{"id":357296,"date":"2018-04-18T10:26:56","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T09:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/could-student-loans-lead-to-debt-prison-the-handwriting-on-the-wall\/"},"modified":"2018-04-18T10:26:56","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T09:26:56","slug":"could-student-loans-lead-to-debt-prison-the-handwriting-on-the-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/could-student-loans-lead-to-debt-prison-the-handwriting-on-the-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"Could Student Loans Lead to Debt Prison? The Handwriting on the Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_101409\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-101409\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/04\/Screen-Shot-2018-04-17-at-5.48.56-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"440\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by DonkeyHotey | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Holders of student loans\u00a0\u2013most of whom are no longer students\u2013carry a combined debt burden that stands at a record high of $1.5 trillion, more than 8 percent of GDP and more than the $1.3 trillion in direct costs of waging war against Iraq.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Desirability of Cancelling Student Debts<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The burden weighing like a nightmare, to coin a phrase, on 44 million indebted current and former students will haunt these people for a good portion of their lives. The average student debtor graduates owing close to $34,000 and is projected to spend 21 years paying it off. At present, the average monthly payment for those between 30 and 40 years old is $351.00. It is not uncommon for repayment obligations to be borne by underwriters of these loans, typically the primary borrower\u2019s parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Taking these co-signers into consideration, we have about 100 million people adversely affected, directly or indirectly, by the difficulty very many have repaying these loans.<\/p>\n<p>Because it is hard to have loans dismissed or renegotiated on the grounds of undue hardship, cases like the following are numerous: a 2008 graduate entered the job market with $50,000 in student debt. After the September meltdown he was laid off from his $29,000 a year job and had no choice but to default. His mother, a laid-off factory worker, had underwritten his loan, and so $120.00 of her $300.00 unemployment check was garnished in order to service her&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/04\/18\/could-student-loans-lead-to-debt-prison-the-handwriting-on-the-wall\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by DonkeyHotey | CC BY 2.0 Holders of student loans\u00a0\u2013most of whom are no longer students\u2013carry a combined debt burden that stands at a record high of $1.5 trillion, more than 8 percent of GDP and more than the $1.3 trillion in direct costs of waging war against Iraq. The Desirability of Cancelling Student [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-357296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}