There are a lot of feelings about student loans. Some people say that they should be forgiven, others that they should be forced to pay. In my case, as one who went to college and does not have student loans, I can say that that most students got the degrees they have because they were told by all people since they were small children- parents, teachers, friends, family, neighbors, the media, and more -that one needed to go to college, debt was pushed on them at a young and impressionable age, and to not go to college was equivalent to being a failure at life. They went to university genuinely believing and trusting in what they were told, and then they came to forcibly discover- following the economic crash caused by the overspending habits of the previous generations and forcibly exposed in 2007 with the financial crisis -that all they were told is a complete lie and there are no jobs, and now they have a bunch of debt and no way to pay it off, and they should have known better.
This was a crime committed against millions of people. Yes, there is a financial reponsibility, but the financial problem was caused by a denial of social responsibility forced on young people when they had no context to know otherwise. Likewise, because there were so many loans and the loans are so large, it resulted in the debt enslavement of millions of students against their will to the point it is permanently affecting the health of the economy.
There needs to be a kind of student loan debt jubilee in order to address the debt, since it is toxic and killing the country, and because most student loan debt is very difficult to discharge, it causes a generational burden that will endure for decades to come.
President Trump, who is arguably the king of bankruptcies, having defined his professional career by his bankruptcies and now his bankrupting of the United States by his actions, while he may like bankruptcies for himself, showed his true feelings about the rest of the people in society by vetoing a bill that would give forgiveness to student loans to students who received education from schools that closed while they were students and essentially were defrauded of a degree.
In a widely expected move, Trump vetoed congressional legislation that would have overturned a key student loan forgiveness rule drafted by the U.S. Education Department under the leadership of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. In March, the U.S. Senate voted 53-42 to overturn a new student loan forgiveness rule introduced by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that critics argue limit student loan forgiveness for students when a college closes due to fraud. All Senate Democrats and 10 Republicans voted on a bipartisan basis. The House of Representatives overturned the rule in January by a vote of 231-180.
The student loan forgiveness rules are known as borrower defense to repayment, which allow students to have their federal student loans forgiven if a school employed illegal or deceptive practices to encourage the students to borrow debt to attend the school. Without these rules, students are potentially on the hook to repay federal student loans even if they didn’t find gainful employment or finish their degree before their school closed. The original rules were issued during the Obama administration. However, DeVos rewrote the rules to narrow the requirements to receive student loan forgiveness. (source)
Trump will likely win in 2020, but the student loan issue is a major sore spot with frustrated Millennials and Zoomers who find themselves with debts they cannot pay amid an economic crisis caused by conditions nurtured by previous generations and no way to pay them back, and with that no hope of a future.
This will be remembered not in 2020, but in 2024, when the Boomers’ power as a bloc is replaced by the Millennials and they begin to have their say. It won’t matter for Trump, but the Republican party will suffer as a result of it because people may not know politicians, but they know how much their monthly bills are, and when they can’t pay them because “those guys stopped me from getting rid of this debt”, they will remember that at the voting booth.
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