What about student loans constitutes a "crisis"? [View all]

[Recursion]

What is the crisis here?

People keep saying "there's over a trillion dollars in student debt!" but never indicate what they think an appropriate amount would be.

Student debt allows income-based repayment, so that if you make less than $25K, you don't have to pay anything, and if you're supporting a spouse and 2 kids on $35K you pay the huge sum of $5 / month. If you're having to choose between food and student loans, you need to switch to the income-based repayment. (I mean, I've lost my job and had a really hard time actually contacting my loan servicer to reduce my payments because my loans got resold so many times -- this is an irritant but not a "crisis".) And for that matter for a lot of borrowers, standard repayment is a bad idea: if your debt is over a certain amount compared to your income, you're much better off just paying the minimum for 20 years and then having the rest discharged.

Student debt is forgiven after 20 or 25 years (depending on when you borrowed) of income-based repayment, so it's not "a lifetime" of debt despite the fact that people keep saying so.

Student debt is overwhelmingly held by the richest third of the country (and as mentioned above if you have low income you don't have to pay much if anything at all).

What exactly is such a crisis about a trillion dollars of debt that allows income-based repayment and is discharged after a fixed period of payment? Is this a serious enough crisis to divert a trillion dollars that could instead be used for the poorer half of the country?