Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

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Beelzebuddy said:
Those people who don't know aren't going to need an answer for why Republicans aren't supporting Democrat policies. They will ask why Democrats aren't supporting Democrat policies, and "go ask the Republicans" is not an answer to that. To repeat: point fingers all you want, but where do we actually go from here?
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About the only place we can go on that front to make things better is getting more decent Democrats to where they could actually make a difference.

ETA: As for your ETA, getting out the votes for our democracy is fundamentally necessary. That supporters of democracy are generally facing headwinds against them when it comes to a bunch of factors, not least being how media coverage works and built-in inequalities to our systems certainly doesn't change that.
 
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IsThisTheLife said:
Not even wrong.

List of executive actions signed by Joe Biden

ETA >> not that he does anything more than literally sign where someone points.
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Thanks for providing that link which lists what he's done by Executive Action. They look pretty damn good to me. Many of those XO's are repealing Trump's XO's and dealing with the Covid pandemic.

ETA>>still supporting a malignant narcissist-sociopath who think he's a 'stable genius' and remembering five words a few minutes later proves he
"has one of the great memories of all time"?

“You go, 'person, woman, man, camera, TV,'” he said. “They say, ‘That's amazing. How did you do that?’ I have, like, a good memory ... I’m cognitively there.”
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Stacyhs said:
Thanks for providing that link which lists what he's done by Executive Action. They look pretty damn good to me. Many of those XO's are repealing Trump's XO's and dealing with the Covid pandemic.

ETA>>still supporting a malignant narcissist-sociopath who think he's a 'stable genius' and remembering five words a few minutes later proves he
"has one of the great memories of all time"?
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Somewhere in the back of your consciousness I'm sure you're aware that Biden didn't draw up those 'executive actions' (completely incapable), that they originated with individuals who are invisible, unelected and unaccountable.

You're happy with that?
 
IsThisTheLife said:
Somewhere in the back of your consciousness I'm sure you're aware that Biden didn't draw up those 'executive actions' (completely incapable), that they originated with individuals who are invisible, unelected and unaccountable.

You're happy with that?
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Thank you for voicing your concern.
 
Biden administration gives more borrowers a chance of debt cancellation

People who have been paying down their student loans for decades will get a better chance at debt cancellation, as the Biden administration temporarily relaxes the rules of certain repayment plans.

On Tuesday, the Education Department said it will grant federal student loan borrowers additional credit toward loan forgiveness under what is known as income-driven repayment plans. The move will bring more than 3.6 million people closer to debt cancellation, including 40,000 who will be immediately eligible, according to the department.

About half of the more than $1 trillion in outstanding student loans made directly by the federal government are being repaid through one of the four income-driven plans. The plans cap monthly payments at a given percentage of earnings, with the promise that the balance will be forgiven after 20 or 25 years of payments.
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IsThisTheLife said:
Somewhere in the back of your consciousness I'm sure you're aware that Biden didn't draw up those 'executive actions' (completely incapable), that they originated with individuals who are invisible, unelected and unaccountable.

You're happy with that?
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I'm sure you had the same concerns when Trump was issuing XO's, didn't you? Especially considering his own ex-cabinet members said they couldn't get him to read a damn thing and he had the attention span of a goldfish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by_Donald_Trump
 
ZiprHead said:
Biden administration gives more borrowers a chance of debt cancellation
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But, but, but....I thought Biden wasn't doing anything to help those with student loan debt! :rolleyes:

Why should people just have the loans they took out just written off instead of paying them back? Do credit card companies and banks allow that? Hell, no. I paid about $100,000 for my daughter's university degree using my inheritance from my mother rather than keep it for my retirement (and I could use it!) instead of making her take out loans. Am I going to get that money back? Hell, no.
 
IsThisTheLife said:
Somewhere in the back of your consciousness I'm sure you're aware that Biden didn't draw up those 'executive actions' (completely incapable), that they originated with individuals who are invisible, unelected and unaccountable.

You're happy with that?
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Once the president's signature is on it, the president is accountable. That doesn't cut it?
 
gnome said:
Once the president's signature is on it, the president is accountable. That doesn't cut it?
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Honestly, the complaint mostly just sounds like it's of the same ilk as the ever popular in Republican circles "All politicians are dirty politicians" that's heavily used to engage in equivocation and shield them from the need to take the next step and compare the actual differences in play honestly.
 
Stacyhs said:
But, but, but....I thought Biden wasn't doing anything to help those with student loan debt! :rolleyes:

Why should people just have the loans they took out just written off instead of paying them back? Do credit card companies and banks allow that? Hell, no. I paid about $100,000 for my daughter's university degree using my inheritance from my mother rather than keep it for my retirement (and I could use it!) instead of making her take out loans. Am I going to get that money back? Hell, no.
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I think the implication is forgiving it creates greater economic stimulus and welfare than giving you money.
 
