Posted on 08/12/2025 4:36:41 PM PDT by Libloather
Less than half of student loan borrowers have been making their payments on $1.6 trillion of debt as they struggle to afford housing and groceries – and some are letting the bills pile up as a form of protest.
Only 38% of the 42.7 million borrowers nationwide are in repayment and current following five years of leniency measures from the US government following the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Education said in April.
While most borrowers have loans that are less than $40,000, about 3.6 million Americans owe more than $100,000 each in federal loans totaling $656.7 billion – or about 41% of total student debt.
As of May, about 30% of borrowers with a payment due, or 5.6 million people, were at least 90 days behind, according to TransUnion data.
At the 270-day mark, the government can withhold tax refunds and order employers to garnish up to 15% of a borrower’s after-tax salary.
But these consequences may “feel too abstract to feel motivational for people,” Sarah Newcomb, senior behavioral scientist at Edward Jones, told Bloomberg.
About 2.2 million borrowers saw their credit scores tank by at least 100 points in the first quarter, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
Kameron Davis, a 24-year-old Uber driver in Miami, recently saw his credit score plunge about 180 points for not paying his student loans – but he’s unbothered since he doesn’t plan to buy a home anytime soon.
After dropping out of college when classes went online during the pandemic, Davis is more concerned with supporting his wife and two kids than prioritizing an $800 monthly student-loan payment.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Obama really screwed this up. Trump needs to give all the loans back to the banks and put everything back the way it was before Obama screwed it up.
It used to be extremely rare to default on student loans because it was one of the only kinds you couldn’t wipe away with bankruptcy, and they had the power to garnish your wages ect.
I would like to a breakdown by major.
When they signed for that loan, they said they’d pay it back.
They OWE it, and if they don’t pay it voluntarily, there’s always garnishing their wages or tax refunds.
There are also people out there who owe the IRS a lot of money. And you know what? Some of those people have no intention of paying the IRS. It’s kind of like a protest. Wish them luck!
Make the colleges, who sold then the worthless degrees, pay.
Half those students never even completed their degrees.
They should never have gone to college in the first place.
The loans should be forgiven, but it should be taken out of the endowments of the ]institutions that exploited dumb 18-year olds for their student loan dollars.
The ones that refuse to pay, we call them, government workers.
I would like them by race and sex. Mustn’t be any discrimination.
They were trained by the Biden Administration’s deferments and repeated efforts at forgiveness to assume they were never going to have to pay. This is what you get.
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Federal employees in every type of job, from Uncle Sam’s money movers in Treasury to members of the military to postal workers to Capitol Hill employees, owe back taxes.
The total tally? A combined $3.3 billion in delinquent taxes, which is the latest By the Numbers figure.
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Republican senators have been up in arms over reports issued over the past 18 months indicating the extent to which federal employees are not paying their federal taxes.
In a July letter, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa noted that a recent audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that 149,000 federal employees owe $1.5 billion in unpaid taxes.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/22/congress-irs-tax-delinquencies/9442749/
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Federal employees owe a total of $3.3 billion in back taxes to the federal government, according to Internal Revenue Service data released Thursday.
In all, 318,462 federal employees owed back taxes as of last Sept. 30 — an increase of 2.6% from the previous year. That puts the average tax bill at $10,391, according to IRS data obtained by USA TODAY under the Freedom of Information Act.
But federal workers are better at paying their taxes than the average taxpayer. Their delinquency rate of 3.19% is far lower than the 8.7% for the population at large.
Some federal workers are worse than others. The non-payment rate for employees of the House of Representatives is 4.87%. In the Senate, it’s 3.24%. That’s 714 tax delinquents on Capitol Hill owing a total of $8.6 million — more than one for each representative or senator. Thirty-six employees in the Executive Office of the President are delinquent on their taxes, for a rate of 2.06%.
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https://www.answers.com/united-states-government/How_many_senators_and_congressmen_owe_back_taxes
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435 Congressmen don’t pay taxes.
9 Senators owe back taxes.
Two ways to handle it.
First, do like the Brits in the 18th and 19th centuries and open up a debtors prison (the Marshalsea).
Second…give them an option to work off debt as farm laborers.
You could discharge student loans with bankruptcy until 2005. Things changed after Harry Reid’s banking bill that also allowed credit card companies to jack up their interest rates as high as the mid-30s.
Force the banks to eat it.
The Feds can suck money out of tax refunds and even social security checks if you owe them.
I made it a priority to repay my college loans. I hated having that hang over my head. I double-paid them off faster just to get them over with.
I think the age of college is over. We are heading into the age of certifications, where multiple certifications will compile into a degree.
Here’s a plan: Bring back debtors prisons and fill them with those who refuse to pay.
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