Q: What is Congress doing to help?“Making a huge profit” is her loaded language for the reality: the federal government charges interest at a rate substantially lower than the private lenders could ever do. How do we know this? Because every student has the choice of borrowing from private lenders, and almost all of them don't – because the interest rate is much higher!
A: This is the part that makes me grind my teeth. Right now, the United States government is making huge profits off the backs of our students. Our young people not only have to pay back the cost of the loans, they have to pay billions more in interest to the government — like an extra tax for trying to get an education. That's just wrong. We ought to be investing in young people who are trying to get an education — not making it harder for them.
Q: Student loans are treated differently than many other kinds of debt under bankruptcy law, so it's much harder for struggling borrowers to discharge their student loans. Do you think this should be changed?
A: Yes. I have co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Durbin, D-Ill., that called for making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. Keep in mind: Young people who have student loan debt — they didn't go to the mall and charge up a bunch of things they couldn't afford — but if they had gone to the mall, they could discharge those debts in bankruptcy. It's only the student loan debt they can't discharge.
Q: So whatshould the government be doing?
A: For both private loans and federal loans, the fixes are pretty similar. We need to restore bankruptcy protections, provide better oversight of the government contractors that work with borrowers and process loan payments, and ensure that struggling borrowers can get help to modify their loans.
Warren's solutions are classic socialism: stop charging any interest at all on the student loans, make it easy and automatic for student borrowers to restructure their loans (skipping or stretching out payments), and allow student borrowers to eliminate their debt if they go through bankruptcy. Elsewhere she proposes that student loans be automatically granted, without any of those pesky preconditions such as decent grades, the ability to learn, or even the financial need. All of these measures would cost an enormous amount of money, and of course Warren wants taxpayers to foot the bill.
Reading things like this make me feel like I inhabit some sort of bizzaro world where “up” means “down”, ordinary logic doesn't apply, and incentives work backwards. I find it difficult to believe that any adult actually believes this bullshit.
But they do. And the voters seem to love them.
Oh, I feel the doom coming on...
No comments:
Post a Comment