Political Roundtable Part XXX

[Zonkerbl]

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[Zonkerbl]

The Failed United States of America.

It's going to take a blue state to outlaw gun possession with an end around of this nature to get the supreme court radicals to come to its senses.

and... scene

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FWIW, the timing of this is such that it looks like they started working on it pretty much the moment the Texas law came out.

The perversity of this all, Republicans will end up weaponizing this exact response to ratchet up the outrage on single voter issue no. 2. gun control whilst conveniently ignoring that the assault on the constitution they love to accuse the democrats of has been championed and developed by conservative think tanks.

You know, I've never seen the GOP make an issue out of guns like they have gay marriage. I think the dirty little secret is that only a third of US households own guns and only a fraction of those (some fraction of the white people) care enough about it to vote about it. It's red meat for the extremist far right but not a winning election issue.

[Wizardspride]

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[FAH1223]

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And Biden being tone deaf here

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[Wizardspride]

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[Wizardspride]

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[FAH1223]

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[Zonkerbl]

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[Ruzious]

How Liz Cheney is treated by Republicans is one example showing the Republican party is nothing more than a mob that only cares about power rather than a political party that cares about issues and their country.

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[dckingsfan]

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This is interesting... I am not sure that this should be owned by Biden in a singular fashion though.

First, the inflationary pressures didn't come from Biden, they are global. And the cure to high prices are high prices - as someone else noted in this thread. So, the best thing he can do on this one is "sit in his basement".

The second part of the "cure", IMO, should be unions and minimum wage hikes. That will be a broad base cure affecting the largest number of folks. Going after single issue things like "student debt" should be secondary.

I feel that the Biden Administration is being pushed into a corner on this - I hope they broadly ignore those forces but not ignore those singular issues (for the time being).

My two cents...

[FAH1223]

This is interesting... I am not sure that this should be owned by Biden in a singular fashion though.

First, the inflationary pressures didn't come from Biden, they are global. And the cure to high prices are high prices - as someone else noted in this thread. So, the best thing he can do on this one is "sit in his basement".

The second part of the "cure", IMO, should be unions and minimum wage hikes. That will be a broad base cure affecting the largest number of folks. Going after single issue things like "student debt" should be secondary.

I feel that the Biden Administration is being pushed into a corner on this - I hope they broadly ignore those forces but not ignore those singular issues (for the time being).

My two cents...

Him waiting for Congress to send him a bill is a clear cop-out. It’s well within his powers and he fumbled an easy win because he probably doesn’t care.

If you don’t want to wipe out the debt, extend the deadline or suspend interest and point to that come midterms.

The communication apparatus of this White House is garbage.

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[FAH1223]

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[dckingsfan]

This is interesting... I am not sure that this should be owned by Biden in a singular fashion though.

First, the inflationary pressures didn't come from Biden, they are global. And the cure to high prices are high prices - as someone else noted in this thread. So, the best thing he can do on this one is "sit in his basement".

The second part of the "cure", IMO, should be unions and minimum wage hikes. That will be a broad base cure affecting the largest number of folks. Going after single issue things like "student debt" should be secondary.

I feel that the Biden Administration is being pushed into a corner on this - I hope they broadly ignore those forces but not ignore those singular issues (for the time being).

My two cents...

Him waiting for Congress to send him a bill is a clear cop-out. It’s well within his powers and he fumbled an easy win because he probably doesn’t care.

If you don’t want to wipe out the debt, extend the deadline or suspend interest and point to that come midterms.

The communication apparatus of this White House is garbage.

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Gotcha - two different things though. Student debt, the best way to help those in the bottom quintile and WH communication.

I'll start with the communication. It hasn't been good. Not on this and on many other topics. One thing I violently disagree with - I do think he cares - but that is just opinion.

With respect to student loans - we disagree - I think his focus should be on BBB & helping those in the bottom quintile. But, as your posts show - he is getting painted into a corner. I hope he goes down into his basement and ignores this (for the time being).

[dckingsfan]

One more thing - Manchin is not a democrat. Folks can say that moderate Ds are responsible for this - but it just isn't the case. They are fully lined up behind BBB.

