It continues to baffle people how this president, who was elected thanks to the overwhelming support of young people, can’t see the crushing effect of student debt. Most may think that President Obama has a blind spot on this issue because he was able to pay off his debts with a book deal. Not just anyone gets a book deal.
Hey, in this economy, you’re lucky to even get a job.
And if you don’t have a job, then paying off your student loans is the very last thing on your list. Your list probably goes something like this: shelter, then food, then dating, then the internet (so you can look for a job), then all the bills where they take something away from you if you don’t pay, and then, if you have any money at all left, you try to pay your student loans.
For some reason, Obama doesn’t understand that. He seems to think that if you pester people more, then they’ll pay off all of their loans. And thanks to this flawed logic, expect debt collection calls to be coming to a cell phone near you.
This is the kind of subtle change that massively increases the government’s intrusion into our lives that neither the Tea Party, or the Occupy Wall Street type of people notice, because they are much too busy screaming about some absolute nonsense they don’t even understand.
From the Huffington Post:
”To the dismay of consumer froups at the discomfort of Democrats, President Barack Obama wants congress to make it earlier for private debt collectors to call the cellphones of consumers delinquent on student loans and other billions owed the federal government.
The change ”is expected to provide substantial increases in collections, particularly as an increasing share of households no longer have landlines and rely instead on cellphones,” the administration wrote recently. The little-noticed recommendation would apply only to cases in which money is owed the government, and is tucked into the mammoth $3 trillion deficit-reduction plan the president submitted to Congress.”
It’s just a backwards way of trying to get money that shows a distinct lack of understanding of what student debtors are facing:
”Enabling robo-calls (to cellphones) is just to lead to more harassment and abuse, and it’s not going to help the government collect more money,” said Lauren Saunders of the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center. ”People aren’t paying their student loans because they can’t find a job.”
This really isn’t that complicated: if you really want people to pay their student debts, then they need to have a job.
Evidently, the federal government is more financially illiterate that just your average bookie. They just don’t understand that no matter how many time you call them, they don’t have any money to give you, and they won’t be paying back the student loans.