I see absolutely no awareness among powerful elected democrats that they’re pissing off their base in a completely unfixable way.
Have we gotten all the TV pundits (McCaskill, Lincoln Project execs) to angrily lecture on how we should never question the great Nancy Pelosi because “she always wins”? She sure does, but WE never win. Never is that more apparent than here. Get on Etrade, ma’am, make yourself a killing.
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Yeah, like if you run the election immediately after the primaries this might be true, but black outreach in those cities would obviously be a huge priority for the campaign and they had a lot of volunteers willing to doorknock etc. This was not so easy taking on Clinton or Biden but I think against Trump it would have been OK.
The progressives should be out there calling this a $7.7 trillion dollar bill because apparently we talk about prices in 10 year time frames now. I mean it’s going to be even higher than that when they bump up the price tag every year for the next decade, but close enough. Just hammer that all day to get an apples to apples comparison with BBB; not that it would matter or that it would work but they should still do it.
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Hey guise, anyone want to take this one?
IMO means testing generally means they don’t want to do it at all and it’s simply whittling it down to as next to nothing as possible.
EDIT: Also they’re not good at it, so it will be either comically restrictive or super easy to cheat
EDIT2: Given that, my money would be on some sort of means-testing $10K forgiveness middle of 2022, in panic time. This will be heralded as a gift for which you should be so grateful to the Dem dinosaurs who “get it done”
I’m good with it if we simultaneously means test the mortgage interest deduction, corporate welfare, commercial real estate depreciation, the basis step up at death and 529s. Otherwise, fuck off.
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Lol at all of this. Bernie had an easy win until most everyone in the Democratic Party picked personal advancement over popular policy. Kinda like what is happening now, and it’s just hilarious that some can’t connect the dots
Lmao at “the voters did it” like they aren’t spoon fed capitalist propaganda from birth to death. Like they didn’t come out of the SC primary thinking they had voted for M4A. The problem is capitalist corruption at the top
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Going into South Carolina, Biden was talking non stop about how Medicare For All was bad. Whatever SC primary voters were voting for with Biden, it wasn’t M4A.
Bernie was winning early on because the centrist dems had 50 million candidates running and splitting the vote. There’s a reason why when they all suddenly dropped out he started losing. That and our stupid primary system lets all the white states go first, even though those states don’t look anything like the modern Democratic Party.
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So after Dems get wafflecrushed doing exactly what David Shor suggests that will be the end of the “be moderate, don’t offend centrists” crew, right? Right (Natalie Portman meme)?
lol the Dems have been “oh we lost, we need to be more like Republicans” my whole life.
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I’d agree with means testing all of those things as well. What it sounds like you’re saying is if rich people get all of these other breaks, we need to definitely give them this one too! But I assume your point was somewhat different from that.
I’m not really thinking about the politics of it. I don’t see why some lawbro who makes seven figures a year needs a break on his loans (I think Biden has said something like this). So in a vacuum, I think that means testing student loan relief is a better policy than not means testing. Of course, we’re not in a vacuum.
So, I’m interested in hearing the arguments against means testing.
The only arguments again means testing I can think of don’t really have anything to do with student loans per se. Mostly it has to do with ease of implementation of any sort of relief, ease of passing a bill, political benefit, etc.
In other words, flame on.
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It’s pretty much all this imo.
If it’s means tested, it just means that the people who most need it are going to have to do a shitton more work to get the benefit. “Okay, we passed 10k in student debt relief, but now we need your last 5 tax returns, your diploma and a detailed breakdown of the assets you might inherit if your parents suddenly die to make sure you actually qualify.”
Just give it to everyone. If some law bro making 800k gets a small benefit out of that, it’s not the end of the world. There aren’t that many of these people.
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This. Most people with super rich parents didn’t have to take out loans to begin with. It’ll probably be cheaper to just pay off whatever rich people’s loans still exist than to set up a bureaucratic means testing administrative nightmare.
The people that benefit from all that stuff Riverman mentioned is like the top 0.5%. Obviously no one gives a shit if you set a super high bar on student loan means testing to just exclude them. But would rather let them have this little extra thing too rather than letting the shitlibs whittle away at it for everyone else.
Bernie had two tremendous runs for an openly socialist old guy without the money and organizers of the centrist Dems. He was always going to be an underdog. It’s good news for when Gen-Z reaches voting age, we’re certainly going to see other progressive candidates use his model to take down a primary in the future if we still have elections.
The media went all in against Bernie. That was fatal.
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Having a bad media strategy makes for a bad candidate.