As President Joe Biden considers some form of loan forgiveness for college borrowers, student loans in America have been a slow-boiling crisis for almost a decade now.
One expert critic who has been following the crisis lays much of the blame for the $1.6 trillion loan debacle at the feet of two men at the very top of the U.S. government: former President Barrack Obama and Biden.
“This is far worse than the Savings and Loan crisis, or the sub-prime auto crisis and even the subprime mortgage crisis,” Allen Collinge, author of the book “The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History and How We Can Fight Back,” told the Epoch Times.
“These two guys are some of the people most responsible for permanently saddling so many Americans with debt for which they have no way out but dying,” Collinge added.
Two factors have come together, said Collinge, to create what he calls the biggest loan crisis in U.S. history.
The first was the removal of bankruptcy protections that people enjoy from all other debt in America.
“Among all living, serving elected officials, Biden literally is most culpable for removing bankruptcy protections from these loans, which really is the core of this problem,” said Collinge, who runs an organization called Student Loan Justice, which is seeking cancellation of all student loan debt in return for the end of the federal student loan program.
Serving as a member, and then eventually, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden was instrumental in removing bankruptcy protection from, at first, government-backed student loans, and then, from privately-made student loans.
“Joe Biden bears a large amount of responsibility for passage of the bankruptcy bill,” Ed Boltz, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, told International Business Times in 2015.