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Why do we hear so little about student loan debt? I suspect, in brief, that's it's because these debts are all but inescapable; even if your home is foreclosed and you lose your job and your spouse dies and your children are kidnapped by goblins, you can still expect a friendly reminder from Sallie Mae in next month's mail. That means that the lenders are effectively protected from the repercussions of their aggressive and predatory lending policies. Sure, you can get a deferment and a forebearance and various sorts of temporary amnesties, but when these expire you can expect another gentle note from Sallie.
I've even read here on DU about people whose sole income comes from social security, but not before the student loan provider takes a 15% bite out of the gross.
Credit cards are well known to engage in predatory tactics, but at least these can be mitigated through various measures, of which bankruptcy is only the most obvious. Not so student loans, which are basically indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Even the inadequate measures currently being examined by congress will be of benefit primarily to people who haven't yet been saddled with these loans, locking in this or that interest rate or the like. What about the sizable chunk of the population already laboring to pay off five or six times the actual cost of a diploma, sometimes received decades ago?
Student loans are often incurred even before the borrower is eighteen, all but unemployeed and with no concept of how to interpret pages and pages of obscure requirements and provisos. Contrast that with a prospective homeowner, likely somewhat older than eighteen and possibly with one or two incomes already.
Why are student loans permitted to continue in this manner, especially when the product that they paid for (college education) is becoming increasingly obsolete in our outsourced economy?
And who bears the brunt of this inescapable debt? Well, it isn't the wealthy ruling class, that's for damn sure.
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