Biden’s Extended Payment Pause for Student Loans is a Trick
The democrats are courting disaster in November
Today, the White House announced the extension of the federal student loan repayment pause until September 1st. This is good news for many, but borrowers beware: THIS IS A TRICK.
In the press release, The Education Department said they’ll put defaulted loans back into repayment, calling it a “fresh start”. This is not a fresh start, it is essentially moving borrowers out of the fire, and into the frying pan. This is a rather shameless ploy to cajole borrowers back onto the hook of repayment. And it won’t work. Nearly two-thirds of all borrowers weren’t paying before the pandemic, and that will only increase if/when they have the gall to try and turn the loans back on.
Most importantly: No mention is made of returning bankruptcy rights to the loans, as Education Department officials have been promising for months. Also no mention is made of cancelling loans by executive order.
That they chose September as the end date for the current pause- just two months before the November mid-terms- almost certainly means that they intend to take one more major action just before the elections.
We’ve been warning for years, now, that the student loan complex would try hard to foist fake loan cancellation upon the citizenry and keep bankruptcy protections- and the leverage it provides to the borrowers- gone from the loans. This is a tried and true stunt that has worked many times going back to 1995. Today’s announcements are clearly laying the groundwork for yet another version of this tactic.
Their current strategy is almost certainly to extend the pause until just before the election, keep bankruptcy gone from the loans, and do an “Up to $50,000” loan cancellation gimmick (which will be bureaucratized to mean almost nothing for almost everyone) at the 11th hour in a bid to retain control of the House and Senate. In the continued absence of the constitutional, uniform bankruptcy rights that exist for all other loans, this will effectively add another 20+ years onto the life of this viciously predatory lending system.
Sadly, leading democratic senators like Elizabeth Warren are both leading, and cheerleading it along.
Senator Warren taught bankruptcy at Harvard Law School for many years. One of our first splashes- and Senator Warren’s first splash- in the national media was in a seminal top story on 60 minutes in 2006, where she nailed it on bankruptcy. To see her now not fighting for bankruptcy, and in fact her deafening silence on whether she supports bankruptcy legislation, speaks volumes.
Senator Warren knows that the “Fresh Start” that is needed is S.2598, the FRESH START THROUGH BANKRUPTCY ACT.
The Democrats control the Presidency, House, and Senate right now, which is very rare. They have ONE SHOT at solving the student loan problem between now and November, if they are to have any chance in the mid-terms. If they continue on this course, and try to foist yet another fake loan cancellation gimmick on the citizenry as a cheap substitute for the bankruptcy rights that the Founders enshrined in the Constitution ahead of the power to raise an army and declare war, they will be crushed by voters who are far smarter than they are being taken for.
