Should parents - with their nice middle class income and their nice $250K home - be able to file bankruptcy simply to weasel out of some $80k in student loans?
Hell No.
Should students with $80K in debt and a liberal arts degree with Ebonics or something similarly stupid be able to file bankruptcy because they can’t find a job except at McDonalds?
Again, Hell No.
Perhaps you can tell me under what circumstances it is OK to weasel out of student loan debt through bankruptcy?
Well, your position is the current system, none of those loans can be weaseled out of.
How’s it working out for you? For me, seems like the grand financial experiment has worked out poorly.
“Hell No.”
“Again, Hell No.”
I’m with you. The reason why student loans are not dischargeable is because they wouldn’t exist if people could simply walk away from them (at least private ones wouldn’t exist).
So how about a compromise - make them collateralized, like car loans. Allow the borrower to walk away from the student loan, but then allow ‘repossession’ of the college degree. Walk away from the loan and your college transcript simply VAPORIZES - cleared out of university records and any other records, and claiming that you have a degree when you no longer do would be fraud.
Now that would never happen, but proposing it would FORCE the deadbeats and their supporters to BE TRUTHFUL about their intentions - that they want free college - not really loan relief.
That's the judge's call, isn't it.
Under what circumstances do you consider bankruptcy to be valid at all?
If students could, as you say, “weasel” out of loans, then I guarantee you the ebonics departments would all dry up because no bank would put their money at risk subsidizing it.
Bankruptcy is a well defined construct. People who are insolvent “weasel” out of debts all the time.
Just because student loans are mostly not dischargeable (at the moment) does not mean an individual is solvent.
There is no legitimate reason to not let insolvent people declare bankruptcy, and a lot of legitimate reasons to encourage them to do it.
One reason to allow it is to destroy liberal bastions of ignorance that many universities have become. Once student loans are dischargeable only legitimate borrowers at legitimate institutions with legitimate courses of study will be funded.