How Joe Biden Bankrupted Students and the Average Joe
In an October, 2019 GQ.com article penned by Luke Darby, former Vice President Joe Biden’s central role in ushering in today’s bankruptcy and student loan crises is laid bare.
Pointing to a recent Democratic Party presidential primary debate as a backdrop, Darby describes a tense confrontation between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren over creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
However, their debate appearance was not the first time these two had clashed over treatment of American consumers. To be sure, they have a long and bitter history over this issue– reaching all the way back before Biden was vice president and before Warren was elected to the senate. That history began with Biden’s support for and fulfillment of a GOP fever-dream for so-called “bankruptcy reform” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he was a powerful senator from Delaware and Warren was still a lowly Harvard law professor.
At that time, Warren and Biden locked horns over the differences between and utility of the two kinds of bankruptcy then available to individuals: Chapters 7 and 13 of the federal bankruptcy law.
Chapter 7, otherwise known as “liquidation” bankruptcy was primarily used by low to moderate income people, and allowed them to sell assets in order to pay creditors, and then…
