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.
I find it hard to decry someone trying to correct his past mistakes. There are too many people on the hill willing to endlessly hard-line their past stances in spite of them being proven wrong or ineffective. I’d rather criticize them or Biden for his current on going mistakes than for things he’s turned the corner on.
If he was doing that saying “I fucked students over for rich assholes. I regret it. I want to change it.”
Sure.
But he’s pretending he had nothing to do with it. And counting on people too young to know he’s an architect of fucking students financially.
That’s something totally different than correcting his past mistakes. Especially since he’s in dire political trouble, and this is a pandering move.
Okay, so what would you rather happen instead? Biden… not look for ways to relive student debt? Hope to vote for a 3rd party candidate that won’t get elected? Or you could vote for Trump or another Republican, who want to charge back interest for the student debt pause during the pandemic?
I’m just trying to figure out where you’re going and what you’re trying to accomplish with your rage.
