Maybe he should have taken courses that would lead to employment.

The department wants to seize the disabled man's benefit checks to pay loans that are at least a decade old.


7 billion? if they forgave loans over 5 yrs old it would be 1 or 2 % of what they spent in iraq...

aren't we as important as our leaders vain-glory?

2005-04-25 06:44:22 PM Deev [TotalFark]

Maybe he should have taken courses that would lead to employment.

Maybe you should read the article.

he took the loan he should have to pay it off....

Screw the seizure of his social security benefits. It's soylent green time, baby!

/mmmmm, soylent

But it's peeeeeeeeeeooooople!

Pull his feeding tube. No more social security for the delinquent.

Hmm, interesting. Social Security is supposed to act like a guaranteed income for people that are disabled, which is the case for this man. Additionally, I'm surprised that the government isn't treating 10+ year old student debts as sunk costs.

Ah, another sucessful graduate of DeVry University !

Won't be able to eat? Huh...sounds like that college education was money well spent.

7 Billion? wtf.

Interesting case. From what I know, student loans are dischargable in a bankruptcy if over 10 years old and it would place the debtor in hardship. Couple that with the fact that in a bankruptcy, Social Security payments are totally exempt assets and cannot be used to pay off creditors.

From the combination of those 2 principles, and considering that bankruptcy is governed (mostly) by federal law, His SS should not have to pay off his old student loans. However, stranger things have happened in the Supreme Court.

"stranger things have happened in the Supreme Court."

And the 9th Circuit is the most frequently reversed in the country.

Whoever wrote the article is a dumbass. Is that 7 billion for this one man, or for everybody? The way they put it, it sounds like he owes 7b (highly unlikely).

psherman:

2005-04-25 11:39:40 PM psherman

"stranger things have happened in the Supreme Court."

And the 9th Circuit is the most frequently reversed in the country.

The 9th Circuit court is ranked 8th of 13 in terms of reversals.

Solon Isonomia: I'm currently on a full-ride scholarship to law school.



Ok now,I'm jealous (1L who shopuld be nowhere near Fark this time of year, here...)

That's truly great- what school? Did they give that scholarship to you right out of the gate or are you a 2L and #1 in your class or something?

Solon Isonomia:

nally got my bachelors from a school similar to DeVry and I'm currently on a full-ride scholarship to law school


Had to be a little better than DeVry. I think law schools only allow undergraduate degrees from accredited colleges/universities.

Is DeVry accredited?

I have leukemia and the owners of my student loans don't care. I am on full disability and it is still "fark you, pay us."

My government loans were forgiven as soon as they got the paperwork.

Faust_Motel:

Ok now,I'm jealous (1L who shopuld be nowhere near Fark this time of year, here...)

Don't let those stories scare you. Although 1l is the hardest of the three years, it is not the backbreaking challenge that many a lawyer would have you believe.

Billcosby--

Source?

danvon:

Although 1l is the hardest of the three years, it is not the backbreaking challenge that many a lawyer would have you believe.


Oh I know. I'm at Vermont Law, and we're pretty laid back up here as far as law schools go anyhow. But- i do have a closed book exam coming up for Property (4 hours, at that) that is looking to be no fun, despite my interest in the subject. Between that and my second semester of Civ Pro, it won't be a fun set of exams coming up... And just to stay on topic, I don't even want to THINK about what this is all costing...

BillCosby

I'll probably pre-empt you now that I've asked for a source, but I was talking about most overturned as a percentage of cases that are granted cert., not total cases decided. Since this one HAS been granted cert., I think that's a relevant statistic. I wasn't making a commentary about "judicial activism".

I am on disability and taking college classes and I will pay off my student loan after I graduate. Voc Rehab wouldn't give me money for college because I am not medically cleared to work. Should I make improvements in my mental and physical health, I might be able to be cleared to work and use that degree.

So far, the college classes, have been able to keep my insanity in check for a bit, except for peroids that I am on the Internet and go insane quite a bit.

psherman: 2005-04-25 11:47:57 PM psherman

Billcosby--

Source?

http://mediamatters.org/items/200412220001

or you could just google 9th circuit court reversals and click on the first non-foxnews link.

Solon Isonomia: And yes, DeVry is NCA accredited.

Ya learn something every day.

Heh, I think that's obvious, seeing that Faust_Motel and I are Farking at the moment when we should both be studying for finals.

I actually quit buying books after the 1st semester. The profs only test you on the stuff they go over in class anyway. Real hard choice there. $500 per semester for books or show up to class everyday. Hmm, let me think.

xcajx: I have leukemia and the owners of my student loans don't care. I am on full disability and it is still "fark you, pay us."

I hope you've talked to a lawyer. The owners of any loan are going to go after you until a judge tells them to stop. If you've signed up for the RCA 12 records-or-tapes-for-a-penny club, they'll eventually leave you alone if you tell them to go to hell enough times. A loan is different. You pay it back unless a judge says otherwise.

High school counselors really do a sneaky job of pushing these loans onto college-bound kids, because having the kid go to an expensive, prestigious college makes the school look good. They totally handwave how easy it's going to be to pay back the loans. They cast it in terms of lifetime earnings: "If you go to School A, you'll earn $2M over the course of your working life as opposed to $1M going to School B." What they don't tell you is that the debt is due and payable *up front*, while you're in that dues-paying entry-level job you get right out of school and earning what is (hopefully) the least money you will ever earn in your life. Meanwhile, because so much of your paycheck is going out the door servicing student loan debt, all those other early adult life expenses like your first car, set of pots and pans, furniture, "professional" clothes, etc., get financed on a credit card at 25% interest instead of being paid for with cash like they should be. Thus you end up on a debt merry-go-round you can never get off of.

