Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
So we apparently decided that millionaires could get COVID loans forgiven and moved on, but regular folks can't get any student loan forgiveness.
Every day I'm more disappointed in my home country.
we didn't decide anything, the mechanism the elite put into our government to prevent true democracy once again worked for them and against us. Just like the Citizen's United case.
Abort the Supreme Court
Judical branch is in place to protect the rights of the few and Constitution so it plays a role. The issue is that the justices defend the powerful rather then thepeoples.
I know the marketing spiel, but I'm talking about how it actually historically functions. In the fine print 'the rights of the few' = 'existing rich people / old money'
Especially since the supreme court never sides with the few when it has the opportunity to grow a spine. Ie: "Jim Crow", "slavery"", internment camps", etc
somehow every kind of bank, business, and rich person can get tax breaks, and bail outs yet average middle class people can't get some help on their student loans.
The SCOTUS is illegitimate at this point. Prepare for years of terrible decisions. Or, do what I'm doing. Expatriate. This shit's beyond saving during this lifetime.
It's been years of terrible decisions. They've been trying to build this Scotus config since Nixon and Reagan years, now they have it and everything people have been making fun of me for saying for 20+ years is happening. Ugh.
Expatriate
Where are you headed?
I remain unconvinced the states had standing sue here. They were not affected parties
This is a terrible precedent. Some federal action might affect a company which might pay the state taxes at some point so the states get to sue now? That could apply to nearly anything the federal government does! This is a terrible ruling for so many reasons. Naked partisan hackery by the conservative judges. The court needs reform badly.
dam so they paying back all the PPP money they ~~stole~~ used??
This looks silly from an outside perspective:
IIRC the special thing about student loans in the US is that you cannot default out of them. So even if I go through bankruptcy, I will still owe this specific debt.
The obvious fix would be to deny student loans this special treatment.
I could imagine that this would also have a positive effect on the cost of tuition in the US, as the collection of these stupidly high debts would be far from guaranteed.
edit: spelling
The obvouis fix would be to deny student loans this special treatment.
Unfortunately we're not going to get this anytime soon. The Republicans are against it, and Biden was the one who introduced the bill making student loans work this way.
Spoiler, democrats are against it too. They just pretend to be for it to gain votes.
Democrats are only progressive by virtue, but they are all republicans behind the scenes.
It’ll always be rich vs poor while they convince us it’s left vs right.
Oh give me a break. If you take a look at voting records on controversial bills designed to make the average person's life harder, it's usually republicans voting for it and democrats against it, and vice versa if it's something that would make the average person's life better. Of course, SOPA was a significant exception, it had more dems voting for it than repubs.
Basically it's a question of "bad right-wing capitalist party" and "very bad ultra-right wing late stage capitalist party". One is bad because they're taking a bunch of corporate donations, the other one already wants you to be jailed, dead or in debt if you're not white, christian or straight enough, but ALSO takes all the corporate donations they can get.
You're right that it's rich vs poor not left vs right, but the thing is that the right generally sides with the rich way more than the poor. They're always for more corporate freedom and less consumer protections, etc. Of course the US democratic party isn't socialists - they only support SOME social programs, but overall are still capitalists. But it's still better than actively trying to destroy any chance of socialized healthcare, education, etc.
You might not be trying to do it on purpose, but the whole "both sides are the same thing" argument is an actual right-wing strategy to disenfranchise younger, less active voters who'd vote for left-wing politicians, because older people, more likely to vote right-wing, are much more reliable voters. There is a bit of truth to it, but it's nowhere near the whole truth.
It should be Ilegal to pay for education
That's the dumbest thing I've read today
Finland is doing it and they are much better off then us.
If por and rich kids are forced to go to the same schools, rich parents will have to make donations to increase the school's quality.....
FINLAND is doing it already and they are DOING MUCH BETTER THAN US.....
Disappointed, but it makes sense that decisions with such huge implications should be clearly made by the legislative branch, not just at the whim of some executive department.
yep. if something like debt forgiveness has a lot of bipartisan support, it should be an easy bit of legislation to pass.
It does have bipartisan support, this is repeatedly shown in polling. But it doesn't matter what voters want. The interests of capital will be served above all else because of decades of antidemocratic moves.
Antidemocratic moves like
The US is just an oligarchy at this point and it's getting harder and harder for me to stay optimistic about getting out of it.
unsurprising, it was basically judged as setting a horrible precedent from the beginning.
go into debt? you pay your debt. full stop, end of discussion.
want to change that? get congress to change how laws work
"A horrible precedent of slightly more affordable education.
Born into indentured servitude? Work it off."
These are poor defenses of the current US debt system.
Cases of precedent affect legislation.
But it's not more affordable education? It's just funneling federal dollars into the education industry, which is such blatant corruption I don't get why anyone was ever for it. If you want to make education more affordable then start by.. reducing the cost of education?
That’s the thing: Congress provided for waiving and modifying student debt in at least two laws. Biden based this action off the HEROES Act of 2003. There is also broad authority to do so in the Higher Education Act of 1965.
Not sure why the HEROES Act was used this time around, but Congress provided for debt forgiveness nonetheless.
Not sure what the “horrible precedent” is with acknowledging that.
Agree and disagree. They put the cart before the horse on this one for sure. If we solve the problem of unaffordable education, then we can talk about forgiving the student loans of people who didn't get to benefit from the new system
Just forgiving the student loans of a seemingly random block of people makes no sense. The next generation and more importly the universities will expect us to do the same thing later. Guess what that means?
Schools will raise their prices even more and kids will take on even more debt. We can't just slap a bandaid on this and pat ourselves on the back
Cancel predatory loans, that lead to high tuitions, first...
Had a feeling this would happen unfortunately. I have a lot of student loans for my graduate degree and even if they would put the interest rate at something reasonable that would be so much better than the rates that are currently set
this is the kind of US-centric topic I don't want to see on main. a tragic story, yes, but not relevant to the instance, lemmy, or the fediverse as a whole, sorry.
