Like I’m sure I’d fail at actually abolishing ICE that way but I dgaf as long as the checks get sent out. I’d be on TV like “Cash that shit FAST people! The Republicans are suing for it back. Once you cash it you’re good.”
Then I’d play Mitch’s hostage taking strategy.
“You want to restore the funding for ICE that I sent away? Stimulus, bitches. I’ll sign that bill if it’s got six months of stimulus. Fuck around and find out!”
Checks won’t be set out. The president can’t spend money outside of what has been appropriated by Congress. Broad language may allow wiggle room for redirecting some money, as Trump tried to do, and there is a limited ability for a president to refuse to spend allocated money, but liquidating the budget of a federal agency by executive order just isn’t happening.
The realistic fantasy is to just refuse to spend money wherever possible to shut down the government and tell Republicans that no stimulus is pushing poor people all a cliff, and if they’re going off the cliff, then where we go one, we go all, and I’m going to do my best to tank the stock market and fuck all your investments and I’m going to fuck up national security and let the terrorists win unless you give me a country worth saving.
If you want to take hostages, take hostages they care about.
Someone interpret the last two charts. My brain misfires when I try to understand them.
Well I’d need the head of ICE to be down for the cause. We’re not really liquidating the budget so much as we’re re-allocating it. ICE’s new function would be to enforce immigration and customs by reducing poverty in America, thus ipso facto something something, enforcing immigration.
I’m with you up until there. Could just threaten to use the Defense Production Act to force some of the biggest earners in the S&P 500 to produce surgical masks for pennies on the dollar. Sorry AAPL, MSFT, and AMZN… You make surgical masks for us now. We’re going to give one per day to everyone who has to go to work because Senate Republicans won’t pass a stimulus bill enabling shutdowns to happen.
You got a problem with that? Talk to Mitch.
This is a bad argument.
Income =/= wealth?
and I imagine there is a lot more room in that 1st quartile of wealth than there is in the 1st quartile of income.
(I wish they had #s there because now I’m not sure about the above…)
I understand that, but how is it that so much of the distribution of one is on the left and the other is on the right.
Expensive educations lead to better paying jobs?
People with wealth don’t need student loans. People with college educations have higher paying jobs than average.
That’s the second chart. Maybe the first is that when starting out you take on a lot of debt (education and housing). So, you can be making a lot of money, but be poor due to debt.
1st quintile’s upper limit was 25k in 2018
But people with higher paying jobs are also wealthier than average too? But maybe not initially.
Not initially, especially if they’re young and paying off student loans.
Ok thanks, I finally got there thanks to kerowo and NBZ. I feel as if I should get some Econ 101 credit.
How about we start with the 23.5% of the debt owed by people making <50k, forget about the 53.9% owed by people making >80k because they got their value out of it and we can talk about the 3rd quintile people.
As a graduate of DeVry it’s worse than that. They approve student loans then when the kids can’t pass any tests because they didn’t finish high school they are stuck with the student loans.
Can we do that, or is it an all or nothing proposition?
The way it works in Australia is that there’s no requirement to service your college debt unless you’re making income over a certain threshold. I have no idea if it’s within the power of the President to do something like that but I assume not.
The breakdown for people ages 25-40 is a better dataset because it removes the factor of wages tending to increase as people get older.
Basically what student debt forgiveness would mean is that the government gives relief to people who are in debt, but 56% of that relief goes to people making more than 80K a year, including 28.5% going to people making over 130K per year. It’s a regressive cash handout to largely people who are already well off, despite holding debt.
I posted upthread about how the Democrats are barely any more a centre-left party at all, they’re becoming the party of educated elites. I feel like people dismiss too easily the myriad ways in which the Dems already signal to the uneducated that they aren’t members of the club. This would be gasoline on the fire imo. I don’t have a strong feeling about whether it’s worth doing it in policy terms, in the absence of other options for offering debt relief, but I think it’s just a terrible look if the first thing Dems do on taking power is a handout to college graduates.
I’m not a huge fan of the show in general but I recommend this week’s Useful Idiots, they had Thomas Frank on, he’s the author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”. He was pushing this exact same line about how the Democrats are the educated/urban/PMC party now and the Republicans are going to become the working class party. It’ll be a populist-right European type of party in the vein of the National Front, UKIP etc. The Democrats will be the party of urban capital, heavily into meritocracy, but with a cosmopolitan cultural sensibility. Again, like European aristocracy. We’re bringing noblesse oblige back, baby! And there just won’t be a left party, which is nothing new, there already isn’t. God knows what will happen to the Black vote.