OPINION:
The whole brouhaha over President Biden‘s blatant vote buying with the student loan mess highlights another huge problem: A large minority of loan holders never stopped paying their bills and are enjoying a huge edge as a result (“Millions duped by Biden‘s student loan lies,” web, July 7).
Biden suspended payments, but he also suspended interest accumulation and compounding. Those debtors who kept paying their bills were paying only principal, not interest. The result is that these individuals paid off very large chunks of their debt.
Family I know pushed their graduates to put every penny they could manage into payments and two of the three managed to pay off their debts, while the third has paid off 70% of her principal. All used COVID-19 payments and other sources of saved cash to pay off principles.
They are now essentially free of the burden and have very high credit ratings, since paying off student debt early is one of the best way to boost those numbers.
Yet no one in the financial-adviser racket ever put forth that advice in public. Why? Mr. Biden‘s COVID-19 repayment suspension was a golden opportunity to clear student debt.
Instead, public officials and even financial professionals were encouraging young adults to take the money and spend it on trips and other unnecessary things.
And they did, with a vengeance. They spent freely on “stuff” such as new phones, etc.
It is not hard to think the establishment used these naive young adults to first prop up the economy and then dangled the bait of loan forgiveness to buy their votes. Importantly, nowhere in the public debate has there been any attempt to bring the true source of the
student debt problem (the abusive college cost structure) to heel.
JAMES BARENDS
Wayne, Pennsylvania
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