It is the crossover Republicans that have blocked BBB not the moderates or the progressives.

And the problem? The Ds (moderates + progressives together) don't have enough votes.

[dckingsfan]

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-covid-surge-shows-overwhelming-cost-of-being-unvaccinated-america/

[Zonkerbl]

I mean, Manchin probably thinks that the CTC is so popular, they could easily just pass it as a separate bill, and then he gets the price tag on BBB that he's after. But it's a stupid hill to die on.

Trump wasn't afraid to pass unpopular or outright illegal EOs to throw red meat to his base, and even the people who disagreed with the policy in the GOP agreed it showed he wasn't afraid to take bold action, even it was stupid action.

I don't understand what Biden gets from dithering about things the progressive left asked for. Show Manchin you mean business.

[FAH1223]

I mean, Manchin probably thinks that the CTC is so popular, they could easily just pass it as a separate bill, and then he gets the price tag on BBB that he's after. But it's a stupid hill to die on.

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This cutoff of CTC payments is not the only looming financial problem facing millions of Americans. Since the pandemic began, student loan payments have been on a pause. The pause has been extended several times, but the White House has confirmed that it will not extend the pause again after January 31. This means that payments of $393 per month (on average) will resume for 42 million federal borrowers. The raw total of those renewed payments, on an annual basis, approaches the level of the one-time checks handed out in the American Rescue Plan.

So under current policy, in January, CTC checks will stop, and in February, student loan payments will restart. This double whammy is a form of austerity that might bolster the federal government’s bottom line, but will severely crunch millions of families and young college graduates in the middle of an inflation surge.

I’M REMINDED OF TWO historic situations. The first was in 1937, when Franklin Roosevelt, confident that his New Deal policies had put the economy on greater footing, tried to balance the budget, concerned about (as his Federal Reserve chair Marriner Eccles put it) a “dangerous inflation” in consumer goods. This triggered a recession within the Great Depression, one that Roosevelt had to work to reverse; the buildup prior to WWII—which didn’t really take effect until four years later—finally did the trick. Periodically over the years, we have relived 1937, with too-soon efforts to kick out federal support for the economy. If we reimpose significant costs on families and young people at the outset of 2022, we could relive 1937 all over again.

The second historical analogy is 1979, when Fed chair Paul Volcker announced that he would “break the back” of inflation with persistent interest rate hikes. This lasted for three years and created the worst economic downturn since the Depression and the decimation of Midwestern manufacturing. Eventually, inflation came down and Volcker eased up, at the cost of the financial fortunes of millions.

[Zonkerbl]

What I get from this article is abortion has been a polarizing issue for so long that nobody talks about it - as a result, we're astoundingly ignorant about 1) the details of abortion - it mostly happens in the first trimester, very few abortions happen in the last trimester, the way "weeks of age of the fetus" is calculated is nuanced, etc. 2) the details of what will happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned - trigger laws in many states will make abortion flat out illegal, for everybody, for all reasons 3) as Nate demonstrated, everybody is extraordinarily ignorant about the opinions that people outside their bubble have about abortion. I'm more aware of opinions of right wing extremist forced birth advocates because I get their opinions forced down my throat all the time. But the extremely strong opinions all my well educated white friends have about abortion don't get expressed very often because they don't have to.

Once Roe v. Wade is overturned or seriously undermined, this country 1) will start talking about abortion 2) will quickly learn about the details of what the SCOTUS just did and how it affects them and their friends and their family 3) the country will quickly learn that there is a significant chunk of the progressive left, educated white women in particular, that holds extremely strong opinions about abortion that noone has had to think about because the current regime favors their views, so they don't have to complain about it.

Make no mistake, taking away the right to abortion will cause turnout of well educated white women to skyrocket and the GOP will get crushed in the next election.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-americans-really-think-about-abortion/?ex_cid=538twitter

[Pointgod]

This is interesting... I am not sure that this should be owned by Biden in a singular fashion though.

First, the inflationary pressures didn't come from Biden, they are global. And the cure to high prices are high prices - as someone else noted in this thread. So, the best thing he can do on this one is "sit in his basement".

