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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBlue print for winning the mid-terms
Cancel at least a part of everybody's student debt.
That will get people to the polls.
OS
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Blue print for winning the mid-terms (Original Post)
Omaha Steve
Oct 2021
OP
ColinC
(8,231 posts)1. Cancelling all of them would create democratic dominance for a generation
brooklynite
(93,851 posts)2. Why?
And more importantly, how?
Omaha Steve
(99,069 posts)4. What Biden Can't Do on Student Debt--and What He Won't Do
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-biden-cant-do-on-student-debt-and-what-he-wont-do
Activists argue that the President could cancel student debt with the stroke of a pen, fulfilling a campaign promise. Newly uncovered documents suggest that Biden has been reviewing the issue for months.
By Andrew Marantz
October 29, 2021
Occupy Wall Street, the encampment in lower Manhattan that began and ended a decade ago, did not overturn the two-party system, eradicate government corruption, or install a socialist President. In retrospect, it was less a political movement than a laboratory for radical ideasmany of which, owing in large part to post-Occupy organizing, have since come to seem far less radical. Take student debt. In the fall of 2011, the total amount of outstanding student debt in the country had just surpassed nine hundred billion dollars. A group called the Occupy Student Debt Campaign took the stark moral position that all of this debt should be abolished. The current scenario, in which government agencies, banks, and other private lenders set extortionate rates and extract lavish profits, is corrupt and abhorrent, the collective wrote on its Web site. Immediate forgiveness in the spirit of a jubilee, where the injustice of an unpayable debt is redeemed through a single, corrective act, is the only just response to this crisis. At the time, a few Democrats supported relatively minor tweaks, such as debt refinancing, but no member of Congress, not even Bernie Sanders, supported the broad-based cancellation of student loans. We were constantly laughed at, Thomas Gokey, a member of the group, told me. Even sympathetic people would tell us, Thats a nice idea. Itll never happen.
Occupy ended, but the debt-cancellation idea kept evolving. The amount of student debt in the country surpassed a trillion dollars, then a trillion and a half. The Occupy Student Debt Campaign tried to persuade a million student debtors to default, openly and collectively, on their loans. This failed, but this campaign eventually grew into one called Strike Debt, which later reëmerged as the Debt Collective. The activists kept organizing debtors, but they also started trying to convince politicians of the need for debt cancellation, and trying to identify legal mechanisms that could make it happen. Our position was always that the government can and should cancel federal student debt, Astra Taylor, one of the Debt Collectives co-founders, who has also contributed to The New Yorker, told me. But it wasnt until 2015 that we started doing the governments homework for them to lay out how it could be accomplished.
Most people assumed that any vast shift in student-loan policy, such as broad-based cancellation, would require new laws. President Barack Obama, citing a lack of bold action in Congress, ordered his Department of Education to make incremental reforms, consolidating some loans and reducing some interest ratesfar less than what activists wanted, but in line with what most experts thought was possible via executive action. Then, in 2016, Robyn Smith and Deanne Loonin, lawyers at the National Consumer Law Center, wrote a memo pointing out an obscure provision of the Higher Education Act. The provision, which has been on the books since 1965, gives the Secretary of Education the authority to enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand. They proposed that the Department of Education, by far the largest student-loan collector in the country, already had the unilateral power to modify those loans as it saw fit. Smith and Loonin suggested that the department should use this power to cancel the debt incurred by a few thousand alumni of predatory for-profit colleges. But Luke Herrine, then a law student at N.Y.U. and another co-founder of the Debt Collective, saw no reason that the department couldnt use its discretion in more sweeping ways. As far as I can tell, nothing in current law prevents the Department from using its compromise authority to cancel broad swathsor even allof its student loan portfolio, Herrine wrote in 2017. In other words, he argued, the President could order the Education Secretary to cancel any amount of student debt at any time, without waiting for any further action from Congress. This was more of a remote hypothetical than an imminent possibility, especially given that the President at the time was Donald Trump. When I first put the idea out there, I didnt expect it to go anywhere, Herrine, who is now a Ph.D. student at Yale, told me recently. At least not in the short term.
The idea started to gain some acceptance within legal academic circles. There was a lot of scoffing at first, Herrine said. Now there are still experts who disagree with my interpretation, but its more along the lines of This isnt the way it traditionally works, not Heres a clear, knock-down reason why this cant work. (Two Harvard law professors, for instance, recently called Herrines interpretation a plausible textual reading but cautioned that an executive debt-relief initiative might be tied up in court for many years.) In 2019, Julie Margetta Morgan, who was then a researcher at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, asked Herrine to write a white paper called An Administrative Path to Student Debt Cancellation. Later that year, after Morgan joined Elizabeth Warrens Presidential campaign as a policy adviser, Warren announced a new plan: as President, using executive authority, she would cancel more than a trillion dollars of student debt. (Morgan now works at the Department of Education.) Warren argued that her plan, although it looked expensive, would ultimately be a boon to the economy, promoting consumer spending and narrowing the racial wealth gap. Representative Ilhan Omar, an ally of the Debt Collective, persuaded Bernie Sanders to get on board with broad-based debt relief, and he soon outflanked Warren: whereas she proposed cancelling up to fifty thousand dollars of debt per person, he pledged to cancel all of it.
FULL story at link above.
ColinC
(8,231 posts)5. Thanks for this
Commenting to review later...
rsdsharp
(9,036 posts)3. Wouldn't do anything for me.
And its not politically possible, anyway.
forthemiddle
(1,373 posts)6. So pay people off?
On many liberal websites, I have seen a lot of opposition to just paying off pre existing debt.
A better solution would be 0% interest loans, or free to low cost community college.
The many that sacrificed, and have already paid their debts, and those that went to cheaper schools due to costs dont want a total relief of others debt.
Chuuku Davis
(564 posts)7. I paid mine off by working
In a rural town in Arkansas for three years.
I met a lot of good folks and they are still friends.