AMANDA SCHEIB
Special to The Leader
This is a crucial year to vote for all Americans, but especially college students.
Pertaining to higher education and the predatory loan sharks that come along with college, Trump has not made this a focal point in his debates orpolicies during his campaign — even though there are somewhere around 42 million student loan borrowers.
This is unnerving due to the fact that 70 percent of college graduates start off their lives in debt.
“The average balance is around $30,000, up from $10,000 in the early 1990s, and many borrowers owe $100,000 or more. The typical month- ly payment is $400,” according to an article for CNBC.
Trump has put little effort and thought into a policy that details undergraduate students, including Fredonia students, to pay our monthly bills for around 30 years.
Biden plans to chop 10 years off of Trump’s plan, leaving us to pay 20 years at 5 percent income rates.
A topic that everyone has been talking about relating to loans is student loan forgiveness.
Trump wants to completely disregard anything to do with student debt forgiveness, while Biden wants to fix the policy put into place by George W. Bush.
For undergraduate students, Biden wants to dismiss up to $10,000 for everyone, while also restoring bankruptcy shieldings.
On top of this, Biden pledges to make community college and training programs free for two years of attendance.
“The plan would invest $50 billion in workforce training programs and $8 billion in upgrades to community college technology and facility infrastructure,” according to an article for NPR.
If we really dive into what Trump has said about higher education, his focal points have been promoting nationalist ideals and cutting budgets for student debt loans.
Women’s rights have evolved in the last decade, but something yet again has stopped progress.
It is called separation of church and state, a term created by the Founding Fathers.
You can relate this to our government, especially when it comes to abortion.
Donald Trump has fought hard against abortions. You can see this in his new Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, or his former attorney general Jeff Sessions.
When it comes to the decision to choose, Trump thinks not.
Our president wants to completely ban abortions with expections of rape, incest or if the woman’s life is in danger.
He has said that he is in favor of banning abortion up to anywhere after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The funding of Planned Parenthood was never something Trump supported.
Planned Parenthood does not only help women receive safe and affordable abortions, but also STD and cancer screenings, therapy for rape victims, sex education and more.
This is the frightening part, because The Hyde Amendment prohibits any government fundings for abortions under Medicaid, unless the mother is endangered, or it is due to rape or incest.
Essentially, Trump would strip all other programs Planned Parenthood has to offer other than abortions from funding.
He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which helps women receive affordable birth control. Repealing it would also make anyone over the age of 18 forced to buy their own insurance.
This means that all college students would have to be able to afford health insurance on top of our crippling loan debts.
Biden’s stance on female reproductive healthcare has been shaky throughout history.
At one point, he tried to cut funding that would essentially grant women reproductive rights; in 2020, Biden has done a full 360.
Biden supports repealing The Hyde Amendment, so that abortions could be covered with federal funding. He also wants to protect Roe v. Wade, restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood and support a woman’s right to choose in general.
Ultimately, Joe Biden is for everything that Donald Trump wants to take away for women’s reproductive rights.
The economy is a bit trickier when it comes to our next president.
No matter who wins, the next man up will inherit one of the worst economic stances to date, with record job losses, plummeting stocks and even higher numbers of homelessness and medical bills.
One of the bigger policies that has been talked about throughout the presi- dential race are taxes.
Joe Biden’s stances on taxes include: raising taxes on anyone that makes more than $400,000 yearly (while keeping taxes the same for anyone that makes less than that), raising corporate taxes from 21 percent to 28 percent, forcing sanctions on tax havens, raising taxes on foreign profits and raising long-term capital gain tax rates from 23.8 percent to 40 percent.
Biden focuses on raising taxes near the top five percent and anyone who uses loopholes in the laws to avoid paying them. This tax raise will most likely not affect middle class families.
Trump focuses more on corporation tax cuts. He “signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and changed the income level of individual tax brackets (the highest tax bracket saw their rate fall from 39.6 percent to 37 percent),” according to Marketplace.com.
After these cuts, the economy grew 2.9 percent after two years.
Trump has also discussed another tax cut, calling it “Tax Cut 2.0.”
This would be aimed for middle class individuals, and would cut taxes by 10 percent, helping lower taxes on families that need a tax break.
With a tax break on the higher one percent and corporations as well, the upper class would see some sort of influence, negative or positive.
Dealing with job growth, Biden plans to create 18.6 million new jobs and higher wages for most workers.
Income would increase, on average, around $4,000 for Biden’s plan.
Trump’s policies regarding new jobs would produce 11.2 million jobs by 2025 with little to no increase for incomes. The economy, women’s reproductive rights, taxes, student loans and higher education all affect undergraduate students to some degree.
This election is something that college voters should care about — because in the end whoever wins will change the way we live our lives.
Whether you care deeply about the right for women to choose, you have stocks invested or if you are about to graduate and looking for opportunities in the job field, you should use the voice you have by voting.