The Squad, a team of four radical congresswomen, just keeps getting more and more radical in its demands.
The team of AOC, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib keeps on demanding everything under the sun, including cancelling rent payments and defunding the police.
Now, you can add student debt cancellation to their wish list!
Speaking with Yahoo, Representative Ayanna Pressley said that student debt must be wiped clear in order to promote “racial justice”:
Canceling student debt would not only address the massive racial inequalities among borrowers, but also “jump-start” the economy, according to a Democratic lawmaker.
“There’s unrest in the lives of Black Americans, and that’s because of centuries of disproportionate hate, hurt, and harm that have been foisted on to Black Americans,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) told Yahoo Finance. “And so we’re at a culture shift moment — but we need a power shift moment.”
Pressley has supported cancelling student debt to help level racial inequalities. “Black student borrowers borrow, and default more than anyone else because of our inability to build generational wealth,” she said. “I see that as a racial justice issue.”
There would be a macroeconomic benefit, she added: “The average borrower has $30,000 worth of debt — [cancelling that] will jump-start the economy.”
A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that borrowers living in majority Black and majority Hispanic zip codes are “much more likely to default on student debt by age 30.” Two-year college borrowers who reside in majority Black areas defaulted almost twice as much as those in majority white areas.
Nationwide, default rates are the highest for those who live in majority Black zip codes, both for graduates of two-year and four-year schools.
A recent report by the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) went deeper into borrower behavior in Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., to determine how they manage their debt.
The researchers found that despite living only a few blocks apart, borrowers of color struggle a lot more with their student debt. When added to existing inequities, the strain of student loans is “reinforcing social stratification and segregation across neighborhoods,” the report stated.
For instance, in San Francisco, the rate of student loan delinquency in neighborhoods with the largest minority populations is over 7.5 times higher than areas with majority-white populations. And the three neighborhoods where student loans saw a delinquency rate lower than 5% are at least 75% white, the authors noted.
The data “highlights how student debt is increasingly a racial and economic justice issue,” SBPC stated in an email to Yahoo Finance.
Pressley has been active in pushing Congress to consider student debt cancellation.
<p content='She previously introduced a bill with colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to cancel $30,000 in outstanding student loan debt back in March, right as the coronavirus began to hit the U.S. The senate Democrats proposed cancelling $10,000 instead. The CARES Act, passed in March, didn’t offer either. ‘ data-reactid=”69″ type=”text”>She previously introduced a bill with colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to cancel $30,000 in outstanding student loan debt back in March, right as the coronavirus began to hit the U.S. The senate Democrats proposed cancelling $10,000 instead. The CARES Act, passed in March, didn’t offer either.
You can watch part of Pressley’s interview right here:
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