Letters: Supply collection for Ukraine ongoing; No-win cycle of student debt
Supply collection for Ukraine ongoing
Salvation Baptist Church wants to thank the community for their overwhelming response to the need for supplies in Ukraine. We are pleased to announce that the container the community packed was successfully delivered.
But as many of you know, war continues to rage between Russian and Ukraine and our efforts are not over. A cold and uncertain winter ahead is before them. We are currently packing another container scheduled to be shipped in late September.
We are lacking in non-perishable food, diapers, toothbrushes and toothpaste, etc.
The address is:
Salvation Baptist Church
3645 W. College Ave.
State College, PA 16801
Drop-off deadline is Sept. 15.
No-win cycle of student debt
President Biden has pledged to make a decision on student loan forgiveness, by “the end of August.” Borrowers have not had to make any payments on their federal student loans since March 2020, thanks to a pandemic-related pause that Biden extended, several times. The benefit is set to end Aug. 31.
Trump’s college “affordability” proposal considered the elimination of federally funded student loans. That didn’t happen. It remained unclear where financial support would come from. So, we continue to kick the can down the road.
Total student loan debt is now $1.75 trillion.
Undergraduate-student graduation rate is 54%; many students run out of money. And, while 45 million students borrow more than $160 billion per year, university endowment funds have risen to almost $400 billion. That’s money universities keep, when it could be used to reduce tuition.
The cycle that causes the problem: the more federal student financial aid available, the higher the tuition (and fees) charged by universities, and a greater amount of student debt. For students, it’s a “no-win” cycle of ever-increasing debt.
We need to eliminate the patchwork of existing student loan repayment programs, and replace it with a single, well-functioning income driven repayment program that will be easier for student borrowers to navigate, and easier for the Department of Education to effectively administer.
A realistic Biden “plan” to reduce student debt, will require tuition decreases, a loan forgiveness incentive for former students, and not allow universities to operate as for-profit businesses.
Only judicial process can decide guilt or innocence
How did we get to the point that the rules that apply to the rest of us don’t apply to Donald Trump? He said it himself, “I could … shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
I don’t know whether Trump is guilty of the charges leveled at him, and no one else does either. The answer requires full due process of law, in court, not in the court of public opinion. So, why are Republicans declaring him innocent without hearing or seeing any evidence?
Why didn’t they give the same benefit to Hillary Clinton? Republicans pilloried Clinton for using a private email server for public communications. (They did not care that members of Trump’s administration did the same.) An FBI investigation concluded that she was careless but there was no criminal case. Nevertheless, Republicans clamored to “lock her up.”
Now, Republicans are competing to outdo each other with laughably hypocritical complaints about the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, which appears to be part of an investigation into mishandling of classified documents with implications for national security.
Republicans have compared the FBI to the Gestapo, called for violence and defunding the FBI, and complained about the politicization of the Justice Department. Adding to the hypocrisy, Trump spent his single term repeatedly trying to use the Justice Department for his own benefit.
Democracy depends on letting the Justice Department investigation run its course. Guilt or innocence is decided through the judicial process, not by demands from partisans.