The impacted borrowers are people enrolled in the SAVE Plan.
The Biden administration will begin automatically relieving student debt for another 153,000 people on Wednesday, bringing the total number of Americans approved for debt relief to nearly 3.9 million.
President Joe Biden will tout the new debt relief in a speech from Los Angeles, and thousands of people will receive an email from the president informing them that they now qualify for relief.
“Congratulations — all or a portion of your federal student loans will be forgiven because you qualify for early loan forgiveness under my Administration’s SAVE Plan,” the email from the president will read.
The people receiving debt relief beginning Wednesday are those who enrolled in the newest student loan payment plan, called the SAVE Plan, which the Department of Education calls the most affordable plan for the majority of borrowers.
Anyone enrolled in the SAVE Plan who took out less than $12,000 in initial loans and has been paying them down for the past 10 years or more will have them forgiven.
It always pisses me off when I see qualifications like this. You know who needs forgiveness? People who got suckered into a lot of fucking debt. You know who needs forgiveness? People who have missed a lot of fucking payments.
Qualifications like this seem designed to make sure relief goes directly to those who need it least every time.
The Biden admin tried a different approach that included more borrowers, but the Trump SCOTUS and Republicans are doing everything in their power to derail that. They succeeded so far.
The More sweeping forgiveness attempt was blocked.
He seems pretty committed to forgiving whatever he can get through. It wouldn’t be unusual to give up after the initial attempt was blocked, but now he seems to be breaking it apart into more manageable chunks. I’m still slightly hopeful that more forgiveness is coming for those who need it.
The record really doesn’t support that. He could have kept pursuing the sweeping relief under different rationales while also doing these small-scale things, and he could have done more to make sweeping relief more difficult to challenge in court by implementing it closer to when it was announced. The fact that there have been no efforts in that direction makes it seem a lot more likely they’re just trying to get as many headlines out of this issue for themselves as they can and don’t care who does and doesn’t get help at the end of the day.
e; almost goes without saying, but I probably should add that this is still way better than anything we’d see out of any Republican administration
This sounds really ambiguous. What “different rationales” are you referring to? I’m pretty sure his team of lawyers and advisors have pursued every alternative avenue possible. Warren’s recent interview with PSA reflects this. If he wanted to provide blanket coverage before, why wouldn’t he try now when it’s such an obvious win to rally support from an essential coalition?
Biden intentionally hinged the entire legal argument for the original relief on the emergency powers granted during the Covid pandemic. An alternative option would have been to pin the legislation to the department of education’s authority over federal student loans
Thanks for giving a specific example. I’m curious why they didn’t pursue that route or if they just didn’t believe the DoE actually held that authority. At the end of the day, the DoE is still a cabinet-level Department formed under the executive, so I’d assume the thought-process was that the emergency powers under COVID superseded the powers of the DoE?
I mean…maybe I am misunderstansing something… but if they have a small loan of 12k…and in 10 years they haven’t been able to repay it yet… to me it seems like they needed help…
It’s simply more cost effective this way. He gets more people out of debt for the same value of money.
In other words form an illusion he’s helping without actually having to help.
Yes technically he’s helping but he’s helping the people that need help the least. It’s like handing out stimulus checks to people who are already cash rich.
In the end it’s just a big publicity stunt to secure votes. This isn’t what real help looks like.
If the people are indepted then they’re clearly not rich, just because they don’t have as much of a dept as some other people. And yes, of course it is to secure votes. Welcome to politics 101. The same reason why no country on Earth actually does any meaningful shit against climate change. Because no one would vote for you once they realize what that would actually entail.