> It's already a house of cards and we should just deal with it instead of tying large portions of the population to these bad deals
I guess the taxpayer is kind of screwed when it comes to Federal loans. I still think it is a bad idea to retroactively change laws even if the idea seems popular. As far as I understand, an individual's loan obligations don't automatically transfer to their surviving family members so if you have a massive student loan it will die with you.
If the loans were predatory, lets ban them going forward. If we find illegal activity and predatory behavior I am all for prosecuting bankers and throwing people in prison. In fact, I will go further and say we should rid of all the silliness of deductions and credits in income tax toward education loans as well.
New York made a good first step with its excelsior program. While I don't like the income ceiling for the program, I think overall this is the way forward. I think we should expand the program to allow people to go to school part time for free. Private schools can either compete with free public education or shut down.
> I'd say that a politician who stares at a problem head on and refuses to deal with it, because we didn't deal with it in the past, is the insane one.
I am all for dealing with the problem but I still firmly and politely OPPOSE any effort to make it easier to discharge existing loans with taxpayer money. I am not an expert on this matter though so I don't know much about it. All I know is we cannot give a handout to people who went to college by signing a loan letter and pay for it with resources that could have gone to people who didn't go to college.
I think the first good step is to make private education loans go away the same way as any other private loan going forward. I don't know how we can apply this to direct federal loans.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-federally-gu... According to this web page:
> As of June 30, 2010, Congress stopped the guaranteed student loan program for newly issued loans.
> If a borrower defaults on a guaranteed loan, the federal government pays the bank and takes over the loan. The federal government pays approximately 97% of the principal balance to the lender. At that point the federal government owns the loan and the right to collect payments on the loan.
Yeah, no. If you have a guaranteed loan (which apparently you can't get anymore), I say you are on the hook for it for life especially if you start making money later.