Hi Joseph... great piece... one other looming issue for which I'd like to hear your thoughts... For borrowers on an IDR plan, the write-off of the remaining balance will potentially be taxable at that point in the future when they've finished the years of payments.
For PSLF, that write-off is explicitly non-taxable but my understanding is that for all non-PSLF plans, this was not written into the law and a temporary fix was added into one of the Biden COVID laws that only extends for a few more years. After that, absent congressional action, the write-off becomes taxable again.
This, of course, would be essentially unpayable when that was to occur. Do we just assume Congress permanently fixes this or is this more trouble down the road?
Ah yes! The technicalities of a "forgiveness tax" are a big mess. My guess is that it gets fixed at some point, just because it would be such an obvious problem faced by recipients, but I am really not sure about the legal technicalities of how they will get it fixed.
Have you ever looked at cohorted data? I've never seen such breakdowns, but you could get so more insight from them. You could look at loan balance remaining from a given cohort by years since. You could look at repayment rate by major. When college access is increasing, uncohorted data is just up and to the right.
I asked in part because their data is so suspect. It doesn't make sense that for a 2009 cohort, women would have paid off zero percent of their loans. I think they get their gender stats by saying "of loans from 2009 that were still active in 2018 and increased balance in 2020, what is the loan balance vs original balance." Suffice to say, this is a dogshit cohort analysis.
As usual, one of the most informative and data driven article on the topic that I have seen to date. Great work.
Thanks Bear!
Hi Joseph... great piece... one other looming issue for which I'd like to hear your thoughts... For borrowers on an IDR plan, the write-off of the remaining balance will potentially be taxable at that point in the future when they've finished the years of payments.
For PSLF, that write-off is explicitly non-taxable but my understanding is that for all non-PSLF plans, this was not written into the law and a temporary fix was added into one of the Biden COVID laws that only extends for a few more years. After that, absent congressional action, the write-off becomes taxable again.
This, of course, would be essentially unpayable when that was to occur. Do we just assume Congress permanently fixes this or is this more trouble down the road?
Ah yes! The technicalities of a "forgiveness tax" are a big mess. My guess is that it gets fixed at some point, just because it would be such an obvious problem faced by recipients, but I am really not sure about the legal technicalities of how they will get it fixed.
Have you ever looked at cohorted data? I've never seen such breakdowns, but you could get so more insight from them. You could look at loan balance remaining from a given cohort by years since. You could look at repayment rate by major. When college access is increasing, uncohorted data is just up and to the right.
I know there are people at the Jain Family Institute who have looked at cohort breakdown—they wrote a bit about it at the NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/13/opinion/politics/student-loan-payments-resume.html
But unfortunately the underlying data they used isn't public so I haven't been able to look at it.
I asked in part because their data is so suspect. It doesn't make sense that for a 2009 cohort, women would have paid off zero percent of their loans. I think they get their gender stats by saying "of loans from 2009 that were still active in 2018 and increased balance in 2020, what is the loan balance vs original balance." Suffice to say, this is a dogshit cohort analysis.