Definitely better than a kick in the teeth, but it’s a shame the Supreme Court nixed the bigger loan forgiveness plan. I’m glad to see Biden is still trying to live up to his promise as much as he can given the obstructionist Congress and Supreme Court.

Here in Australia, our student loans are given and managed by the Australian Tax Office, and while they technically don’t accrue interest they are “indexed” according to inflation (CPI specifically) once per year, every year. Our repayments just come out of or income like regular income taxes - that means that the repayments are tax-deductible too. We usually get indexed around 2-3% per year but last year it was almost 8% which hit really hard. Most degrees also fall under the Higher Education Commonwealth Support (HECS) program which drastically reduces their total cost too.

Lots of moderates want to keep copying the Republican party, even the part where no one is allowed to question any politician who has the right letter next to their name.

They think it’s better to live with the problems and not talk about them let alone solve them.

Which is pretty much the whole problem.

The supreme court stopped them forgiving 460 billion a wide acope. Instead, his admin has forgiven 141 billion in a narrower, but still huge, scope. Its far, far more than any other admin has ever forgiven, and still going.

If 30% of “an ocean” is just “a drop,” thats one hell of a drop.

Hell, if he had just promised to forgive the equivalent of 10k like he intended on the campaign trail, his admin would be more than half way there, and climbing.

3.4 million people total have had their debts forgiven (so far) out of a potential 45.3 million. That’s around 7.5% of all people who held student loans.

NOAA estimates that the oceans hold around 1.335 billion cubic kilometres of water, which is around 1.335 sextillion litres (1.335e18 litres) or 353 quintillion gallons (3.53e17 gallons). Estimates put annual human water usage at around 4 trillion m^2 per year (4 quadrillion litres or 1.057 quadrillion gallons).

If the student loans forgiven were merely ‘a drop in the ocean’, that ‘drop’ would contain 100 quintillion litres or 26.4 quintillion gallons. That ‘drop’ would weigh 100 quadrillion tonnes and would be twenty-five times the amount of water all human being use globally every year. Dumped over the contiguous United States, that would form a layer of water 12.5km (7.8miles) deep.

That’s a hell of a drop.

Sources:

• oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html
• parksandrecbusiness.com/…/water-consumption-stats

Good thing we elected a career politician who said his decades of Senate experience meant he could get Republicans in the Senate and house to vote for progressive legislation…

Oh, that’s right…

I forgot Dems had the Senate, House, and presidency for 2 years…

But that highly experienced career politician told us trying to change even a single politicians mind (even if they were in his own party) was an impossible task so he wouldn’t even try.

Welp, at least we’re not running him again since the whole reason he said he was the man for the job turned out to be something he was lying about…

That would seem like a terrible plan

It’s both. The loans are absurdly special status, so the lenders are incentivized to give out more and bigger ones, and the availability of more and bigger student loans means universities can charge more and take in more people

It’s a very tangled system with all sorts of perverse incentives

France & the UK declared war on Germany two days after Germany invaded Poland.

That is an absolutely astounding level of historical ignorance, right there.