President Joe Biden recently announced a student loan forgiveness program. While it will provide some people a small amount of relief from student loan debt, this $300 billion taxpayer-funded scheme does nothing to address the underlying problem. In fact, it will exacerbate it.
The underlying problem is the high cost of a college education.
Have you heard? The Democrats are going to fix the student loan mess! They’ve brought up the issue in almost every Democratic Party presidential debate. All we need is a good government program and we can easily solve this $1.64 trillion problem.
Never mind that government programs caused the problem in the first place.
Just how big is the problem? And how did we get here? And most importantly, why should you care? You can get all of the details in SchiffGold’s fully updated report “The Student Loan Bubble: Gambling with America’s Future.“
During a recent podcast, Peter Schiff talked about the student loan debacle.
In a nutshell, it’s the government’s fault.
Democratic presidential candidates have been talking about the student loan crisis. And it is indeed a crisis. The total of the outstanding student loans in the US has more than doubled since 2009 when it was $675 million. The rate of delinquency on student loan debt pushed up to 9.5% in the first quarter of 2019, even as total student loan debt climbed to $1.49 trillion. Currently American owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. That’s more than their outstanding credit card balances.
I was perusing my local newspaper’s website the other day when I came across this headline – “University of Kentucky to Give iPads to All Incoming Freshman This Fall.”
I have to admit, just seeing the headline kind of annoyed me. Because you know what I got when I started at UK as a freshman in 1985?
Nothing.
I didn’t get squat!
Total household debt climbed to a record $13 trillion in 2017. One factor driving overall American indebtedness higher is the ever-increasing burden of student loans.
A recent article in the New York Times focused on three charts that illustrate the ever-increasing toll of the student loan bubble – and it’s not just impacting students. Parents are increasingly feeling the squeeze.
