Of course they did. If you’re rich, you get a bailout. If you’re not, then fuck you.
The lesson here is don’t let Republicans into power ever. Just 4 years of a pretty ineffective and incompetent Republican administration has still managed to set this country back decades and the damage is going to keep coming. And if you want to mitigate it, I can’t promise Democratic majorities will do so efficiently or quickly because it really depends on which Democrats get picked in the primaries whether or not a hypothetical majority of them will be motivated to address stuff like this in a quick fashion. But I can promise you if we let Republicans hold onto any branch of government or regain all of them, then it definitely will not get addressed and in fact the next Republican administration will make this stuff look tame in comparison. We’re in for a tough decade or two, time we will not get back, because of 2016. All we can do is make sure it doesn’t happen again and try to make it so our kids aren’t still mopping up this same mess when it’s their turn.
Ppp loans were completely forgiven. What a fucking joke - we can’t have shit in America.
I wish they had pursued structural changes to this debt rather than simply forgiveness, which was always going to be politically fraught. We need reduced (or eliminated!) interest rates and monthly payment caps instead of the income-driven options that currently exist.
I think the point is that any type of relief of these kinds of debt would be met with political opposition. The opposition to this is against helping people in any capacity at all, engaging with nitty gritty details as to what might have been more sensible is giving credence to their insanity. When someone is trying to hurt you, you don’t let them ratchet it up to normalize “well, at least they only hurt me this much”. It’s painfully obvious that we have an entire political party in the US that has popularized suffering as the end goal. Nothing less.
There will always be opposition to policy from ‘the other side,’ even if it is reasonable policy. But as a holder of a mountain of federal student loan debt, interest rate elimination and low monthly payment caps are way more preferable to me than simply forgiving a percentage, claiming a political win, and calling it a day. It has been depressing to watch the debate be framed simply as “debt forgiveness” vs “you need to pay your debts, honor your commitments, why are we giving handouts to the elites!” with basically no other attention given to the actual mechanics of paying this debt. I don’t care if my debt is not forgiven, I’m not even asking for that. What I am NOT ok with, though, is how payments and interest are structured, as well as how poorly the non-profit forgiveness program has been run since its inception. Wanting this to have been the focus of policy and debated is not the same as “giving credence to their insanity.” And now, after three years, all we gained is a 5% reduction in IBR caps and a “we won’t send you to collections for a while” window. This wasn’t just a political failure because the Supreme Court is dysfunctional and practically the entire right wing is sadistic, it was also a failure because it was bad policy that a corporatist president didn’t actually care about in the first place.
