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The federal government owns 92% of student debt, but President Joe Biden is refusing to cancel that debt up to $50,000 per debtor using executive action.
“I will not make that happen,” Biden responded to an audience member’s question at a Town Hall yesterday in Milwaukee. He claimed that canceling up to $50,000 of debt would only help more well-off graduates of universities like Yale and Harvard. Instead, he repeated his commitment (yet to be enacted) to cancel only $10,000, hopefully in cooperation with Congress.
The depth of the debt crisis
Biden’s hesitancy to take dramatic action on student loan debt is particularly cruel when one considers the magnitude of the problem. Student loan debt totals $1.71 trillion in the United States, and is growing at a rate six times that of the overall economy. As of the most recent data collected in 2020, 45.3 million student borrowers are in debt, owing an average of $37,691 each. The 42.9 million U.S. residents with federal student loan debt each owe an average $36,510 to the U.S. government.