Original Press Release

During the presidential primary campaign, Joe Biden said that he was endorsing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan, and his campaign dutifully copied and pasted key bullet points from her bankruptcy platform into theirs. The most important element of Senator Warren’s bankruptcy agenda, however, was her pledge to issue an executive order on Day One calling on the Department of Education to stop opposing federal student loan borrowers in bankruptcy court. Given this, it is fair to say that Mr. Biden has an obligation to issue this order on Day One as President.

As the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots citizen’s group fighting for student loan justice, we urge Joe Biden in the strongest terms to make good on this campaign promise, and issue an executive order the Department of Education to, along with its contractors, stop opposing federal student loan borrowers in bankruptcy court. …

Trump’s last official act in office should be cancelling all federally owned student loans by executive order

As many feared- and some probably hoped- it appears that Trump’s tenure as President its not going to end well. Trump will be leaving office in a storm of violent controversy not seen before in our nation’s history, and in his wake will be a looming economic catastrophy brought on by the pandemic. At the forefront of this new reality is the student loan problem.

There are 44 million federal student loan borrowers in the country carrying about $1.5 Trillion in federal student loan debt. According to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last year, 75% of these people were either unable to make payments on their loans, or were paying, but their balances were going up. Trump appointee Wayne Johnson, who ran the federal lending system until recently, said that this was closer to 80% just before COVID-19 hit. Also, we now know that the class of 2004 are defaulting on their loans 40% of the time, but they were only borrowing a third of what is being borrowed today. …

A common popular belief about student loans is that they are a young person’s problem. We assume that, by and large, most borrowers are able to have their loans repaid by their mid-30’s. Sure, there may be a few stragglers who take until their 40’s or even beyond to repay their loans, but the conventional wisdom is that people 50 or older who haven’t yet been able to repay their loans are the outliers. The exception to the rule.

Well, it turns out that this is completely wrong.

This is Department of Education Data for the fourth quarter of 2020. For comparison purposes, we combined the source data to find statistics for the 5th, 6th, and 7th rows, and the reader can verify the calculations from the data shown. …

In opposing student loan cancellation, Rowe wags his finger at the 44 million million people being crushed by the worst big-government college-enriching lending scam in U.S. History. This serves to defend and perpetuate it.

Mike Rowe has never had much to say about the student loan system in this country. For years he has advised people to not go to college, and pointed to the hyper-inflationary, predatory student loan system as a good reason why, and that has been the extent of it. In recent months, however, Rowe has strongly opposed student loan cancellation as a stimulus measure. Rowe paints student loan borrowers as being soft, entitled, unwilling to do hard work, and uses outdated stereotypes to make his argument. Ultimately, his advice to people being crushed under the weight of these loans- from which constitutionally enshrined bankruptcy protections, and also statutes of limitations have been removed, is to suck it up. …

The next President can and must erase them, start over.

There are 44 million federal student loan borrowers in the country carrying about $1.5 Trillion in federal student loan debt. According to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last year, 75% of these people were either unable to make payments on their loans, or were paying, but their balances were going up. Trump appointee Wayne Johnson, who ran the federal lending system under DeVos, said that this was closer to 80% just before covid-19 hit. Also, we now know that the class of 2004 are defaulting on their loans 40% of the time. These borrowers, however, only borrowed a third of what today’s students are being compelled to borrow. Given this, it is no stretch to say that the default rate for more recent borrowers will surely be 70% if not higher…and even higher still considering this pandemic, and the uneven economic recovery that we are seeing. …

Media is badly misreporting, overselling his tricky agenda

If mainstream media reports on Joe Biden’s student loan plan are to believed, one would think that Biden is being extremely generous to the 55 million student loan borrowers and cosigners in the country. According to reports that have gone viral in recent weeks, Biden is promising to eliminate the loans of people who went to public colleges, and earn less than $125,000 per year. He is also pledging to cancel $10,000 for all borrowers, across the board. Further he is reportedly pledging to return bankruptcy protections to all student loans. …

Distressed borrowers are the biggest electoral bonanza in modern U.S. history

This piece originally published August 25th, 2020

A lot has happened on the student loan issue since 2016. The presidential candidates had better take heed. We now know, for example, that at least 75% of all federal loan borrowers are either in default, forbearance, delinquent, unable to make payments on their loans, or they are paying but their balance is going up, not down. We also now know that 40% of 2004 students- who were only borrowing one-third of what is being borrowed today- will, or already have defaulted on their loans. …