Forty million student debtors are waiting anxiously for President Biden's loan forgiveness plan to kick in. Biden wants to knock off $10,000 from everyone's student loans who makes less than $125,000 a year. That won't mean much to people whose loans are in six figures, but it will mean a great deal to people with modest loan balances.
Unfortunately for all those millions of college borrowers, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals halted Biden's plan.
President Biden appealed to the Supreme Court, and yesterday the Court agreed to consider his appeal. We should have a Supreme Court decision by early summer of next year.
I predict that the Supreme Court will strike down Biden's loan-forgiveness scheme as an unconstitutional usurpation of Congressional authority. If that happens, the President and Congress will be under heavy pressure to provide some sort of loan relief that isn't illegal.
As I have argued repeatedly, Congress should revise the Bankruptcy Code to allow honest debtors to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy. This simple action would do more than anything else to grant loan relief to deserving college borrowers without allowing unworthy student debtors to get a free ride.
If this is too much of a heavy lift for Congress, it could enact more modest reforms. Here are my suggestions:
1) Congress should forbid the Department of Education from garnishing the Social Security checks of elderly borrowers who defaulted on their student loans.
2) Congress should shut down the for-profit college industry. There is no reason for private investors and hedge funds to profit from young people striving to get their college degrees.
3) We should end the Parent PLUS program, which has impoverished hundreds of thousands of low-income families who took out federal loans so their children could attend college.
4) Congress also needs to reform the Grad PLUS loan program, which currently has no cap on the amount of money students can borrow to attend graduate school. It is ridiculous for people to borrow $100,000 or more to get a master's degree in journalism.
Will any of these reforms see the light of day? Doubtful. Universities, student-loan servicers, and the banks are all happy with the status quo. As someone remarked after the fall of France during World War II: "Reform was possible only through catastrophe."
Sadly, it will probably take the catastrophic collapse of the American economy before our politicians will do what needs to be done to clean up the calamitous student-loan program.
Reform is not possible without a calamity. |