How has he been unable to move the needle on student loan forgiveness when substantial amount of loans have already been forgiven and more are in the works? Not being able to forgive 100% of them counts as being 100% unable to do any of it?
Pretty much. They’ve been litigating the issue and doing what they can within the constraints they have, but apparently it amounts to nothing to entitled people.
Well yeah, conservatives are screeching lunatics who are incapable of rational thought. It's great that most supporters of the Democrat party are critical of its many, many shortcomings and failings. I don't think the issue is that Dems demand "perfection," it's that we want to see change. In my mind, erasing small pockets of student loan debt is one of the worst ways to invigorate your base, because the only people who are excited by that are the ones who just got their loans forgiven. I'm sure those people view Biden's efforts as very successful, but you can certainly understand why all the ones who haven't had any forgiveness think the program is a failure.
Maybe, just maybe, if instead they were trying to systematically make higher education more affordable by changing regulations, thus reducing the need for federal student loans in the first place, people would be more generally positive. To my knowledge, there has been no work in that space by the Biden administration.
In my mind, erasing small pockets of student loan debt is one of the worst ways to invigorate your base, because the only people who are excited by that are the ones who just got their loans forgiven.
Centrists in his own party didn't want debt forgiveness. Kept arguing that the President couldn't forgive student debt via executive order. Biden listened to progressives and forgave student debt broadly, like you and I both want. The Supreme Court shot it down, using arguments that centrists helpfully spent months providing them. If Biden had acted like most Democrats at this point, he would have given up forever on the issue, announced he tried, and dusted off his hands in satisfaction of a job not done.
Biden didn't do that. He moved on to forgiving what he could using the methods at his disposal. He didn't give up. He's done what I would have expected from an actual progressive in the same circumstances. Not gonna lie, it helps that it was blocked by the illegitimate conservative Supreme Court. Debt forgiveness has not been blocked by Biden's own party (for once. yet.), but I suspect that's due more to lack of opportunity than anything else.
In any event, I do not fault Biden on this. He did the right thing and continues to do the right thing.
The improvements that have been made apply to a TINY minority of people and even in that group, they may not qualify. On top of that, continuing to ask people to pay isn't REALLY "forgiveness" now, is it?
"The SAVE option reduces the monthly federal student loan payments for undergraduate borrowers from 10% of discretionary income to 5%, and shortens the timeline to forgiveness for those with small balances from the usual required 20 years or 25 years. Those who took out $12,000 or less in their undergraduate or graduate postsecondary studies get any remaining debt erased after just a decade."
So:
We're still going to ask you to pay, you just have to pay 5% of your income instead of 10%.
If you took out student loans less than $12K (who DOES that?) the debt can be erased after 10 years instead of 20 to 25 years.
That's not forgiveness. That's not what people are looking for.