{"id":820430,"date":"2022-09-30T12:07:51","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T12:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2022\/09\/student-debt-relief-gop-states\/"},"modified":"2022-09-30T12:12:48","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T12:12:48","slug":"student-debt-relief-would-disproportionately-benefit-borrowers-in-red-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/09\/30\/student-debt-relief-would-disproportionately-benefit-borrowers-in-red-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Debt Relief Would Disproportionately Benefit Borrowers in Red States"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Six Republican states are suing to stop Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness plan \u2014 even though a new study shows that borrowers in most of those states would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the program.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n A new Federal Reserve analysis finds that nearly three-quarters of Joe Biden\u2019s student loan forgiveness will go to those living in areas where the median household income is below $83,000 a year. (Lambert \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

As Republicans continue to\u00a0portray<\/a> student debt relief as a giveaway to affluent Democrats, new Federal Reserve data show the opposite: the relief would disproportionately help low- and middle-income communities and especially benefit many Republican states whose GOP officials have been insisting debt forgiveness \u201cwill unfairly burden working class families<\/a>,\u201d as Missouri\u2019s Republican attorney general put it.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, six Republican-led states\u00a0filed a lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0to try to block the Biden administration\u2019s plan to forgive up to $20,000 of borrowers\u2019 federal student debt. The lawsuit comes after one federal student debt servicer, Maximus, has poured more than $1 million into Republican state campaigns in the last three years.<\/p>\n

The new\u00a0Federal Reserve study<\/a>\u00a0shows that\u00a0five of the six<\/a>\u00a0Republican states filing the lawsuit would have among the largest shares of their adult populations benefiting from the program.<\/p>\n

Overall, the Fed analysis finds that nearly three-quarters of the loan forgiveness will go to those living in areas where the median household income is below $83,000 a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe average forgiveness amount makes up nearly two-thirds of the average balance in the lowest income areas,\u201d the researchers found, adding that borrowers in lower- and middle-income neighborhoods \u201care more likely to have their loans completely forgiven by the plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Evaluating the average amount of debt forgiven per borrower, the analysis finds that five out of the six states that would benefit the most are Republican strongholds: South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Eight of the ten states with the highest average amount of per-borrower debt forgiveness are red states.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same story when comparing shares of the adult population that would receive debt relief: seventeen out of the thirty-two states with the highest share are Republican, and three of the four that top the list are the GOP strongholds of Alabama, South Carolina, and Ohio.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Lever<\/i>,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Republicans continue to\u00a0portray student debt relief as a giveaway to affluent Democrats, new Federal Reserve data show the opposite: the relief would disproportionately help low- and middle-income communities and especially benefit many Republican states whose GOP officials have been insisting debt forgiveness \u201cwill unfairly burden working class families,\u201d as Missouri\u2019s Republican attorney general put [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820430"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":820431,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820430\/revisions\/820431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}