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The Supreme Court strikes down Biden's student-loan forgiveness plan, blocking debt relief for millions of borrowers
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Well... I'm not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. We all knew this Supreme Court was not in favour of its citizens. The Supreme Court should have been stacked long ago. Leaving it be with its insane appointments just because stacking it might start a war with the GOP was a short sighted move, as the GOP is always going to play underhanded (that's how they managed to get so many SCOTUS appointments in the first place). Biden's insistence on trying to play nice with the GOP has always been his weakness.
This really sucks for those with student loans who were depending on this. We're already in an economically rough place for the kinds of folks who would have student loans. Inflation has been sharp in recent years and wages have not kept up. In my field of tech, layoffs have been widespread and new grads would be the most severely impacted (they already struggle to get hired and now they're competing against an increased number of experienced people).
As an aside, it's also a shame that lawmakers have not managed to pass a law for this debt relief. My understanding is that the strike down is specifically because it's not a congress passed loan forgiveness. But congress isn't willing to do the right thing (not in enough numbers to pass a law, anyway).
Re: Congress, just to comment on the political reality, I think people often lose sight of the fact that only 53% of the country has a college degree, and of those that don't have degrees, you can probably guess their general political leanings. Congressional Republicans who are disproportionately representing people who didn't go and don't care about university education are unlikely to want to vote to further pay for the loans of people who are statistically going to go on to make significantly more money anyway, and their constituents certainly don't want them to.
I think there are decent economic arguments to make in favor of forgiveness, but the opposition isn't coming from nowhere. People without degrees are financially struggling as well, and the plight of tech workers isn't going to be very persuasive.
Loan forgiveness would have helped a lot of people who didn't go to college. People who did not finish their degrees and parents who cosigned on loans were two big benefactors. The blatant hypocrisy of forgiving the PPP loans but then objecting to this forgiveness is what stings the most to me.
I get the hypocrisy, but from a legal perspective, PPP loans were explicitly authorized by Congress. This wasn't.