If Democratic presidential candidates want to earn the support of people calling on the government to do more to help Americans awash in student debt, they might want to run from the Obama administration’s record.
On Tuesday, the same day of the first Democratic presidential primary, the Department of Education told a federal judge in Boston that a 65-year-old former blue collar worker should not be discharged of his student loan obligations.
The department said that the unemployed man shouldn’t be entitled to relief because it could set a precedent that would threaten “the fiscal stability of the [student] loan program,” according to Bloomberg.
Robert Murphy is seeking relief for up to $246,500 in debt he acquired to pay for his three kids’ educations. He has estimated that his student debt would mushroom to $500,000 over the next dozen years even if he were to find a job that paid him $50,000 annually.
“Unlike almost every single form of consumer debt, student loans can be erased only in very rare circumstances,” Bloomberg pointed out.
The news service noted that federal law requires petitioners for student debt relief to prove that repayment imposes “undue hardship.”
“The Department of Education has been successful at convincing judges to make that threshold incredibly high,” it also stated. “A borrower now has to show that making payments on a loan would ‘strip himself of all that makes life worth living,’ according to one court.”
While the department policy of staunchly opposing student debt relief might be longstanding, the timing of its Tuesday filing was somewhat awkward for the Democratic Party. According to a transcript of Tuesday’s debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley collectively mentioned the word “debt” eight times—each time in the context of education finance.
Read the Bloomberg story here.
