop of student debtors do the same thing I did: suck it up and pay off their loans, no matter what. From reading Twitter, I can see many baby boomers feel the same way.

One boomer who does not, however, is Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren. She — as well as rival Senator Bernie Sanders — is proposing a substantial student-loan-forgiveness program. Hers would eliminate “$50,000 worth of student loan debt for 42 million Americans,” according to her issues website. Total student loan debt is now more than $1.5 trillion, according to estimates, higher than any other category of debt after home mortgages. Warren’s plan would erase $1 trillion of that. 1 (Sanders’s plan would go much further and simply wipe all student debt off the nation’s books.)

This being Warren, she ladles her student loan plan with a heaping of progressive rhetoric: “State governments and the federal government decided that instead of treating higher education like our public school system — free and accessible to all Americans — they’d rather cut taxes for billionaires…” and so forth.

But — this also being Warren — she lays out a concrete, practical reason for her loan-relief plan: Student debt, she says, is acting “as an anchor on our economy.” She continues: “It’s reducing home ownership rates. It’s leading fewer people to start businesses. It’s forcing students to drop out of school before getting a degree. It is a problem for all of us.”

She is right on all counts, which is why, however unfair it may seem to those who struggled to pay their student loans, relieving some of that debt burden would benefit the country enormously.
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Much more at the link. Worth a read if you still have free articles from Bloomberg. This was my last one.