'It’s well past time for the critics of student debt relief to get honest about their real purpose. It’s to protect wealthier Americans who fear their income taxes will have to rise to pay for that relief,' writes hiltzikm.
This should never have happened. It’s the result of a panic over student loan defaults starting in the 1970s that was never supported by any actual data.
Those yarns were never authenticated, however. In fact, the Government Accountability Office determined in 1978 that although the default rate on student loans was 18%, less than 4% of the amounts borrowed were discharged in bankruptcy, resulting in an overall discharge rate of less than three-quarters of one percent, better than the rate on other consumer loans.
MBA graduates accounted for 2.6% of all student loan borrowers who received their degrees in 2015-16, lawyers were 1% and doctors 0.5%, according to statistics released by the Department of Education in 2020. That means that about 4% of all borrowers fell into those high-profile, well-paid career categories.Canceling student debt isn’t unfair to those who have already paid off their loans. And it isn’t a giveaway to the rich, either.
“This is why it’s galling to hear many refer to borrowers as slackers,” Ramamurti adds, referring to a theme popular among Republicans and conservatives asserting that working Americans will be shouldering the debt for these freeloaders. “These are typically people from lower-income families...trying to get a degree, and then using their income to help their families as well as pay down their own debt,” Ramamurti counters.
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