Tag: debt forgiveness

West’s neoliberal ‘age of abundance’ is over, as war and sanctions boomerang home

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Aug 27, 2022 — France’s President Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, warned “we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance.” Western wars and sanctions are boomeranging back at home. The neoliberal phase of capitalism is collapsing.

Neoliberalism has lost the key pillars it was built on: cheap energy and raw materials from Russia, cheap labor and consumer goods from China, an unsustainable bubble of household debt, low to zero interest rates, and Washington’s ability to organize regime-change operations in any country where a government tried a socialistic or state-led economic model.

West’s neoliberal ‘age of abundance’ is over, as war and sanctions boomerang home via Multipolarista

Biden’s student-loan debt forgiveness would cost $300 billion, report says — less than half of the defense budget

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Biden’s student-loan debt forgiveness would cost $300 billion, report says — less than half of the defense budget

Student loans currently aren’t even profitable for the government. A July report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that federal loans are actually projected to cost the government $197 billion, instead of bringing in what the Education Department estimated as a $114 billion profit, because of the various pauses and changes over the last couple of years.

The price of student-loan forgiveness pales in comparison to other major federal expenditures. Defense spending is projected to cost nearly $8.7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and will cost $796 billion in 2022 alone.

That $300 billion is also a fraction of how much borrowers hold right now; America’s student loan debtors currently owe $1.7 trillion.

While Biden has not publicly confirmed his plans for broad student-loan relief, he has said himself he will make the decision before August 31, when student-loan payments are set to resume. In April, he shot down $50,000 in relief — an amount many Democratic lawmakers and advocates have been pushing for — and recent reports have suggested his final amount will be near $10,000, which he pledged on the campaign trail.