That's a funny way of saying "people who are disabled are no longer going to be shaken down to pay student loans they have no way of paying."

Ah yes, remember: the poor people have your money: http://www.ibtimes.com/panama-papers-corporations-shifted-ha...

Better we wash away a bit of fiat we shouldn't have then screw people who have already been screwed enough by being disabled.

No it didn't. Student loans are a wildly lucrative business. The DoE originates something like $110B in student loans EVERY YEAR and charges between 3-7% interest on it.

The DoE could eat the cost of this without even noticing.

110B * .05 = 5.5 Billion theoretical net profit on a year's loans.

This forgiveness costs 7.7 billion so I think they probably would notice.

They originate that many per year. So that's $5.5B per year for 20+ years. At any given time, they should have income for 20+ years worth of originations, right? Obviously, this situation is more complicated since they couldn't pay.

They lent out much less in previous years, climbing from ~$15B in 2000 to a peak of around ~115B by 2011, and declining steadily since. This makes sense because private lenders controlled a healthy portion of the market before 2011.

Not net profit, ?gross profit?

The US government doesn't have those billions lying around with no ideas about how to make money with it. It has to borrow it. Interest rates for US bonds aren't high at the moment, but they aren't zero, either.

And as others mentioned, these are the bad loans: those that people do not have and likely never will have the money to pay back or pay interest on.

Because of that, this is more a decision to do the government's accounting differently than a decision to spend money.

"All translators are traitors." -- Italian proverb.

Well, "Traduttore, traditore" is a Tuscan proverb -- which has been translated! Oh, the irony.

It works on so many levels.

Well duh. Isn't the other way around literally impossible?