IsThisTheLife said:
Somewhere in the back of your consciousness I'm sure you're aware that Biden didn't draw up those 'executive actions' (completely incapable), that they originated with individuals who are invisible, unelected and unaccountable.

You're happy with that?
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Are you under the delusion that presidents actually write up their own XO's? Do you think Trump wrote up all his XO's in-between rounds of golf?

 
Delvo said:
And that link describes another example of exactly how. It's only a partial measure even for those whom it does benefit, and it's about the fifth or sixth round of picking out some tiny special group to deem worthy of it while avoiding touching the big picture.
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So what do you think should be done? Everyone's student loan debts just wiped clean 100%? Twenty-thirty-forty-thousand dollars forgiven? A percentage?

It doesn't look like it's geared toward "some tiny special group to deem worthy of it" to me at all. It looks damn generous.
 
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Stacyhs said:
So what do you think should be done?
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The point at that moment was not what should be done but what had been done, but OK...

I'm in favor of 100% plus making college and trade school free (and a back-door way to do the latter without the Manchin-Sinematic Universe's permission would be to establish the debt forgiveness as repeating every semester). But really any amount is better than nothing, as long as it's universal, not another round of doing something for left-handed color-blind Capricorns and freckled dwarves whose names contain a letter "o" while lying about thinking it just can't be done at all.

Of the two commonly suggested intermediate amounts, 50000 would be better than 10000. The bigger amount would mean more of all of the benefits: to individuals, to the economy overall, to the public perception & discourse about our whole college-economy paradigm, and to Biden's and the party's reputation as keeping promises and actually listening to the people and doing good instead of just more of the same we've been getting for decades. (I'd also compare them in terms of the drawbacks as well as the benefits, but there are no drawbacks to either.) One thing both numbers have in common is that they'd serve as a sloppy proxy for means-testing (on the basis that bigger loans went to people who one might expect in theory to end up earning more). And the out-of-place middle-managers running the party do love their means-testing and sloppy proxies.

I don't expect the king of arbitrarily deliberately making American peasants' debt burdens worse to really care about the direct effects on people or the economy. But to continue to refuse to do it even if just to avoid/reduce the coming electoral shellacking is another level of bizarre.
 
Stacyhs said:
But, but, but....I thought Biden wasn't doing anything to help those with student loan debt! :rolleyes:



Why should people just have the loans they took out just written off instead of paying them back? Do credit card companies and banks allow that? Hell, no. I paid about $100,000 for my daughter's university degree using my inheritance from my mother rather than keep it for my retirement (and I could use it!) instead of making her take out loans. Am I going to get that money back? Hell, no.
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You were in an extraordinarily fortunate position and chose to be generous.

Good for you.

But this is still basically "I got mine, **** you."
 
To poke back a bit, complaints of "do nothing president" and do nothing party are a bit misplaced when it comes to Biden and the Democrats. To poke at some examples -

One Hundred Amazing Things Biden and the Democrats Did in One Year!

Certainly, the GOP has been trying hard to hurt the US, prevent Biden and the Democrats from making things better, and blame everything bad that they caused on Biden and the Democrats, but progress has been made on many fronts, even if it's not always as much as we want to see.
 
Aridas said:
One Hundred Amazing Things Biden and the Democrats Did in One Year!
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That's the most damning list of faint praise I've ever seen. We're going to get creamed in November.

Today's 4/20, so here's the straight dope. If you want a single issue to sail into a cushy reelection on, legalize pot. Biden could do it today. Everyone in the joint would notice. You wouldn't need to refer to a BS little listicle of a hundred ways these tiny little incremental changes no one notices or cares about are actually really good ones.
 
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Beelzebuddy said:
Today's 4/20, so here's the straight dope. If you want a single issue to sail into a cushy reelection on, legalize pot. Biden could do it today.
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No he couldn't do it today. Making pot legal would require legislation, which means it involves Congress. (He could take other measures... Suspend enforcement, issue pardons for those with simple possession charge, etc.) but it would still not be "legal".

As for whether that would guarantee an election victory? It would be a popular measure among the majority but that does not guarantee they would come out to vote for Biden because of it. (Many in support of legalization may vote Democrat anyways, others may not care enough, or think "it's now legal... No need to vote Democrats because of it").

Sent from my moto e using Tapatalk
 
Segnosaur said:
"it's now legal... No need to vote Democrats because of it"
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I was going to reply to the rest of your post but the absurdity of saying "people won't vote for the party that does things they want" struck me dumb. You're setting a beer down because the sign says "free beer tomorrow?" Really? How self-defeating can you get?
 
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