I had a conversation the other day with my vet. (It’s okay, it was just a checkup to get Abner’s Rx for heartworm renewed.) He was relatively new to the office. He brought up Biden’s $10K student loan forgiveness. He had some pretty complicated feelings about it. Part of his complicated feelings were due to the terms of his loan. ( I haven’t seen his terms, just his representations.) But, from my understanding he was already benefitting from some of the reforms Dems helped put into place where his monthly payments couldn’t exceed a certain percentage of his income. However, from his representation he could be making those payments the rest of his life (according to his understanding) but, if he died his wife nor his parents were on the hook the remaining principal.
Here comes the tricky part, he wasn’t totally for Biden’s debt forgiveness. His reasons weren’t entirely clear (my personal take is it’s probably due to his parents or colleagues political bent). He’s perfectly fine with the immediate forgiveness of a loan that could exceed 6 figures if he were to pass away, but wasn’t sure he was for a general $10K debt forgiveness for 43M of his fellow college graduates.
I asked him a hypothetical. Which loan is better? A loan where only the “bank” benefits? Or one where the community benefits from the banks loaning of $XXX for a home? Explaining that if the money only goes to the bank, (simplification here) the greater community gets nothing. But if forgiveness of $10K allows a person to now qualify for a mortgage (in all probability much higher than $10K), that mortgage sum is spread out over the community via purchases necessary for a house(appliances, furniture etc.) benefitting the entire community not just the bank.
When we left, I’m not entirely sure what I said had sunk in( we’re talking about a less than five minute conversation here), but by some of his parting words, I don’t think he was as sure of his previous position. And that’s a start.