LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Derrick Turner, a 31-year-old lumber yard worker in Grayson County, Ky., was “ecstatic” when President Biden announced his broad student debt forgiveness plan on Wednesday.
“I think it’s a great step in the right direction, and I think the next step is to tackle tuition costs,” said Turner, an online student at Western Kentucky University. “Education shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be available to everybody.”
Greg Fint, a 42-year-old cable company lineman in south Louisville’s Valley Station, had a different reaction to the news: “Crap.”
Fint, who never finished college, said he had tired of the roughly $15,000 in federal student loans he had carried since leaving Eastern Kentucky University in 2004, and he wanted to clear his debts to improve his credit for obtaining a mortgage. So, in November, he took a loan from his 401(k) retirement account to retire his two student loan balances.
Upon learning on Wednesday he likely could have had $10,000 forgiven under the Biden plan, Fint said he was “kicking myself.” But he said the fact that he, not taxpayers, paid his debts gives him a “clear conscience.”
“I try to stay calm. Life’s too short to get all angry over stuff you can’t control,” Fint told WDRB News.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Kentucky and Indiana could see some or all of their debt forgiven under the Biden plan.
Reactions to debt forgiveness ranged from relief, to disappointment that Biden’s forgiveness didn’t go further, to outrage over a perception of unfairness.
Oldham County resident Carissa Vinup, 32, said $10,000 is a “drop in the bucket” compared to the roughly $60,000 she has accumulated with interest after spending six years working toward a University of Louisville communications degree in 2014.
“I don’t think it’s going to help me pay off my loans,” she said.
Vinup said other aspects of the Biden plan are more meaningful for her, particularly the continued moratorium on payments owed for federal loans. Borrowers of federal loans haven’t had to make payments during the pandemic, which Biden said will continue until January, when the moratorium will finally end.
Biden is also lowering the demands for income-based repayment plans, which Vinup relies on to limit her monthly payments in hopes the debt will eventually be written off.
About 60% of graduates of four-year public and private nonprofit institutions in the Bluegrass and Hoosier states carried debt that averaged about $28,000 as of the 2019-2020 school year, according to Common Data Set information from the schools analyzed by the Institute for College Access and Success.
Republicans decried the Biden plan as a wealth transfer to higher-income college graduates on backs of the majority of Americans without four-year degrees.
“President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt. This policy is astonishingly unfair,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement.
Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, Biden said Republicans supported tax cuts for the wealthy and forgivable loans to businesses during the pandemic.
“The outrage over helping working people with student loans I think is simply wrong,” Biden said.
Republicans also said the plan will exacerbate inflation, with prices already running about 9% higher than a year earlier.
Jose Fernandez, chairman of the economics department at the University of Louisville, said in email that $10,000 is “not with respect to the entirety” of student loan balances, “But it will mean more disposable income for these graduates.”
Fernandez noted that federal loan payments, meanwhile, have already been on hold for two years.
“It could potentially accelerate inflation but not to the same extent as giving people $10(,000) … So my inflation concerns are less,” he said.
WDRB's Dalton Godbey contributed to this story.
