Bernie Sanders wants to cancel $1.6 trillion in student debt: A bridge too far?

Senator Bernie Sanders is running for President a second time. Last week he made the news with his proposal to cancel all federal student-loan debt-- $1.6 trillion.  If Bernie makes good on this pledge, he will certainly make 45 million student-loan borrowers very happy.

Bernie also proposes to make a four-year college education tuition-free at public universities. If he can pull that off, millions of Americans will be delighted. A free college education! What's not to like?

I have supported student-loan reform for more than 20 years, and I applaud Senator Sanders for putting the student-loan crisis on the front burner of national politics. But in my view, Bernie's proposals may have gone a bridge too far.

First of all, the federal student loan program, which Congress inaugurated 50 years ago, has morphed into a giant Improvised Explosive Device (IUD). As we saw in the movie Hurt Locker, an IUD must be defused very carefully or it will blow up in our faces. No one really knows what the impact would be on the national fisc if the federal government were to write off $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt. Bernie says he will pay for this bonanza by taxing Wall Street, but that tax would fall heavily on retirees, who have most of their savings in mutual funds tied to the stock market.

Even if Bernie could cancel all student debt tomorrow, most students would still have to take out additional student loans to pay for their next semester's tuition, fees, and living expenses. Of course, Bernie's solution to that problem is to simply make a college education at a public institution tuition-free.

But let's think about Bernie's tuition-free college proposal for a moment. All public colleges receive some kind of financial support from the 50 individual states. Any plan for a tuition-free college education at a public institution must involve some coordination with 50 state governments. Is it realistic to think a Sanders administration could successfully negotiate with California, Illinois, New Jersey, and 47 other states to provide tuition-free college from sea to shining sea? I doubt it.

As for Bernie's proposal to forgive all student-loan debt, that notion seems unwise. Although it is true that millions of student-borrowers are unable to pay back their loans, some portion of the 45 million student debtors received fair value for their student-loan dollars. Do we really want to forgive student-loan debt taken out by people who attended Harvard Law School and landed high-paying jobs?

In my view, the best way to resolve the student-loan crisis is to reform the Bankruptcy Code and allow insolvent student-loan debtors to discharge their student loans through bankruptcy. People who took out student loans in good faith and cannot pay them back should get relief from their debts like any other insolvent debtor.

After all, the bankruptcy judges have the expertise and experience to determine who is entitled to bankruptcy relief from their student loans. All that needs to be done is simply to strike the "undue hardship" clause from the Bankruptcy Code.

In fact, Senator Sanders and several other presidential aspirants in Congress are co-sponsoring just such a bill. Titled the Student Borrower Bankruptcy Relief Act of 2019,  the bill has been filed in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Rather than forgive $1.6 trillion in student debt in one fell swoop, Congress needs to pass this bill so that distressed student-loan debtors can obtain relief in bankruptcy.

Bernie Sanders: We can have our cake and eat it too!

Student Borrowers Beware: Joe Biden is a Lackey of the Banks

Fourteen years ago, Congress passed a so-called bankruptcy reform law at the behest of the banking industry. One provision--inserted solely for the benefit of the banks—made private student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy unless the debtor could show “undue hardship.” The banks justified this heartless legislation as a way to reduce interest rates on private student loans. They argued that the additional protection for creditors would make it possible for banks to loan students money at a lower interest rate because defaulting borrowers would find it virtually impossible to discharge their private college loans in the bankruptcy courts.

This legislation benefited Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo and other major players in the private student-loan market, but the U.S. Department of Education issued a report in 2015 arguing that this provision should be repealed.

This is what the DOE report had to say:

There has been no evidence that the 2005 changes to bankruptcy caused interest on student loans to decline or access to credit to increase significantly. As private student loans generally do not include the consumer protections, such as income-driven repayment plans, included in federal loans, the undue-hardship standard for bankruptcy discharge leaves private student loan borrowers in financial distress with few options.

According to an article in International Business Times (IBT), Senator Joe Biden was an enthusiastic supporter of this Fat Cat Assistance Act, which made it harder for insolvent student-loan debtors to obtain bankruptcy relief. As IBT’s David Sirota observed:

Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion of the struggling middle class--a man who famously commutes on Amtrack and mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers—the Delaware lawmaker has played a consistent and pivotal role in the financial industry’s four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to shield themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s.

Indeed, Ed Boltz, who was president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in 2015, observed that “Joe Biden bears a large amount of responsibility for passage of the bankruptcy bill.” In fact, the New York Times reported that Biden voted for the bill four times: in 1998, 2000, 2001, and in March 2005, when the bill finally passed the Senate by a vote of 74 to 25.

And—surprise, surprise!—as of 2015, the financial industry had donated $1.9 million to Biden over the course of his career. Now Joe is launching another campaign for the presidency.

So if you get an opportunity to vote for Joe Biden, keep this mind: he is a lackey of the banks. And if you are a student-loan debtor who supports Mr. Biden's presidential bid, then you are an idiot.

References

Christopher Drew & Mike McIntire. Obama Aides Defend Bank’s Pay to Biden Son. New York Times, August 24, 2008.

David Sirota. Joe Biden Backed Bills to Make It Harder for Americans to Reduce Their Student Debt. International Business Times, September 15, 2015.

U.S. Department of Education. Strengthening the Student Loan System to Better Protect All Borrowers. Washington D.C., October 1, 2015. [Note: This DOE report has been removed from the web.]

Dude! Don't move to India to escape student loans!

Zero Hedge posted an article yesterday about people who fled the United States to escape their student loans. (Annie Nova wrote the original story for CNBC).  Chad Haag, for example, graduated from the University of Northern Colorado and emigrated to India to get away from $20,000 in college-loan debt.

Apparently, Haag is somewhat ambivalent about India. He gets to see elephants--a plus.  But Haag is not crazy about the plumbing. "Some toilets here are holes in the ground you squat over," he confided.

Zero Hedge went on to report on a woman who went to Japan to teach English and a guy who moved to China--also to teach English. Both said they were partly motivated to leave the U.S. by their student-loan debt.

Dudes! Don't move overseas to dodge your student loans. People who cannot find good jobs can enroll in one of the Department of Education's income-based repayment plans (IBRPs). If they are unemployed or living below the poverty line, their monthly loan payment will be zero. An IBRP is a terrible option, as I have often said. But for most people, it beats moving to Asia.

Frankly, I'm not buying the underlying premise of this story. Millions of people have defaulted on their student loans and hardly any of them have left the U.S.  Why would they? People can't dodge their student loans by moving overseas. The debt will be waiting for them when they return, along with accumulated interest and penalties.

My guess is that student-loan debtors who leave the United States have multiple motives. Mr. Haag, for example, married an Indian national, which must be the major reason he is living in a country that doesn't meet his hygiene standards. And thousands of people teach English overseas simply to experience another culture.

If we are looking for signs of suffering, we shouldn't focus on a handful of people who have left the country with student loans hanging over their heads. We should reflect on plummeting birth rates, declining homeownership, and inadequate savings for retirement.

The student-loan program is a catastrophe but publicizing a few outliers is a distraction. We need to relieve the suffering experienced by millions of people. In my mind that can best be accomplished in the bankruptcy courts. And then we need to find a better way to finance higher education.