Posted on 12/08/2024 5:50:32 AM PST by george76
Proposal uses ‘hardship’ as the rubric for granting student loan forgiveness.
Joe Biden’s Department of Education has proposed a student loan forgiveness plan to take effect after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.
While the Department of Education puts the estimated cost at $112 billion, one analyst called it a “gross underestimate” and suggested the cost could be five times larger.
An economist and public policy analyst who spoke to The College Fix also criticized the regulation as “worrisome.”
The department opened comments on Oct. 31, just days before the election. The comment period for the proposed regulation just closed on Monday, Dec. 2. It has been in the works since at least February.
According to the new proposal, this act would “specify the Secretary’s authority to waive all or part of any student loan debts owed to the Department based on the Secretary’s determination that a borrower has experienced or is experiencing hardship related to such a loan.”
The Education Department uses a broad definition of “hardship” as that which is “likely to impair the borrower’s ability to fully repay the Federal government” or that which “renders the costs of enforcing the full amount of the debt not justified by the expected benefits of continued collection of the entire debt.”
Because of this, the final costs are not calculable, according to American Enterprise Institute economist Preston Cooper.
“The subjective nature of the proposal is worrisome,” Cooper told The Fix via email. “Whether a borrower is in ‘hardship’ is left up to the discretion of Education Department bureaucrats.”
While the official cost estimate of the proposal is $112 billion, Cooper told The Fix that “independent analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have estimated that it could cost as much as $600 billion [over the next 10 years].”
The committee submitted its analysis as a comment to the proposed regulation.
“It’s likely they will adopt a maximalist standard of ‘hardship’ in order to forgive as much debt as possible,” he said.
An analyst at the center-left Progressive Policy Institute said the proposal “creates a back door for blanket debt cancellation.”
The estimated $112 billion cost is a “gross underestimate,” Ben Ritz, vice president of policy development for the think tank, told The Fix via email.
A staffer at the Department of Education directed The Fix to a specialist for comment. They have not returned a voicemail request for comment.
President Joe Biden has attempted several student loan bailouts while in office, most notably his 2022 proposal to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for Pell Grant recipients, and $10,000 for others earning less than $125,000 annually.
The administration cited a 9/11-era law that allowed for loan modification in cases of “emergencies.” Biden said the coronavirus outbreak gave the Department of Education wide authority to bailout student loan borrowers. The Supreme Court did not buy this argument and struck down the plan in 2023.
Another student loan bailout, called the Saving on a Valuable Education plan, is currently frozen due to legal challenges.
Prior to the massive bailout in 2022, taxpayers had already absorbed more than $32 billion student loans since Biden took office in January 2021
...
However, some data points suggest people are not being “literally crushed,” by their loans, as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suggested in May of this year.
A report from Mission Square Research Institute, which supports public programs to pay off student loan debt, found “15 percent [of workers] across both the public and private sectors missed their student debt repayments three or more times in the past six months,” as The Fix recently reported.
Meanwhile, recipients of a student loan bailout said they planned to use the money to take a vacation, go out to eat, or buy drugs.
Recipients of the student loan pause that began under President Donald Trump in 2020 also used the opportunity not to pay off debt, but to take on more loans, a University of Chicago study found.
None of these bailouts have materialized, have they? The court said no, and Congress isn’t dishing it out.
Did not RTA.
However, “Get a Rope!”
What is there to dish out? I thought they were just canceling debt?
I also didn’t understand how they were using this “savings” to go on vacations, if they didn’t have money to pay back the loans.
But not a cent more for those in NC living in tents in the middle of the winter!
These “bailouts” are passed on to the American taxpayer, at least 50% of whom did not attend college. The money just doesn’t disappear, despite what the Biden admin wants you to think.
The USSC needs to respond to this. “Pardons” should be limited to specific, prosecuted and convicted, criminals and crimes.
That’s a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the Constitution that likely comports to all that was originally imagined and intended.
report to DOGE
The student loan program is a wealth redistribution plan - taking money from the working middle class to leftist, rich, elite indoctrination centers.
> hardship
College isnt working.
I don’t consider this a high priority, but reforming the student loan industry would be good. No government loans. No bank loans. Pay cash, or borrow from the degree-granting college. Pay them back or don’t pay them back, it depends on the quality of the education they give you. We would have fewer colleges, fewer college graduates, and everyone would be better off.
These students will buy Teslas and Range Rovers. Those loans will not be a problem. They will call them an investment.
American taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for this. Let them get their pals the Hamass muzzie terrorists pay for their college attendance certificates. They owe it to them the way they have advanced Jew-hating, anti-Semitism in the United States. The muzzie terrorists couldn’t have done it alone without the help of the Jew hating college loan deadbeat brats.
The introductory page of the Education section in the Evil Project 2025:
I would like to see the new Administration do this on day one. Going to be a busy "Day One" if my wishes came true!
Folks,
Keep in mind our govt is a cash flow manager, not a profit manager. That money went out the door and was spent in their minds. The govt does not have a balance sheet in their minds.
Message: If you vote Republican, either change how you vote, or die.
Act? Act??? That implies that it is a law passed by Congress and signed by the President. This is just a change in interpretation and enforcement of a law by the Department of Miseducation. Once again Biden ignores the law. Trump makes a phone call to Ukraine or gives a speech to supporters on January 6, 2021 and gets impeached twice. Biden gives away more than half a trillion dollars of US government assets without Congressional authorization against previous Supreme Court rulings and doesn't even get a wrist slap.
President Trump needs to find a spot in his administration/cabinet for Mike Rowe. Give him the platform to expound against any student loan forgiveness. I don’t know what agency that would be but they’re creating one for Musk and Ramaswamy, do the same for Rowe.
These are the occupations that are needed - not more over educated Ivy League idiots who will fall for “loan forgiveness”, take out more loans and vote for the dem party lunacy.
https://mikeroweworks.org/scholarship/
“”comment to the proposed regulation.””
Act, proposal, regulation...off to a good start not being able to define what is in the works!!!
Many senior members of the Dept. of Ed want to keep their share of the cash flow going into their pockets.
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