This October is particularly spooky. Student loan payments are scheduled to resume, and they are killer. Not in the hyperbolic millennials are killing industry way, but in the people have a perverse incentive to either kill their family members:
It’s actually death of parents who took out the loan, not suicide. So maybe murder, but not suicide.
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 30, 2023
Or themselves:
The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on whether 43 million people will have some of their student loans canceled.
It says everything you need to know about capitalism that instead of total loan forgiveness, the gov’t offers suicide hotlines. https://t.co/DQ3MTF2woV
— Party for Socialism and Liberation (@pslnational) June 28, 2023
Over the last few years Biden has been trying to reduce or forgive student loans. These attempts have been met with well reasoned challenges like “Black people would benefit too much” and “If we start forgiving loans, what will motivate people to die for their country?”
Again, not hyperbole:
Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.
— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) August 25, 2022
Racially vindictive Wisconsinites and the military aren’t the only ones fighting to keep you chained to your debt –there’s also the New Civil Liberties Alliance:
Two conservative groups have appealed a Michigan judge’s decision upholding President Joe Biden’s student loan relief plan for more than 800,000 decades-long borrowers.
The Cato Institute and Mackinac Center for Public Policy launched the fresh legal challenge Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The appeal was filed on their behalf by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
The legal maneuver is the latest of the many legal woes the Biden administration faces amid its pledges to make student loan relief a political priority. The appeal was filed the same day the Education Department launched into a protracted rulemaking process to discuss targeted ways of erasing loan balances for broad swaths of Americans.
The interesting thing is that much of the vitriolic student loan forgiveness discourse has been aimed at “undeserving and entitled” twenty somethings that “didn’t uphold their side of the bargain.” Here we have people who have spent decades paying back their student loans and should qualify for forgiveness, but even that’s not enough — even when they’ve overpaid!
The forgiveness came after the Education Department promised earlier this year to alter how it calculates student loan payments and forgive debt worth about $39 billion, in an effort to correct past mistakes. The borrowers involved all paid down their loans for more than 20 years and were signed up for plans that offered to erase balances after that period of time. But not all of their months and years of payments were correctly recorded; some of the borrowers had paid as much as double what they originally borrowed.
You’d think the Liberty Alliance would be in favor of freeing people from overbearing contracts that they’ve had with the government for decades and not force litigation that keeps people from having children, buying homes and saving for retirement. I would also say that student loans are preventing people from traveling, but some folks are fleeing the country to avoid paying them back. Thanks Liberty Alliance!
Biden Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Plan For 804,000 Borrowers Faces New Legal Challenge [USA Today]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.