I mean, what the hell else are you going to do if you're some 17 year old high school senior who's used to doing the "right" thing and pleasing the trusted adults in his/her life? Your parents and teachers wouldn't steer you wrong, right?

This also totally discounts the idea that what was a lucrative career when you were 18-22 doesn't go *poof* by your late 20s for one reason or another. I remember the days when people said "computers" the way Benjamin Braddock's mentor said "plastics" in The Graduate. Guess where *that* went. (And no, that wasn't the dot-com days of the 1990s--that was when I was in high school, in the early 1980s.)

/didn't take out college loans, glad he didn't.

danvon: Real hard choice there. $500 per semester for books or show up to class everyday.


I know a guy- don't know if he'll be here next year- but he hasn't been in a single class all semester- he takes bar-bri review courses- I don't know if he has the regular course books or not. It seems like a novel approach.

I know I could have easily gotten away with the $30 Understanding Criminal Law and not bothered with the $95 Crim Law textbook- that's for sure. However- in my particular Civ Pro section- you've gotta know the cases, you do get called on randomly, and you will look like an ass if you don't know what's going on...

A.) We now know why college tuition has risen so much. Getting into college has become an entitlement - therefore student loans flow from the mighty government faucet without any control or enforcement. Those whose parents can barely afford to send their children to school then have to suck from that faucet themselves at higher rates to compensate for those that don't repay their loans and the schools love the idea of tapping into that government steady income, perks, and pay increases while doing less and less work themselves.

"And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a farking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink." --Lester

Exactly how I feel about the government.

Looks like you might be right, at least for the year 2003. That said, I will now mindlessly defend my assertion (even though I'm not on the "activist court" bandwagon) because this is FARK and I think the bylaws require it.

I can't get the chart to load, and they don't detail their methodology on the main page. I'm assuming they're measuring based on the percentage cases that are reversed out of all that are granted cert. It would be helpful to know how many cases went up in each circuit. If a circuit has 2 cases go up and both get reversed, that may well be less "important" than a circuit that has 18 of 20 cases reversed (even though the latter is overturned at a lower rate).

However, even if the 9th Circuit had a lower rate of reversal in 2003, I think that looking at a single year, in isolation, is probably not the best way to determine this sort of thing (even if it is the most recent year). I'd be curious to see what data aggregated over the last 5, 10, or 15 years would show. I suspect it would confirm that, of cases granted cert., the 9th is the most frequently reversed circuit.

Faust_Motel:

you do get called on randomly, and you will look like an ass if you don't know what's going on

Where I went, there was no assigned seating in most classes so if they called on you and you weren't prepared, you just didn't speak up. On the ones that did have assigned seating, for some reason when I was called on, they had a tendency to ask me questions that were very general or about concepts that they had gone over the previous lecture. I guess I was just lucky.

Bar-Bri is essential for the bar exam but for test prep, I'm not so sure. I suppose if you got one that was written especially for the text (they do make those as I recall) I suppose it would suffice. Still, the ass-in-the-chair approach, in my opinion, is the best way to get through.

psherman

I agree (also couldn't get the pdf), but it is enough to make me suspicious if someone blanketly claims they are the most overturned.

Then, in 2001 the Bush administration started shipping those jobs offshore by the tens of thousands.


I mistakenly thought we lived in a capitalist society and private companies offshored
by tens of thousands to save a buck and enrich their shareholders.
Thanks for correcting my mistake.

maybe the only REAL situation something like that would be useful....I definitely need to get one

sorry, DAMN IT!

/been drinking

The Larch

They have already ruined my credit. I have no way of paying them and they know this.

I have no assets either. I look at it as I have nothing anyway so what are they going to take?

They continue to harass me - every day. I don't know what else I can d; I can't afford a lawyer.

Pstudent12

The offshoring of jobs wholesale started in the Clinton years, with Gore and Clinton taking a lot of money from the Chinese in campaign contributions in order to set up laws to help offshore more jobs there. Clinton also raised the H1B and L1 Work Visas to triple their quotas in 1997. Bush never did anything to fix those problems.

It is all globalization anyway, and it cannot be stopped. As long as land, labor, and capital costs are lower in other nations, that is where the jobs will go. Marx was incorrect, labor does not move to capital, capital moves to where labor is cheapest. Tariffs only raise prices in domestic nations that raise them against foreign competition and hurt the economy. Making a barrier to free trade, only hurts the economy and at best it is a band-aid fix anyway. For example saving the steel industry in the USA, raises costs on steel so that welders, automotive assemblers, construction workers, and other jobs that now had a cost increase in steel have to lay some people off now. Therefore, the jobs you save with tariffs, you lose in related industries that the cost of what you are trying to save the job of, makes others lose their jobs.

The USA's only hope is to use technology to innovate, and improve quality via total quality management, and offer better quality products and services, and hope that it creates enough of a market to save at least some jobs.

If not, you may very well see the collapse of the US economy and government within your lifetime.

$7B?????
How the hell do you accumulate seven billion dollars in student loans????
Even with 10yrs of interest, I can't see myself accumulating that much in a lifetime of student loans.

ch4r7ie:

7 billion? if they forgave loans over 5 yrs old it would be 1 or 2 % of what they spent in iraq...

--

Screw that. If you took out a loan from the gubment you should pay it back. It is pretty simple, you borrow money for school, you get finish school, you pay back your loans. Don't cry because you can't afford your school loan payments and brand new car, computer... blah blah blah.