https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...Yx4?li=BBnbfcL
Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled a sweeping plan Monday to forgive massive amounts of student loan debt for middle-class Americans as she tries to appeal to the young voters expected to play a major role in the 2020 campaign.
The Democratic presidential candidate from Massachusetts also called for free tuition at state colleges and universities as another way to relieve the higher education costs that have financially crippled many millennials.
“College shouldn’t just be a privilege for those who can afford to take on the significant expenses associated with higher education,” she wrote in a Medium post that announced the plan.
Warren is setting the pace among Democrats in the campaign in rolling out major policy proposals, and her education announcement came as she was scheduled to participate along with four other top presidential contenders in a televised town hall forum with young voters in Manchester, N.H., on Monday night. Student debt defines the lives of many young people, and voters ages 18 to 29 are forecast to make up more than a third of the electorate in the 2020 election.
The debt burden weighing them down is not a result of laziness or irresponsibility, Warren said, but a government that has put the interest of the wealthy and well-connected over the interests of working families -- a dominant theme of her campaign.
“The result is a huge student loan debt burden that’s crushing millions of families and acting as an anchor on our economy,” she wrote. Clearing the debt would allow middle-class Americans to buy homes and start new businesses, Warren said.
The plan will also help reduce the economic disparities between white people and blacks and Latinos, because those groups would benefit disproportionately from the debt relief, she said. Women also hold the majority of student debt.
© Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer/AP Elizabeth Warren. Her proposal could be an attempt to appeal to supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic front-runner who is battling with Warren for the backing of liberal voters. Sanders is known for the tuition-free college proposal that he touted during the 2016 election and is significantly ahead of Warren in recent polls.
This is not, however, the first time Warren has talked about student debt relief. She has proposed several student debt relief measures during her time in the Senate. She is also a longtime critic of for-profit colleges, and her plan announced Monday would eliminate all federal funding to such institutions.
The out-of-control cost of a college degree is likely to become a key issue in the 2020 election. While Democratic candidates in 2016 focused on tuition-free and debt-free college for future students, this time it seems many candidates agree that debt relief for current students and recent college graduates is important to voters and could boost the economy.
Conventional wisdom -- and the advice of baby boomer parents -- has long told students that the value of a college degree still outweighs the cost, but research has begun to question that assumption. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that, for the first time, a college degree may no longer be worth the cost for many.
Warren’s post mentioned that her degree at the University of Houston cost $50 a semester, which she was able to afford with only her part-time waitressing job. The idea that a part-time job could fund a degree now is laughable. And while ultra-wealthy schools like Harvard can afford to offer low- and moderate-income students scholarships without loans, most US students must still borrow.
The average student debt in this country is about $29,000, a staggering amount for people who do not earn huge salaries.
Warren said her two-pronged plan would cost $1.25 trillion over 10 years. She proposed to pay for it with her previously proposed “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” which would slap a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million and an additional 1 percent on wealth above $1 billion. Warren’s campaign said the tax would hit 75,000 families and raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years.
Warren will appear Monday night at Saint Anselm College in Manchester to answer questions from with young voters in a town hall forum organized by CNN and the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. The candidates, including Sanders and California Senator Kamala Harris, will appear separately back-to-back before an audience of more than 500 students, with 200 of them from Harvard. Harvard also plans to release the results of a youth poll on Monday about issues important to young voters.
Related slideshow: Photos of Elizabeth Warren campaigning for president (USA TODAY)
Millennials and Generation Z voters -- all born starting in the early 1980s -- are expected to play a major role in the presidential election after unprecedented youth turnout in 2018.
The specific proposal from Warren comes in two parts — debt relief and tuition-free college.
On debt, she proposed to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with a household income under $100,000. For those with higher incomes, she proposes cancelling less in a series of steps. For example, a person with an income of $130,000 would get $40,000 in debt cancelled, and someone who makes $160,000 would get $30,000. The plan offers no relief to households that earn more than $250,000.
Warren said the plan would provide debt relief to more than 95 percent of the nearly 45 million Americans with student loans, and would cancel all the debt of more than 75 percent of them.
But it does no good to cancel debt if the underlying problem — the crippling cost of a college degree — is not remedied, she said.
So Warren is proposing free undergraduate tuition and fees to all public two- and four-year colleges. She also wants to expand Pell and other federal grants to help students cover the other costs of college, like books and housing.
She would also create a fund of at least $50 billion to help historically black colleges and universities, as well as other institutions that serve minority students specifically.
State funding of public colleges has shrunk in recent decades, especially in New England, leading those schools to make up the difference by raising tuition. In Massachusetts, a recent study found that students actually borrow more to attend public universities than they do to attend private colleges.
“We need to fundamentally change the broken system that created this crisis in the first place,” Warren wrote in the Medium post.
The cost of college only perpetuates the wealth gap in this country, Warren said, by deterring people from attending college or prompting them to drop out before they earn a degree.
Warren plans to "Tax the Rich" for all this - despite no idea about the costs and funding from these taxes - which she and her husband would be eligible to pay, but clearly will not. The first pic on MSN of this was Warren -mouth open - mad a hell - first up-raised. Great and characteristic pic of her. now changed to much more subdued pics. MSM propaganda strieks again. She is a loon DPST hypocrite.