Trump gives people with student loans a break amid coronavirus

March 14, 2020

“COVID-19 is causing economic devastation across the country, with even greater job and income losses to come,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard University.

“Suspending student loan payments is a helpful half measure, especially if interest accrual is frozen,” said Alexis Goldstein, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform prior to Trump’s announcement. “The most distressed borrowers would potentially have hundreds of extra dollars to go toward food, supplies and medicine.”

President Donald Trump may be looking to curry favor with voters in an election year where his hope of touting a vibrant economy is quickly deflating. The stock market has been reeling amid the outbreak, with the potential for more than 200 million people in the U.S. being infected under worst-case scenarios.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made student debt relief a cornerstone of his campaign message. In 2016, Trump won votes from a significant chunk of disillusioned Sanders voters who appreciated Trump’s populism and his isolationist foreign policy. As Sanders’ campaign continues collapsing under the strength of the Joe Biden coalition, Trump is betting he can win Sanders voters over again like he did in 2016.

Outstanding education debt has outpaced credit card and auto debt. The average college graduate leaves school $30,000 in the red today, up from $10,000 in the 1990s. The average monthly student loan bill is nearing $400.

Ben Winters, a legal fellow at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., said the coronavirus has made him worried about his finances. A break from his monthly student loan bill could help him cover the unexpected travel and medical costs he expects to be hit with soon, he said.

“My budget is stretched thin without a pandemic,” Winters, 25, said.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/mnuchin-may-suspend-student-loan-repayments-amid-coronavirus-outbreak.html