Life led Elizabeth Hadzic and Kim Coles to bankruptcy court.
Hadzic, 50, a psychotherapist in Maryland, doesn’t make enough to support herself and her adult son, whose health struggles set her back thousands of dollars. Coles, an accountant in Oregon in her late 60s, was laid off last year.
Both have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Although they have been making payments on those loans for years, they no longer can. And both, in the absence of an alternative, have resorted to taking the costly, typically unsuccessful route of trying to get their loans discharged in bankruptcy court.
That’s where things diverge.
For Hadzic, bankruptcy is proving to be the answer to her financial woes. After months of litigation, she’s on track for a full discharge. In Coles’ case, the government is putting up a fight − though she is of retirement age − against discharging the balance of a loan she’s been paying down for more than a decade.
“I always paid my student loans,” Coles said in an interview. “I was never late.”
The disparity in how the government is treating their cases is indicative of the intractability of one of the country’s most extreme and inaccessible forms of student debt relief, as the Biden administration grapples with finding alternatives to the kind of sweeping student loan forgiveness option that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
Biden definitely doesn’t want people juding him on actions.
From day one he could have done all the student debt relief via executive order. Yes it was debateable among scholars, but plenty of laywers and academics believed it consitutional.
Worst case scenario it would have spent ages in the courts, meanwhile the reprecussions from countering the executive order would have snowballed to where it would have been nearly impossible to unwind it.
Trump and Bush have showed the Dems the new norm over and over. You do what you want, worst case it spends years in court while staying in effect, THEN if you lose in court, you do the same thing but so slightly differently that the effect is the same and you start another cycle of years and years of living with it.
This was an easy and clear strategy to deal with the student loan crisis. But again, as an architect of preventing students from discharging loan debt via bankruptcy—his actions speak loud and clear (just like you said).
And I’m fine if people learn from their mistakes. But when they seek to rewrite or burry history that’s not learning from their mistakes. Nor is catastrophcially crashing in the polls and needing the younger voters so suddenly this is a priority.