Who needs a student loan forgiveness when your payments can be deferred for a year, with no decrease in total debt, as long as you have survived a terrorist attack?

Today, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) Reintroduced a law, called the Terrorism Survivors Student Loan Deferment Act, that would do just that. He said in a press release: “Giving survivors some time to regroup by delaying their student loan payments just makes good sense. This is also the bare minimum.

As my colleague Hannah Levintova wrote yesterday, canceling student debt is a general policy that will not disproportionately benefit wealthy households. On the contrary: the authors of a new study “found that at every level of cancellation proposed – $ 10,000, $ 50,000 or the $ 75,000 proposed last year by the Roosevelt Institute – those with the least in net worth would see the greatest benefit “.

In case you were wondering, under the proposed legislation, “a victim of a terrorist attack is a person designated as a victim of a terrorist attack by the head of the federal agency investigating the attack.” “.

The FBI defines terrorism as “violent criminal acts committed by individuals and / or groups for the purpose of pursuing ideological objectives arising from national influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial or environmental nature.” In other words, if you’ve survived a bombing or a mass shooting by someone for no particular motive, well, you’re out of luck.