Student loan forgiveness is being taken seriously right now by the bourgeoisie.
The Federal interest rate going near 0% has led to a massive boom in housing construction. Student loan deferment has led to many people saving up for a down payment on a house. The housing market is carrying the US economy right now.
If student loan deferment ends, this space that Capital found for expansion will disappear. There will be an immediate crisis.
Also, the effort to privatize student loans has been a failure. Betsy DeVos has been the Secretary of Education most dedicated to privatization. She killed the Perkins Loan, which has led many new students to private loans.
Although, after her reign, 92% of public student loan debt are still held by the Department of Education. It is unlikely that the Biden SoE will be more successful at speeding up the process. Capital is in crisis now.
Forgiving public debts is a method of privatization in America, where a culture of indebtedness exists. They want everyone with public student loans to take out private mortgages, owned by JPMorgan, Citigroup, etc.
I'm not saying student loan forgiveness is good or bad. It is good for me. But it serves a purpose that we should understand.
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These are very different scenarios though. Student payments are money being extracted from the economy and getting funneled to the DOE, whereas in 2008, it was money that was flowing to finance capital that was interrupted. Also the bailouts were a lump sum to restore liquidity. We are talking about eliminating the extraction of a large amount of money from the economy, much of which will go to servicing new long term loans from private banks (hypothetically). A mortgage is most likely multiple times the amount that student loans are and having millions of new mortgages could increase the overall hold finance capital has over the greater economy. On the individual level it's the difference between being on unemployment until work picks back up vs getting a permanent salary bump.