The second part of the "cure", IMO, should be unions and minimum wage hikes. That will be a broad base cure affecting the largest number of folks. Going after single issue things like "student debt" should be secondary.

I feel that the Biden Administration is being pushed into a corner on this - I hope they broadly ignore those forces but not ignore those singular issues (for the time being).

My two cents...

Him waiting for Congress to send him a bill is a clear cop-out. It’s well within his powers and he fumbled an easy win because he probably doesn’t care.

If you don’t want to wipe out the debt, extend the deadline or suspend interest and point to that come midterms.

The communication apparatus of this White House is garbage.

Read on Twitter

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Gotcha - two different things though. Student debt, the best way to help those in the bottom quintile and WH communication.

I'll start with the communication. It hasn't been good. Not on this and on many other topics. One thing I violently disagree with - I do think he cares - but that is just opinion.

With respect to student loans - we disagree - I think his focus should be on BBB & helping those in the bottom quintile. But, as your posts show - he is getting painted into a corner. I hope he goes down into his basement and ignores this (for the time being).

Cancelling student loans is a hell of a lot more complicated than reactionaries on Twitter will have you believe. The best option is for Congress to pass a law, simple as that.

The problem with Biden discharging student loans is that no one knows if it’s constitutionally legal and trust me you will have a ton of right wing groups sue the government (funny Republicans are never made to be punished for going against things that are broadly popular) and a Republican President could come in and reverse the order which would predictably throw things into chaos (and if anyone believes Republicans would suffer any political hit you haven’t been paying attention).

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/07/1062070001/student-loan-forgiveness-debt-president-biden-campaign-promise

Much has been written about the president's authority — through his education secretary — to simply cancel the debts of millions of borrowers. Here's an NPR primer from nearly two years ago.

But Biden doesn't seem eager to try this door. For one thing, he says, it's not certain that canceling student loans with the stroke of his pen would hold up in court, admitting in a February 2021 town hall that "I don't think I have the authority" to cancel $50,000 per borrower.

Instead of acting unilaterally, though, this year Biden asked the Education and Justice departments to explore his legal options. The results are still TBD, more than six months later.

Since then, the White House has gone largely quiet on loan cancellation. Some advocates — and many Democrats — worry that, for whatever reason, the administration is intentionally dragging its feet. Not so, said Kvaal, the education undersecretary, in his interview with NPR.

"Legal authority is not an on-off switch. You need to think about the standards that would be applied, the rationale that we can muster," Kvaal explained. "We are looking very carefully with the White House and the Department of Justice at whether we can cancel loans across the board for everyone, and that's something where deliberations are still continuing."

And cancelling student loan debt is not as politically popular as most people believe. It takes a lot of nuance.

"I do think the president maybe understands that broad loan forgiveness is not popular in this country, which is why, I think, he has not gone the route of doing what some in his party want to do."

But polling suggests broad loan forgiveness would be popular, if done with some nuance. For example, a Grinnell College poll conducted in March found that 27% of respondents supported forgiving all student debt and an additional 39% supported forgiveness "for those in need." In other polling — from Vox/Data for Progress and the Harris Poll — a majority of respondents supported broad, if limited, forgiveness.

But I get the frustration from advocates and Biden shouldn’t have run on it if he didn’t have a plan to deliver. The Whitehouse has communicated this poorly and he needs to fire all of his political advisors. These clowns are still using the Clinton playbook from decades ago trying to appeal to bi-partisanship and sane Republicans.

[Pointgod]

I mean, Manchin probably thinks that the CTC is so popular, they could easily just pass it as a separate bill, and then he gets the price tag on BBB that he's after. But it's a stupid hill to die on.

Trump wasn't afraid to pass unpopular or outright illegal EOs to throw red meat to his base, and even the people who disagreed with the policy in the GOP agreed it showed he wasn't afraid to take bold action, even it was stupid action.

I don't understand what Biden gets from dithering about things the progressive left asked for. Show Manchin you mean business.

No Joe Manchin is a selfish **** period. He only cares about his donors and if the country goes to hell so be it, he’s a rich and retiring soon anyways so what does he care? The guy is a complete piece of ****.