Because it covers 80% of the United States, or four quintiles. Quintiles are big in policy. And because it's the 24% head-of-household income tax bracket. Because they want bumper-sticker simple going into the midterms and they don't want to penalize higher-paying degrees. If you spent $200k getting a poetry degree from Vassar, $100k getting an engineering degree from Georgia Tech or $20k getting an AA in accounting from the community college, you get $10k. 'member GWB's "have a playstation" tax rebate? same-same. You do not. If you make $100k, having $10k of student loan debt forgiven is "cheers." If you make $40k a year, having $10k worth of student loan debt forgiven is potentially life-changing. If they put the cutoff at "poverty line plus some arbitrary number" there'd be accusations of class warfare. Let's be honest. If you make $125k, you have a fuckton more than $10k worth of student loan debt. If you make around $125k, you now have eight months to shave a little bit of taxable income in order to get your magic number. Hire an accountant and STFU. Meanwhile the vast, overwhelming sea of student loan borrowers, who have less than $25k in debt and are largely reliant on student loans, get their debt completely wiped out. Then $10k is $5k less than the $15k lid you're going to be paying if you do income-based repayment so you also need to STFU because that number has come down by like 80% or some shit. Also, if you're a resident? you already have like $300k in student loans and fuckin' $10k is yours anyway. Then any future $10k a year forgiveness is going to be the equivalent of like half of a minor in something nobody cares about focus, man. LOL you're establishing a biomedical startup. Your side hustle has an S1c. Nobody cares what you think. Then you get to deal with the nightmare that is bankruptcy court. Prolly wanna reform that first, chief. Or wait a minute - do you want to shine a light on how 46% of bankruptcy cases are related to medical debt? I dunno, homey, that sounds like 2nd term shit. Maybe get the first one first. $10k for everyone middle class, $25k for everyone with stafford loans is a fucking jubilee. It's a jubilee for people who file 1040EZ, for people who drive Uber on weekends, whose dreams have become an Etsy shop. Frankly? It allows people to take the money they were throwing at student loans, which paid for tuition, and throw it at credit cards, which paid for living expenses. There's zero basis for trickle-down economics. There's plenty of basis for trickle-up. This is trickle-up, and it's designed for the same part of the brain that likes "a chicken in every pot."I'm super confused as to how they arrived at the $125,000 number,
and why it isn't scaled to a cutoff.
If I make $125,001, do I not qualify?
What if I'm a physician in residency and I make $60k, but I'm going to make $300,000 next year?
What if I'm enrolling in college this year at a $50k/yr university?
All-in-all I think this is moronic at best.
Just change the law to make student loan dischargeable in bankruptcy court and get on with it.
Basically all of those questions were rhetorical, attempts to be illustrative about how arbitrary this appears. Let me be crystal clear: I think helping the poor is the mark of a civilized society. That's one of the main reasons I continue to vote democrat despite my best judgement. I think helping a relatively rich person become relatively richer is not my mission. I am against the mortgage interest deduction, and I think the SALT limitation from Trump's tax plan is one of the very few of his policies I can point to that was grounded in good reason (even though he probably liked it because it fucked blue state residents harder--sometimes the blind squirrel finds that nut after all). I say all this to point out that I'm not reflexively against things that don't directly benefit me, even if I can confess to a level of sour grapes, having gone to community college for 3 semesters on a tiny scholarship, then transferring to a third rate state school while working as a night janitor at a restaurant all in service of not accruing onerous debts, but I digress. I am disappointed in this decision for two main reasons, one specific and one general, and I will try to articulate them below. First the specific. That is what I was getting at with the not-so-rhetorical questions above. There are plenty of people who play the lotto and lose. I do not feel any amount of grief for someone who racked up $100k in debt getting that FIT degree in textile design only to find that their job prospects may include folding clothes at Old Navy. Sorry to sound like a republican there, but learn the market before your journey of self-discovery. There are plenty of ways of making it in the world that don't require accruing massive debts. Beyond that, however, is that fact that most people with tons of college debt are doctors and lawyers and management consultants, exactly the type of people who don't need the help, even if they're in the dawn of their career and may be below the 125k cutoff. This edict is arbitrary and arbitrary is exactly what the law is supposed to not be. Want to help people? Take the bottom two quintiles and give them each $3,000. That would work out to about the same $330 billion price tag. Of course that would require an act of Congress, and literally 0 members of Congress will vote for that in an inflationary environment. But Sleepy Joe thinks he has the executive authority to do this, so he'll do this instead. Which segues into my much bigger problem with this action. Executive authoiry. It's out of control and getting worse with each presidency. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and if you can dream of something that democrats despise and think it immoral, but republicans love, then you can think of the next executive action that's going to occur as soon as President DeSantis decrees that it shall be. Rightness has fuckall to do with it. How about DeSantis instructing the FDA to define personhood as "heartbeat". Can he do it? Probably not 30 years ago. Today? Why the fuck not? Congress is derelict, but that doesn't mean that the president gets to fill the vacuum. Or rather, it does mean that until Congress reasserts its authority as the First Among Equals. Since at least Wilson there's been executive creep, but (much to Liberals' dismay) Obama just straight blew it up, and that clearer the way to Trump to shit on the rubble. Executive orders are supposed to be about instructing agencies how to prioritize limited resources among the many competing interests. They're not supposed to be an alternate avenue for law-making. But that's what they've become. it has to stop somewhere, because it's ripping us further apart. Laws that can't get passed as laws shouldn't be laws. Process matters as much as substance, because process is how to help to root out arbitrariness. A dictator is literally defined by dictating what becomes law. So if a "rule" or an "order" or a "regulation" is sufficiently indistinguishable from a "law", then what the hell do we have lawmakers and representatives for? And if arbitrarily changing the terms of a contract isn't lawmaking, then I don't know what the hell is. Look, all this isn't to say that many people got a raw deal with college. All this isn't to say that college shouldn't be a lot less expensive. And all this isn't to say that many people don't deserve a break. I just wish that we could put some effort into things that are hard, like consensus building, or needs-based forgiveness. People like teachers, police officers, nurses, other essential workers who do the shit jobs for shit pay because they love them. Those are the people, in my opinion, who we need to give a break. But if we want to do it for all, fine. Just fucking do it legally. Not because you can stretch the law to buy votes.
