Honestly, the more I hear about the student loan crisis, the more I’m convinced that, if you’re going to go with the line that outright forgiveness is politically toxic, they should just set the interest rate to 0%. A lot of people are basically just stuck paying interest without even hitting the principal, and that’s the real problem.
This fixes a few issues:
the longer you’ve had your loan, with inflation it’ll be a smaller part of your income (provided your income raises with inflation, which admittedly isn’t a given in the US)
the conservative talking point of ‘you borrowed the money, so you need to pay it back’ is completely moot. Yes, you’re paying it back (unlike the business owners that took out PPP loans).
the goal of those loans should be to fund your education, not for someone to make money off, and that would accomplish this.
it’s still revenue neutral (minus the cost of administering, which really should just be done by government instead of outsourcing), even though MMT tells us that deficit spending for stuff like this would be totally fine.
Obviously the best solution is free education and universal loan forgiveness, but Democrats aren’t willing to do that.
Honestly, the more I hear about the student loan crisis, the more I’m convinced that, if you’re going to go with the line that outright forgiveness is politically toxic, they should just set the interest rate to 0%. A lot of people are basically just stuck paying interest without even hitting the principal, and that’s the real problem.
This fixes a few issues:
Obviously the best solution is free education and universal loan forgiveness, but Democrats aren’t willing to do that.