Warren: Black-White Wealth Gap, Gov’t Racial Discrimination Reasons to Forgive Billions in Student Loan Debt

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said at a press conference on Tuesday on Capitol Hill that one reason for a law to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt is to address the black/white wealth gap due to the federal government’s “decades” of racial discrimination.

“As everyone in this room knows there is a black-white wealth gap in this country that has been persistent and growing,” Warren said at a press conference she held with House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) to announce the Student Loan Debt Relief Act.

Warren and Clyburn said their bill, if signed into law, would forgive up to $50,000 of loan debt to each of the estimated 45 million Americans who have student loan debt and also would reduce the interest rate for remaining loan balances.

{snip}

“This hits people of color the hardest,” Warren said, flanked by two students of color who shared their personal stories about staggering student loan debt. Another student in the audience said she has $250,000 in student loan debt and has still not completed her education at Howard University in Washington, DC.

{snip}

But racial inequality was the dominant theme of the press conference, including statistics Warren cited wherein blacks are more likely to owe more in student loans 12 years after graduating than they did right after completing college.

Warren said:

As I pointed out earlier we have a real problem in this country with the black/white wealth gap. And that black/white wealth gap is the product in no small part of decades of official discrimination by our government — red-lining, for example, kept African American families from buying homes and the consequences of that — generation after generation after generation — was that while white families built up some wealth black families were simply denied that opportunity.

{snip}

When asked how the legislation would be paid for, Warren said there are “lots of ways” to pay for it, and both she and Clyburn advanced one of those ideas as reversing the tax cuts Congress recently put in place that they said benefit “multi-millionaires.”

{snip}