Life led Elizabeth Hadzic and Kim Coles to bankruptcy court.
Hadzic, 50, a psychotherapist in Maryland, doesn’t make enough to support herself and her adult son, whose health struggles set her back thousands of dollars. Coles, an accountant in Oregon in her late 60s, was laid off last year.
Both have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Although they have been making payments on those loans for years, they no longer can. And both, in the absence of an alternative, have resorted to taking the costly, typically unsuccessful route of trying to get their loans discharged in bankruptcy court.
That’s where things diverge.
For Hadzic, bankruptcy is proving to be the answer to her financial woes. After months of litigation, she’s on track for a full discharge. In Coles’ case, the government is putting up a fight − though she is of retirement age − against discharging the balance of a loan she’s been paying down for more than a decade.
“I always paid my student loans,” Coles said in an interview. “I was never late.”
The disparity in how the government is treating their cases is indicative of the intractability of one of the country’s most extreme and inaccessible forms of student debt relief, as the Biden administration grapples with finding alternatives to the kind of sweeping student loan forgiveness option that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
People can change, my man. Forty years is a long time.
When people change magically at the same time their approval has cratered, on one of the issues wrecking his approval (again, that he helped architect but doesn’t own up to as a mistake), then it’s important to be suspicious or get duped.
“magically”
Well, be fair. This wasn’t how he wanted to deal with student loan debt relief. But Republicans sued the federal government, and the stacked courts served their masters well by preventing the loans from just being discharged outright. Now we have yo try and find all these bullshit, overly complex, and deficient mechanisms to try and help people. We do still want our presidents to follow the law,
even ifespecially when they don’t want to.