I remember how it was -- JR
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Federal Government to Pause Student Loan Payments, Interest for 3 Million Borrowers
In response to court rulings blocking key elements of the federal government’s new student loan repayment program, the Biden administration will be giving approximately 3 million borrowers a reprieve from their monthly payments.
The 3 million borrowers eligible for the pause are enrolled in the income-driven repayment program dubbed SAVE, and have a monthly payment that is more than $0 a month, the U.S. Department of Education said. About 4.5 million SAVE enrollees who qualify for $0 payments because of low incomes will not be included in the pause.
The payment pause is similar to the COVID-19 student loan relief that lasted three and a half years from March 2020 through September 2023, during which borrowers didn’t have to pay monthly bills and interest didn’t accrue.
Borrowers who are eligible for the new pause will be informed directly in the coming days, a spokesperson for the Education Department told The Epoch Times.
The announcement was made days after a federal judge in Kansas, siding with attorneys general of three Republican-led states, blocked the implementation of the final segment of the SAVE plan but declined to unwind the portions of it that are already in place.
The blocked segment is a calculation formula update scheduled to take effect on July 1. It would have allowed borrowers with undergraduate loans to have their monthly payments capped at 5 percent of their discretionary income, down from the current 10 percent limit.
Borrowers with undergraduate and graduate school loans would have also seen a reduction in repayments, with the amount depending on the proportion of their graduate and undergraduate loan debt.
A separate ruling out of a federal court in Missouri put SAVE’s debt discharge provisions on hold while litigation challenging the program moves forward. The SAVE plan offered debt cancellations for those who originally took out $12,000 or less in loans and have made at least 10 years of monthly payments.
Both of the judges presiding over the twin cases agreed that the SAVE plan, which uses the Higher Education Act (HEA) to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in loan debt, goes beyond what the statute authorizes.
In his opinion, Judge John Ross of the Eastern District of Missouri said Congress did not intend to make debt forgiveness under HEA as economically far-reaching as President Biden’s program.
“The court is not free to replace the language of the statute with unenacted legislative intent. Congress has made it clear under what circumstances loan forgiveness is permitted, and the [income-contingent repayment] plan is not one of those circumstances,” Judge Ross wrote.
A Congressional Budget Office estimate said SAVE could cost $230 billion over the next decade, while researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania placed the price tag at $475 billion over the same 10-year period.
The pair of rulings prompted some Democrat lawmakers to urge the Education Department to place affected borrowers on forbearance, citing the confusion that could result from the injunctions.
“This damning and harmful lawsuit will only throw struggling borrowers further into chaos, deny them the student debt cancellation they demand and deserve, and prevent them from purchasing homes, growing their families, and so much more,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “The Biden Administration must continue to take immediate action to ensure borrowers receive the student debt cancellation they were promised.”
The federal government has promised a continued push for student loan forgiveness.
“President Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary [Miguel] Cardona remain committed to fixing a broken student loan system and making college more affordable for more Americans,” a spokesperson for the Education Department said in a statement to The Epoch Times.
“They will not stop vigorously defending the SAVE Plan, the most affordable repayment plan in history, and will continue to fight for this long-overdue relief.”
Some 414,000 borrowers have had their federal student loan debts erased under SAVE, according to the Education Department. The injunctions will not affect any forgiveness that has already been granted.
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Jewish groups turn on Sydney University
A rare coalition of Australia’s peak Jewish groups says it has “lost confidence” in the University of Sydney to provide for the safety of Jewish people, and that the organisations “stand ready to provide support to Jewish students and staff … who now wish to leave the university”.
The move follows the university’s controversial agreement with the Muslim students society, which defied university orders to pack up its pro-Palestine encampment protest and has been implicated with extremist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir.
In a significant escalation of pressure on Australia’s oldest university, six Jewish organisations, including some of the most powerful in the country – the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Anti-Semitism, and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council – said they were “appalled and deeply concerned” by the university’s agreement.
“Many of the protesters were from outside the university, yet they were allowed to menace the university community and disturb campus life without challenge,” their joint statement reads.
“They have now been rewarded for doing so.”
The groups said they had rejected the University of Sydney’s offer to participate in a working group to review defence and security related investments and called on others not to partake in the “sham” and “fundamentally flawed process”.
The university has pledged to grant a seat on that working group to the Sydney University Muslim Students Association under last week’s agreement. It has also promised a suite of other measures in return for an end to the encampment protest after almost two months.
Those measures include a pledge to disclose defence and security related investments and research ties and to double its expenditure to support academics under its scholars-at-risk program with a particular focus on Palestinians.
The agreement came a week after the university ordered the campers off the lawns, threatening that failure to comply with directions to leave would constitute an offence. Everyone but the Sydney University Muslim Students Association left following that order. That group defied orders and camped out another week until the agreement was struck.
They said in a statement last week that this defiance “worked in our favour across many fronts, most particularly being the catalyst for negotiations with the uni”.
The Jewish groups said the agreement would “only act as an incentive for further and more extreme disruption at the university in the future”.
“Based on our interactions to date, we have lost confidence in the capacity of the university to provide for the physical, cultural and psychosocial safety of Jewish students and staff members.
“This is not just our view. We have been made aware that several academic staff, some of them leaders in their fields and employees of long standing, have already notified the university of their decision to leave the institution. We have also been informed that a number of Jewish students are now considering shifting to other universities.
“We have also rejected the university’s offer, extended to us after an agreement had been reached behind our backs, to participate in the proposed process to review the university’s investment and research activities. “The process is in our view a sham and we will have nothing to do with it. We encourage individuals and groups of standing likewise not to engage with or lend credibility to such a fundamentally flawed process.
“We continue to explore all options to ensure the safety and wellbeing of students and staff at the University of Sydney and stand ready to provide support and assistance to Jewish students and staff at the university, as well as those who now wish to leave the university.”
The University of Sydney has repeatedly said the working group will not review the university’s research activity.
When contacted for a response to the letter, a university spokeswoman said: “These are deeply challenging times and we recognise the significant distress relating to this conflict and also the way the university has managed the encampment.
“We deliberately took time to listen and understand our community’s concerns with the intention of coming to a peaceful resolution.
“We are pleased the encampment was resolved without violence. The ending of the encampment is the first step, and we know we need to work hard to rebuild our relationships with some members of our university community.”
One Jewish student at the University of Sydney, Zac, told The Australian that he was considering transferring following the last few months of tensions on campus. He did not want his face photographed or his surname published for fear of reprisal.
“I’ve been harassed,” he said. “They had a protest. I was filming the protest just in case anything happened. I got told I wasn’t welcome here and that I had to leave – I said, I’m a student at the university and they didn’t care. And I got pictured and posted on Instagram and they called me a ‘Zio’.”
Zac said the university’s deal with protesters announced last Friday confirmed to him that the university “didn’t care about me personally”.
“I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If they complain loudly enough, it doesn’t necessarily mean their opinion’s right or anything they do is right. They’re just the loudest.
“I’ve looked into it a lot, into transferring to UNSW, or UTS, or Macquarie. When you don’t feel comfortable walking around campus, and your classes are on campus, and there are people who you thought were friends who now you don’t talk to or they don’t talk to you, it sort of makes it hard to want to keep coming to uni.”
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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