DeVos seeks to block student loan forgiveness
enrique baloyra
Everybody’s favorite education secretary, Betsy DeVos, tweeted out this week how she thinks her department shouldn’t be in the student loan business. Only she and her loan shark friends should be allowed to rip off desperate students who don’t have mummy and daddy to pay their outrageously expensive college tuition.
DeVos proposes creating a “standalone government corporation,” like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion back in 2008, “run by a professional expert.” Clearly not anyone she knows.
“Congress never set up the U.S. Department of Education to be a bank,” she said at the annual Federal Student Aid Conference in Reno on Tuesday. “Nor did it define the Secretary of Education as the nation's ‘top banker.’”
DeVos has recently come under fire for completely botching the loan forgiveness program for teachers and police officers, rejecting 99% of applicants. And for contempt of court after refusing to back down when a judge ordered her to stop collecting on loans to students defrauded by for-profit colleges.
Mike Pierce from the Student Borrower Protection Center tells Yahoo Finance, “The proposal seems to absolve the secretary and the industry from all responsibility for the mess that 44 million borrowers face today.” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/studen...
But The Intercept’s Ryan Grim notes it looks like a scheme to prevent “the next president from unilaterally forgiving federal student debt, which she is well aware a president can do without Congress.” https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1...
You see, very much like her boss and the rest of his shady administration, DeVos has refused to cut her extensive financial ties to the industry she’s supposed to be regulating.
“Normally the rich are moderately more subtle about rigging the system in their favor.
“They're scared. We're ready.” https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/statu...
“The internal frustrations and failure to come up with a student debt plan are feeding the president’s anxieties that Democrats such as Warren will tap into populist impulses that propelled his 2016 victory.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...
So don’t be surprised next week when he tweets about his latest idea, student loan forgiveness. Only instead of a 0.5% tax on Wall Street transactions, as Bernie Sanders is proposing, Mexico’s gonna pay for it.
https://www.salon.com/2019/12/06/bets...
DeVos seeks to block student loan forgiveness - YouTube