I have a long history with student loans. I am one of those 40 million plus debtors myself. In 2018, I helped organize a student loan debt demonstration in NYC to appeal to both media and President Trump.

This is an area in which I sit on neither side of the liberal or conservative crowds. Make no mistake about it, student loans are predatory and have allowed for crippling debt for tens of millions of Americans, by design. This is an issue that has largely been responsible for many folks in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s and 60s from being able to get ahead.

Buying a home? Yeah, forget that. You can literally rob someone at gunpoint at the age of 18, do your time in prison, get reformed and re-enter society ten years later and have a cleaner slate than someone that signed a Master Promissory Note at the same age.

What the hell does a teenager know about finance or interest rates? If they went through the American school system, probably not a whole lot. A smartened consumer would derail the whole high school to college money pipeline, would it not?

At $1.7 trillion, student loan debt is the second largest consumer debt category and yet federal loans are the only type of debt that cannot be discharged via standard bankruptcy protections as these bankruptcy protections were removed in 1976 (in 99 percent of all cases).

To have a different set of bankruptcy rules for federal student loans violates Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4 of the United States Constitution which authorizes Congress to enact “Uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States.” It provides that Congress shall enact bankruptcy laws to allow Americans to exercise their bankruptcy rights.

What I have long advocated for is not a cancellation of federal student loans but rather simply restoring these Constitution-guaranteed bankruptcy protections. I do not believe in government bailouts for anybody whether that be for corporations, banks, or even student loans. Printing new money will only compound the financial crisis and genuinely alienate millions of Americans who would be paying for it.

President Biden’s student forgiveness plan is nothing more than a smoke and mirrors gimmick that creates the illusion of help but in the long run will only make matters worse. Restoring bankruptcy protections is the solution most don’t know about and those that do know about it, don’t want to bring it up. If most Americans knew that this could potentially be an option with a change in law, I believe an overwhelming amount would support it.

Besides bankruptcy protections being restored, I would propose permanently freezing the interest rates for federal student loans. Borrowers in most cases will come out of college with 30k-40k in debt. By the time ten to 15 years go by, that amount balloons up to 100k in some cases. It becomes an unattainable amount for many struggling to catch up to so they flat out just give up. Then they default and at that point, they are trapped. The point of no return.

The choices are to keep paying and live life as an indentured servant or to just simply stop paying. There are people well into their 50s and 60s paying off a balance that they will never catch. I’ve met several. They will die and never be able to catch up.

The 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, ”Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

I truly believe the 13th amendment protects against usurious debt contracts. What is handicapping about these interest rates is their ability to own the borrower decades after they have already paid the original principal amount of the loan that was taken out. Under the 13th amendment, Congress must enact legislation to stop interest rate usury and free millions from indentured servitude.

To fellow patriots reading this, are you ever really free if you owe six figures to the government for a signing mistake you made decades earlier?

In some states, professional licenses can be revoked for outstanding student loan debt. How can you pay back the loans if the government will not let you work? It only makes sense if you don’t think about it. State governments must also enact legislation to protect against such stupidity like this and draconian measures such as wage garnishment or garnishment of tax returns which the federal government is keen on doing through their IRS tentacles.

My final common sense solution would be to stop federal loans altogether. Forever. I know the higher education industry quite well with over 15 years of working in admissions and related areas. The entire college tuition model is built on receiving money from the government. More and more money is pumped into federal student loans each year and what do the colleges and universities do in turn? They further raise tuition because they keep getting that sweet government-guaranteed money.

The cycle perpetuates in the ugliest of manners with college tuition rates far, far exceeding the inflation rate of just about anything else. You’ve heard of the military-industrial complex? What we have here is the higher education industrial complex. It will continue to spiral out of control until the federal government exits the federal student loan industry. Biden’s plan will do nothing but further, entice these colleges and universities to raise tuition. They have no skin in the game.

Imagine a more competitive market where colleges would actually have to be creative to recruit and retain students. Government money wouldn’t be handed over. Useless majors wouldn’t exist because if students weren’t doing well after graduation, the school would no longer exist as it would work in a natural business environment. If a restaurant opened up and kept giving people food poisoning and hepatitis that restaurant would not last long.

For doing a miserable job at failing in their ROI, so many colleges and universities should naturally be shuttered. Instead, these schools are propped up by the government in a bubble environment. They face no real repercussions for failure, whether that be for declining, watered-down academics, or failure in the sense of unemployment/underemployment for their alumni.

A federal government banishment from higher education would allow for the industry to correct itself and we can also ensure that a federal student loan debt crisis would never happen again.