The Biden administration is moving ahead with a new path to student loan cancellation for Americans who face steep medical bills, child care costs and other types of financial hardship that prevent them from repaying their loans.
Announced Friday, the proposed rule is President Joe Biden’s third attempt at student loan cancellation as he faces repeated legal challenges from Republican states. His first plan was rejected by the Supreme Court last year, and his second plan has been temporarily halted by a federal judge in Missouri.
The new rule would have to clear a number of hurdles before it becomes official, and it’s unclear if it could be realized before Biden leaves office in three months. Like Biden’s other loan forgiveness proposals, it could face court challenges from conservatives who say it’s unconstitutional and unfair.
If finalized, the new rule would allow the Education Department to proactively cancel loans for borrowers if the agency determines they have an 80% chance of being in default on their loans within two years. Others could apply for a review to determine if they meet the criteria for cancellation.
As I already said to someone else, I could not care less if people do the right thing for the wrong reason.
People are hurting. This will help some of them. Complaining that people who need help are getting helped for the wrong reason is silly.
If I’m starving to death, I don’t care if you gave me a sandwich because you wanted to help me or you gave me a sandwich because you thought it was disgusting and wanted me to suffer by giving me a disgusting sandwich because either way, I won’t be dying.
Yeah, that’s not my problem.
My problem is it’s an escalation of giving away money just before an election for votes, and that’s not anything we want to escalate.
I am 100% in favor of giving money for student loan forgiveness, the interest was huge, and it’s not purgable by bankruptcy, it needs to be forgiven.
But I’m terrified of the timing, personally we need an expectation that legislation will stop roughly 90 days before an election so you don’t have dangerous things like giving money for votes, or passing laws to ban voting by key demographics.
This is bad no matter who does it, let’s try to have a 90 day window before elections, let’s even do what other countries do, have a 2 week cool down period before voting where ads and other spending are stopped.
Okay, exactly how many days before an election should a president be prevented from doing anything that might help people?
Because spending never stops. You’re talking about an election spending cool down period. This is not election spending.
As I said, 60-90.
Otherwise I start passing a law to give $1000 to everyone, and time it so it passes just after the election, and if I lose then nobody gets anything.
This is like Reagan telling Iran to hold the hostages till after the election, and Nixon and Vietnam.
Nobody is really trying to do meaningful legislation before the election anyway, they’re focusing on campaigning, so it doesn’t matter much that way either.
You can’t possibly be saying Nixon shouldn’t have taken the U.S. out of Vietnam for the wrong reason or that he should have waited to do so and let more people die because otherwise the election wasn’t fair. Can you?
I’m saying Nixon told the NV to wait and he’d give them a better deal after the election.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vietnam-war-for-political-gainand-johnson-knew-about-it-newly-unclassified-tapes-suggest-3595441/
And how is that in any way comparable to Biden yet again trying to give student loan relief, something he has tried every few months since getting into office?
If an earthquake destroys San Francisco tomorrow, I suppose Biden should hold off sending in FEMA until after the election too?
No, because that’s established norm.
Again, I’m for the move, I just know what the response will be from the other side.
In terms of game theory this is a short term gain for a massive long term loss, this is like the court appointment nuclear option, it was used more effectively by the other side because they had fewer scruples in the way.
This is a game theory problem to me, and the democrats want to shrink the playing field, not increase it, they have structural advantages and the wider the tools acceptable the more the right can take advantage of it, ala CU and modern media.
The more noise, the more everybody loses. Longer campaign seasons are killing this country.