Have you ever had your wages garnished?
If you’re one of the 43 million Americans who are behind on their student loan payments, you’re about to – and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voted to make that possible.
Under the program, the government can withhold entire federal tax refunds and up to 15% of a federal worker’s take-home pay, with wage garnishment for private sector employees to be announced shortly. And with the forbearance in repayments during COVID, borrowers who were just following the rules may find themselves defaulted upon, thanks to the corrupt SCOTUS decision to overturn Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.
It’s worth pointing out that during COVID, MGP was able to keep her auto repair shop open with the aid of $63,000 in loans from Biden’s Paycheck Protection Program – loans subsequently written off.
Student loan borrowers, meanwhile, are advised to check with their loan providers, and the federal Department of Education – but good luck getting an answer, as the illegal and un-Constitutional DOGE program has laid off nearly one half of that agency’s work force. Some experts are even advising borrowers to print or screen-shot their data… just in case.
In a statement explaining her vote, Gluesenkamp Perez said that student loan debt forgiveness needs to be matched by increased access to technical and vocational education, saying that the high price of an undergraduate degree invests it with “unwarranted social status.”
That probably comes as a surprise to the 11,500 students at Vancouver’s own Clark College, where as they will proudly inform you, 42 percent of the student body are first-generation college students; 33 percent are low-income, and 20 percent are both.
Clark is also a school where two-thirds of students in career and technical training programs have found employment within nine months of completion. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case for other, for-profit vo/tech institutions, some of which have proven outright fraudulent, providing sub-standard education at exorbitant prices – with the average taxpayer picking up the slack.
Look at ITT Technical Institute, forced to cancel the predatory loans of 200,000 of its students in a whopping $6 billion court settlement, or the Art Institutes, forced to cancel nearly $160 billion in predatory loans to 317,000 students, or even Corinthian Colleges, whose educational license was revoked due to profit-seeking and poor student performance.
All in all, there are nearly 1.3 million student loan borrowers across the United States who, according to the White House, “were cheated by their schools, saw their schools precipitously close, or are covered by related court settlements.”
It’s easy to crack stale jokes about underwater basketweaving, but the reality is that for many families, a technical, vocational or associate degree is the path to a better life. Skilled and trained workers, not brute-force labor, is what has grown the American economy of the 21st century.
At a time when members of the Presidential Cabinet are talking about how your grandchild will inherit your minimum-wage factory job, we need more, and more affordable education – not new ways to penalize those who have tried to better their lives and gotten scammed. Our elected leaders need to uphold the value of education, at a time when “my ignorance is better than your knowledge” is the watchword of half the nation.
And we, the people, need to remember that government doesn’t justify itself by turning a profit – but by building prosperity.
