The average loan size was 250,000. 5-50 million was also very common.

Massive corporations also got absurd quantities of money.

Yeah agree, but they intentionally chose a long and winding path to get it done, one which allowed republicans to file an inevitable legal challenge. Undoubtedly this wasn't literally purely to sell out student debtors (i.e. me) for just pure malice, but instead they were thinking this is a nice middle path where we're not too radical but also standing by our commitment (a commitment that itself was a climb down from his previous commitments).

The effect, however, is the same. The best path was to immediately forgive the debt and force the court to claw it back, rather than to just nullify something that didn't truly exist yet. They chose this path knowing this was the likely outcome, but preferred it to something more radical that had a higher chance of success. I am not clear on the legal (let alone extra legal) paths available if the court is truly determined to even claw back the money, but they haven't been playing to win from the start.

Because when you have a bourgeois class of elected officials, consultants, lobbyists, and various other hangers on, they lose 100% of whatever genuine enthusiasm and connection they had to the rank and file of the party. It's no different than the SPD in 1915, only even less radical and more doomed to fail

Agreed just saying this was the compromise, the least they could do and they can't even do it.

But it was.

Ooh, a few months without payments, I'm sure that's incredibly helpful to people paying off their student loans over the course of decades. Thank you, Biden, for not fundamentally changing anything so I could go back to brunch in peace.

Who paused the payments my dude?

Well yuo see I have been unemployed every time I've had to reaffirm yearly my commitment to "repaying" the loan... quotation marks because college did not actually cost that much, it's just a nonsense number they pulled out of thin air to pad their fucking fossil fuel investment portfolios but whatever.

Regardless, being unemployed when I re-up as it were allows me to get away without any interest. How kind. Unfortunately I have a job now, so we'll see how it goes.

Yeah I believe it was specifically designed to be easily defeated in the courts, but I can't remember where I read about that

We are not liberals or democrats here to preach about what republicans did, as democrats have done no better.

NOT EVERYONE goes to college/university or even extensive technical/trade school that ensures leaping over the "real working class". Look at the demographics and the percentage of the population reaching "higher education" than HS. The percentage that didn't, never took out a single loan and after this handout to the "middle class" (it is funny because on another thread I am engaged in someone reacted to the term as I fabricated it and brought it on without theorizing upon) they will end up with no degree and no loan without payment. This will increase inequality.

I am surprised that this escapes you, that a large portion of working class kids never attempted to go to any college because simply they couldn't afford it.

Just because the conservatives are using it as leverage to manipulate the poor and working class to their advantage doesn't mean they are wrong on this one. Do you have any clue what it costs to become a physician in this surreal country we are referring to in the cheapest of all state medical school? How many years one must go in debt if have no other support to eventually get a badge that says now I can scoop it all up and make tons of money. Or how rich kids can go to the Carib. private schools and buy themselves an easy degree and compete.

Again, I am not against those that got in debt in getting a waiver, I am in support of all of those that didn't and now are being pushed further behind in the class difference. If they are going to waive payment to some they should give a cash handout to those that didn't get a loan because they never went to school.

undefined> The loan forgiveness was meant to right the wrongs that happened under republican leadership of these programs.

I remember since the early 90s under no republican leadership the gov guar. student loans were sold over cheap to private banking and collection to collect. Again we are not a liberal crowd here to preach anti-republicanism when real defense and advancement to capitalism is carried out by dixocrats, including a dark-skinned one.

Remember who in the 90s passed legislation to wipe out urban poor housing under no protest no contest in court for 1/3 value offerings, and handed out urban land to developers to beautify and modernize cities? This caused the real-estate boom, the explosion of housing costs, and the transfer of the financial bubble into housing and development, to yet another bubble that blew up and sentenced the entire world to pay off the US financial bubble. It also created the transportation havoc created in nearly all urban/metro areas and had people travel 1-2hrs to get to a reasonably paying job.

With the exception of a very few countries like N.Korea, in the remaining world politics are driven around the manupulation of the "middle class", but I am glad you picked it up and asked the question because my definition is not that vague. The vaguness comes together with the manipulation of the majority of the population thinking they are the middle class politicians appeal to.

Don't pretend you've never heard the term, I know you have, to have an aversion to it is understandable.

What I call middle class is management. Those that definitely don't have the same interests with workers, they benefit directly or indirectly from the exploitation, but they are not the owners either. They are the ones that have the authority to blackmail you and terrorize you at work to do as they say or you will be fired, or even never get a raise or promotion.

Who is the capitalist class today, does anyone know? How many of us here have seen a true capitalist in the workplace? Very few in very small outifits where the owner is also a manager directly to the low level employees. The owners have vanished, in some cases nobody knows who they might be with large corporation being in the stock market. How can you engage in class conflict when you don't even see the other class. If you don't see it, you don't see the way of life, how do you know they benefit from your exploitation. The vast majority of large corporations/industries today in paper they show as being in deficit, being worth less than they owe. They are in debt, because that is the financial model of a healthy corporation. Although people can make millions from corporations that are in debt.

This is part of the intentional transformation of capitalism that has sentenced Marxists to be less effective or even making any sense to the average worker. Together with the populism of some left wing parties appealing to managers as "employees" or "proletariat" ... and things have ended up in this dead end we are locked in.

In the old days you walked long muddy paths to get to the factory and the owner passed with his limo and splashed mud on you, someone opened his door and someone else held an umbrella over his tall hat as he walked to the front entrance of the office of the factory. He was the owner. This picture doesn't exist for the past 50 years for 95% of industrial workers.

You can work for a McD franchise and the sole owner of a sole shop is there, in reality all he is is a manager for McD that gets paid a portion of the profit when it exists, or zero when it doesn't, and he is under the illusion he is the owner of the means of production and he can not even buy and use a slice of tomoato in his own means of production. He is just low level management with a really bad (for him) contract to either make money for the boss or work for free. A foreman laying cable for a phone company is higher level manager than the McD owner is.

Dare take it further? Are physicians middle class, college professors, academic researchers with 24 grad students laboring 80h/wk, middle class? Is a plumber with two assistants "the owner of the means of production"?

The working class will never revolt together with their enemies, their managers!