^^^Theme from West Wing plays softly in the background You are also whatabouting the shit out of this, because you identify with Democrats, which is abundantly clear from your disdain for them, and Democrats are supposed to be better, right? So allow me to scratch the record and speak from a place of raw, sardonic cynicism: There's a feckless party and there's an evil party and those are your choices. Anything anyone can do to get people to vote "feckless" means "evil" loses power, and the more energy that gets poured into "feckless" the less feckless it becomes. I'm so old I remember when the Inflation Reduction Act was called the Green New Deal. It exists entirely because young angry democrats demanded something that doesn't come directly from the mind of Larry Summers. Are the socialists happy with it? No, they're not, because that's the game - the Republicans give no fucks about policy, their main animus right now is making fun of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, so if AOC likes it obviously it's bad for democracy. For fuckin' 40 years, the Democratic refrain has been "if you want change, vote" and for fuckin' 40 years, young voters who show up have had the football yanked by a set of rich wax dummies out of Madame Taussaud's. Lately? Lately the Democrats have been primaried by a bunch of kids whose principle refrain is "what have you done for me lately?" where "lately" is defined as "in my parents' lifetimes." Likewise, higher ed has been a lie since 2001 and we have done very, very, very little about it because - wait for it - capitalism. It's a market problem, pay no attention to the vast oligarchy profiting from protectionist market doctrine. So go ahead and wring your hands about "principles" from executive orders when the whole reason we got suckerpunched by Bill Barr is his philosophy is "the president is God." Go ahead and talk about precedent when Mitch McConnell has been leaning on the fuckin' Bork nomination as his justification for "fuck you I do what I want." But beyond that, the people who "play the lotto and lose" are every bit the citizens as the people who got engineering degrees or whatever. Know what? If you racked up $100k in debt getting a degree from FIT, $10k or $25k isn't gonna solve your shit. If you racked up $8k or $20k or $25k not-quite-finishing that degree, though - hoo boy homey you just got a fucking concrete reason to vote blue in November. As if Alito in your uterus wasn't enough. $10k? That's 1/8th of a Javelin missile. $10k for a millennial who has experienced two once-in-a-lifetime recessions and is told she can't buy a house because she eats too much avocado toast? $10k for a millennial who was shown in 2020 that her lack of healthcare and living wage is a policy choice not a limitation of the market? Look, man - if these people made some bad decisions and robbed a fucking bank 20 years ago they'd be out, off paper and living their lives. Instead they've racked up $50k in debt on a $12k principle that goes to private equity. You act as if all this money is going to people who weren't paying attention last Thursday rather than people in their 30s and 40s whose lifetime earnings potential was kicked in the nuts by 2001, 2008 and 2020. And I know you don't think any of this? You're merely riffling through the filofax of NYT columnists and WaPo Pundits concern-trolling their way through Capitalism Lite. What Would Krugman Do? And they're fucking stupid, too. Two bits of news across my transom this week: (1) median age of first pregnancy crossed 30 (2) median cost of rearing a child to 18 crossed $300k. Do you think that's good for democracy? Or poor people? Or minorities? If only we could target some aid and largesse in their general direction. Hell, they might even vote for the party that helps them out. So. Yeah. Executive authority bad. I think you should print out a bunch of bumper stickers that say "decrease executive authority" and see if it changes anything. Or, I dunno, give life-changing amounts of money to an educated demographic too poor to start families that has been betrayed by the political party that ostensibly supports them for their entire fucking lives. I guarantee you - Bill Barr will be mad either way.
Half of Congress made it a platform to not pass any laws. I'd rather Congress worked but failing that, the only other option to executive orders is accepting that literally nothing will get done. And I'd rather Biden do what he can, especially since the Republicans will abuse orders anyways precedent be damned and have the supreme court backing them up