The federal government is reportedly set to bring in record profits on student loans and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is not happy about it, Huffington Post reported.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the total due in federal student loans this year is $51 billion, bringing the total profit to $120 billion over the past five years. Warren said the Obama administration and Congress are not helping students.
"Instead of helping our students, the government is making a profit on student loans," Warren said of the profit figures during the Generation Progress conference Wednesday. "That is wrong. It is morally wrong. That is obscene."
After reading the $51 billion figure, she encouraged the crowd of young people to express how they felt about that number.
"We can hear some booing at this point," she said, presuming the round of boos was meant for the federal government. "There we go."
The increasing student debt numbers, combined with high unemployment and stagnant wages threaten to slow the economic recovery, so policies for easing post-graduate burdens are being explored all over.
Last month Bill Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, responded to a question of whether or not the federal government would step in with refinancing or loan modification plans.
"I think this is really out of the Fed's purview," Dudley said.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said there is $1.2 trillion currently in outstanding student debt. Rohit Chopra, the CFPB student loan ombudsman suggested that once that figure surpassed $1 trillion, the market "had become too big to fail."
"What's frustrating is that many people in Washington don't really look at it urgently," Chopra said. "Student debt is unquestionably strangling our people, and I think to say that it's not having a broader impact in some ways may be naive."
