You know… Manchin is an intriguing case. If Democrats do take advantage of their planned demographic advantages it’ll be interesting how many folks do as Manchin does. That’s the thing about institutions that acquire great power. They can always be subverted.
Manchin will not support the bill.
Has any presidency imploded in such spectacular fashion?
But the only metric that matters to the US is the GDP. That and the almighty DOW. Those are the two numbers that our patriotic duty as Americans are to make go up. Anything that deviates from that is verboten, anything in the pursuit of it is obligatory.
Quality of life index? Life expectancy? Infant and child mortality rates? Wealth inequality? Racial inequality?
Those don’t serve the stockholders fiduciary interests, so can only be addressed as necessary PR in pursuit of managing these numbers.
The problem with American Exceptionalism is that it only means that we do mediocrity poorly. We can only stand to support the things that we excel at, and those categories are shrinking.
It’s good to have obstacles. If everything were easy, things would be boring. But those obstacles should not be insurmountable. Failure should not mean lifelong poverty. And the obstacles should not be artificially and arbitrarily imposed.
You would have needed 10. While it’s possible that some Republicans may have signed onto a voting rights bill, there’s no way they would have removed the filibuster to do so.
There are a number of things that people seem quite certain of that would involve alternate universes and histories in order to prove. It’s easy to say, since there is also no way to prove your guess to be wrong.
And all the time, people would be complaining about congress wasting their time on a voting rights bill when what is needed is stimulus and infrastructure improvements. They’d then complain even louder when it ends up being DOA because it doesn’t have the votes to pass.
And this is also assuming that any voting rights bill doesn’t get fast tracked to SCOTUS and found unconstitutional by the conservative majority on the court.
Has any presidency been sabotaged in such spectacular fashion? It takes a shit ton of gall to complain about how a car is running while you stand there pouring sugar in the gas tank.
Sorry for making the Senate/House flubs, again my apologies.
But if you think this is the same old, same old, a half-hour ago the White House fired a shot at Joe Manchin in a two page response which needs to be read to be believed.
Guys we can rewrite history to explain why he’s destined to fail in the alternate histories as well, but the reality is in this history he is failing as well.
So there may be reasons as to how he could’ve succeeded, reasons which we could deduce if we think about it. And one obvious deduction is he should have strengthened voting rights which may have, gasp!, helped even moderate R’s to support his agenda. Instead, he left the mechanisms for the current divide in place, completely ignored them, has not gone after the instigators of the Insurrection, and now, unless a miracle occurs, he is a lame duck President less than 1 year in.
So yeah, going after voting rights as your #1 priotity on 1.21.21 may NOT have worked. You know what else didn’t work? Biden in reality. Just read that statement above.
Quoted for Truth.
He’s not complaining.
Thank you. It’s always been my belief that this is the true reason for the delay in passing the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts gutted the last one with nary an eyelash flutter. Nothing indicates he’d hesitate to do it again, given the chance. Pass the Voting Rights Act too early, and we risk this being its fate ahead of 2022.
Infrastructure has been a good pursuit to try and pass while we waited. Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema notwithstanding.
America must elect Senators around him. That is the only solution which is both realistic and within Board limits. Campaign for more (D) Senators and don’t give up.
I mean, you are the one who is rewriting history to explain why he would have succeeded in alternate histories. I’m not doing any rewriting myself, just pointing out that your rewriting isn’t necessarily as accurate as you may think.
He’s done about as well as one would expect of a president without support from congress.
Succeeded in what exactly? Passing anything at all, whether or not it helps the American people?
I don’t think that it’s quite as obvious as you make it out to be.
Can you explain exactly what this voting rights bill would have looked like? Can you explain why it would get a 60 vote majority support in the senate?
Why would moderate R’s support a voting rights bill that would erode their own power?
I don’t think that he’s ignored them at all. He has worked with political realities, and between him and his team, they may have a slightly better inkling as to what could get through this congress than you do.
Securing voting rights doesn’t do much good if you don’t actually give people a reason to vote for you.
That really is more of a job for congress.
Everyone’s a lame duck if you have that much pessimism about it.
I don’t think that voting rights is going to be what ushers in the next and probably permanent conservative majority. It’s going to be voter disinterest, as people are talking about all voter rights when they are worried about their jobs and bills. Doesn’t do much good to secure your supporters the right to vote if they don’t feel like using it.
What really doesn’t work is to blame Biden for stuff that’s actually congress’s fault. You can probably get far more voters to stay home by spreading that message than the Republicans can make stay home with disenfranchisement.
So, you support a situation where, if someone went to college in 2015, they’re saddled with five or six figures of debt that they will spend decades struggling to pay off. But someone who goes to college in 2025 for the exact same degree gets a full ride? That’s your solution?
How does that make any fucking sense at all? Why does “forgiving debt” trigger your “Why should I have to pay?” kneejerk, but “Everyone gets a free ride” doesn’t? Your paying for their college either way. The only way this idea makes any sense at all is if its specific purpose is fucking over Millennials, and only Millennials.
Maybe it has something to with fulfilling obligations that were committed to?
Help me out with this student loan debt cancellation plan.
Is this a one-time thing? Should people getting student loans today or tomorrow also expect them to be paid off by someone else in the future? If so, how does this not become de-facto free college? Why wouldn’t everyone now take out the maximum amount of student loan momey they can possibly get away with? How is this good public policy? If not, how is it even remotely fair that one group, and not those that came before or after, get their college paid for?
If there was a magic wand I could wave to get Democrats to wake up about something, it would be the role incentives play in human behaviour, and the secondary effects of primary changes. For example, it was obvious that crime was going to go up after ‘defund the police’, and after progressive DA’s stopped cash bail policies and started releasing criminals back into the streets. It was also obvious that this would blow back on Democrats. But you all seemed blind to the possibility until it happened.
If you forgive student loans, the obvious result is that the cost of education will increase because students will be incentivized to borrow more money, which will incentivize colleges to raise their fees. What you are really doing is creating a wealth transfer system that will ultimately move more money to university administrators at the expense of future students who will take out more loans to pay higher tuition, or at the expense of taxpayers who will fund it all if those loans are also forgiven.
The same goes for free daycare. Is it really wise public policy to incentivize people to put their children in institutions from a very young age? Because if you make it free, a LOT of people who would otherwise raise their kids at home will put them in facilities. It will also drive the cost through the roof, as any massive injection of money into a market where supply is contrained must do. This will eventually force more regulation and federal control of daycare, and increase the overall cost to society dramatically while enriching a few insiders such as teacher’s unions who will invariably seek to control it. I have experience in that area.
Our city announced a ‘solution’ to homelessness a while ago: make it a lot easier to be homeless through shelter programs, food programs, lax enforcement, etc. The result was the opposite of what they intended, but totally obvious to anyone thinking about incentives. Make it easier to be homeless, and you’ll get more homelessness. That’s how human nature works. It’s not hard to incentivize people into decisions leading to lifelong dependence, which helps no one.
Please, don’t just think of who you can help today. Think about the nature of that help, and what it might do to those people and society tomorrow.
Don’t look up the G.I. Bill. It will blow your mind, all those freeloaders.
Not only did I get free college, they also gave me a housing allowance.
(Messed up quoting. This was in response to the GI Bill comment)
Democrats understand incentives. It’s just that their motivations are power and one way to get power in a democracy is to give voters what they think they want. It’s rational behavior for power seeking.
It blows my mind that people equate a program which was earned in part by fighting in WWII with general loan forgiveness.
If the first word was Republicans instead of Democrats, would this statement still be true?