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Comment by justjonathan | Hacker News Reader

While interest may not be charged, the payment remain the same.

From:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/politics/trumps-corona...

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID “To help our students and their families, I have waived interest that all student loans held by federal government agencies, and that will be until further notice.”

This needs context. Interest rates will be temporarily waived for borrowers, but their monthly payments will not actually decrease, according to a Department of Education spokeswoman. Instead, borrowers’ full payments will go toward the principal on their loans.

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That... doesn’t help anyone right now?

Deferment and/or income-based-repayment plans already exist. Presumably, you'd take advantage of it in conjunction with one of those existing programs.

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/lower-payments/get-tempo...

Think of this announcement as an amendment to the section titled "Be Aware That Interest Might Accrue During Deferment"

That's great and all, but how on earth is it supposed to help the present situation?

Isn't the point of these moves to provide economic relief now? I'd be more interested to see minimum payments temporarily set to 0 with no interest.

It's not meant to help the present situation. It's meant to help with elections.

or maybe it's meant to actually help the students, and it's something that he can do without the opposing party conducting lawfare and stopping it? I don't know, I always look at the simplest motivation for actions first.

The opposing party is traditionally in favor of student debt forgiveness, whereas Trump's party is traditionally opposed to it. If Trump just wanted to help students, he had ample opportunity to do so before now.

The simplest motivation is always self-interest and, for a politician seeking re-election, winning that election.

That opposing party was traditionally in favor of bringing troops home from Syria and Afghanistan, until Trump did it.

Members of his own party were opposed to it as well - the US government tends to be pro war regardless of party affiliation. Meanwhile, his opponents are actually running against him with student loan forgiveness as part of their platform.

could this be related to the new round of QE, the $1.5T influx to coporations and possible negative interest rates? Not an economist here, but wondering if holding debt could be bad in the near future, if there is some other kind of shell game/buck-passing going on here? this just doesn't smell right.

> Instead, borrowers’ full payments will go toward the principal on their loans.

That’s good right? There are already forbearance programs to cover those who can’t make payments.

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