Congress lets us down

[Kell4280]

Hey guys- I haven’t introduced myself yet. I will be 30 next month and I have $43,000 in federal student loan debt. I graduated in 2011 with 62,000 and have diligently scrimped and saved in a debtors prison to faithfully pay down what I have. Like so many of you, I was 18, naive and gullible when I signed my life away for a college education that every trusted adult in my life told me that I “needed”.

The last few days, I have been on pins and needles praying that the stimulus bill would include some of the Democrats’ debt forgiveness proposals. Normally, I am bipartisan and even lean conservative. But indebting so many young people in this way is just wrong. Yet… Instead of a true reprieve, Congress has stopped payments and interest for 6 months, but all that does is postpone the problem. At this point, I swear to God that when this is all over, they will never see another dime of my money. I don’t care what that means. I won’t rejoin an economy that has kept me in this prison since I was a child.

A second economy may have to pop up where people only deal in cash and under the table jobs so that the feds don’t garnish this debt they think they are owed (similar to what already happens in many big cities where there are large undocumented populations without proper work visas, etc).

They will pry this money from my cold and dead hands. Even after this is over. That’s the only way they get it.

I’m in Activist Mode now. I want to be free! I want all of us that were sold under this bus as teenagers to be free! Can someone point me in the right direction? I feel sort of lost on what to do and who to ask. Let’s share this forum. Get the word out. Write your senators. Especially the Republicans. They need to truly see what a lost cause trying to collect this debt will be. Let’s get this thing big. Let’s find out who else is in this boat and make our voices so big that they can’t ignore us. Come September, we won’t pay. We won’t ever pay. They are trying to tap a dry well. Student Debt forgiveness and jubilee is the only way forward.

[Thomas_Gokey]

Hi @Kell4280,

You are on the same page as us! Have you signed up for the student debt strike? strike.debtcollective.org

We are organizing to get each member of congress to cosponsor legislation that cancels all student debt. We are doing that here: Organizing to win College For All

When it comes to this terrible stimulus corporate bailout, the Republicans killed the debt cancellation. We can’t pretend the parties are the same here. But the Democrats didn’t fight for it. They caved quickly without really trying.

We have to push everyone. Full court press. I’ve heard some experts say it is especially important to get just a few Republicans to turn on debt cancellation. If that can happen it will change the dynamic. So even if your rep is a Republican it is important to push hard hard hard. Organize a few friends who live near you. That’s all it really takes to get a core local group going.

But we also can’t wait for elected officials to act. We are on our own on this, and we need to organize direct actions of noncooperation. That is what the debt strike is for.

Never forget that the Department of Education can cancel 97% of all student debt with one signature. This is very doable. We will win if we get organized and flex our power.

-Thomas

[Kell4280]

Thanks. My senator is Schumer and he seemed to fight for it a bit. I agree about the Republicans. I think so many of them are on the angle that people who took out debt have a responsibility to repay. Okay, fine. Fair enough. But why don’t they have sympathy for the fact that so many of us were so young and dumb when we took this upon ourselves? Hopefully there are some reasonable people that can hear
this out. If anything, once they really understand the anger behind this and that trying to collect is really a lost cause they will have no choice but to cut their losses on this unfortunate chapter in American history where they made children go into debt to pay for their future. Truly sickening.

[Aya]

Yes, I agree with you about being young and dumb when it came to understanding money and financial education. Guilty. Don’t mean to get you further down, but there are those of us who not only paid off the original principal with interest, which we borrowed, in spite of that and because of the compound interest, we now either owe just as much as we borrowed or more, way more. Sorry to say, but unless we do something about this NOW, that’s what waiting for you, even if you start paying. IF I had known that’s what was in store for me, I would have never started paying. At least I would had the money to put down on a house or something tangible.