Student loan debt: Schumer pressures Biden to cancel $ 50,000 debt

Student loan debt: Schumer pressures Biden to cancel $ 50,000 debt

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The New York Democrat said Monday that the Department of Justice is currently conducting a legal investigation into whether Biden has the power to provide coverage for student debt.

Biden expressed support for the $ 10,000-per-borrower cancellation, but argued that the government should not forgive people who went to Harvard and Yale and Penn.

He also indicated that he believed that Congress should make changes through legislation, which would make it harder to undo – although White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the government open for review of an executive option.

Asked on Monday whether Congress should take the first step, Schumer argued that it would take too long and there are currently many other important priorities that the Senate is focused on.

“I think it will be a lot harder to do legislation. We did not see our Republican colleagues jump at this opportunity,” he said in a press conference with his colleagues Warren and Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

Long-running debate

More progressive members of the Democratic Party have been calling for the cancellation of students for years.

Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Warren and Vermont, put forward forgiveness plans when they ran in the Democratic presidential election. Biden issued a policy proposal to forgive $ 10,000 per borrower only after the pandemic started and he was the presumed nominee.

Legislators passed a similar resolution last year calling on the Trump administration to forgive debt on student loans – but former Education Minister Betsy DeVos has hailed the proposal as a gift from the government.

House Democrats included a provision to cancel $ 10,000 per borrower in a comprehensive bill on Covid that was passed in May and never passed in the then Republican Senate.

The Covid relief bill Biden signed last week contains a provision that will make the forthcoming student debt waiver tax-free, but it will no longer get debt.

Deferment of payments has been extended until September

In one of his first appearances in office, Biden extended the pause over student loan payments and interest, a Covid relief benefit introduced by Congress last year and already renewed by the Trump administration. Federal student loan borrowers do not have to pay until October 1st.

He also supports making community college free for all, making public four-year colleges free for students from families earning less than $ 125,000 a year, and modifying the existing system to make sure student loans are cheaper.

A broad cancellation of federal student loan debt would be unprecedented. However, a memo from lawyers at the Harvard’s Legal Services Center and its project on predatory student loans says the Department of Education has the power to do so.

The department has already introduced some more targeted debt cancellation policies. It wipes away guilt for fraudulent students as well as disabled veterans. According to the National Student Legal Defense Network, Biden can provide relief to hundreds of thousands more borrowers by simply expanding the programs.

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