And Medicare is available to everyone over 65 and is somewhat more difficult to get cost-free if you have a lifetime of never paying employment taxes. So it’s not the straightforward “reward poor planning” program that was objected to. And being able to provide basic health care to people who might otherwise be expected to just go die remains totally unanalogous to giving a cash handout to middle class Biden voters no matter how many times you insist it’s the same.
There is no way this proposed plan wouldn’t cause considerable resentment by those who paid the hard way. See this confrontation between Elizabeth Warren and a father during the primaries, for instance:
Again, not how policy is decided. Will anyone dislike this? Yes?! We begin again!
And yet when the CARES act gave 43,000 taxpayers in the United States all earning in excess of $1 million per year an average of $1.6 million each with unlimited pass-through deductions that was all fine? When Delta airlines which made a net profit of $4.8 billion dollars in net profit in 2019 showed up with a bushel basket for subsidies around 10 minutes after the first COVID case arrived up you’re all fine with that.
If you want to stimulate the economy you’ve got to subsidize the middle class. The rich just keep it, and the poor have debt to pay down and won’t be spending it.
Hell, I’m not even rich and I didn’t spend mine. I put it into the stock market, or rather instead of my normal IRA withdrawal that month I did a conversion into a Roth, which is effectively the same thing.
I would prefer that Biden’s first act as president not be to embrace Twitter-obsessive pandering issues with the attitude that “we don’t care if this will piss off voters.” We had enough of that before and it ended up with Trump and a 2020 election that came disturbingly close to re-electing him. Biden is supposed to be smarter than this.
No.
Am I?
OK, I’m in the middle class. Give me 50,000 dollars and whatever I don’t put in a savings or investment account will directly be used to stimulate sellers of luxury goods rather than go to the holders of student loan debt. I don’t have any student loan debt so I will be a much more effective economic engine.
Examples?
I just had this conversation with my mother three hours ago. I also brought up that we push college as the primary means to success. My high school measures success by how many of their students went to college (never mind how many graduate from college because that’s not their problem) and everything they did was geared towards preparing me to be an undergraduate.
I had the same thought! It was the right decision to make even though I wish they had made it in time to help me.
Is that per year or per semester? I’d kinda like to look at your source. I’d love to dream about going to college for a reasonable tuition. But “Google search” won’t get me very far. Can you give us the link?
Why do you hate America?
We. Can’t. Do. That.
That’s what you seem to be missing. There is no way for Biden to, by executive order, give you extra money. However, there appears to be a strategy by which student loans can be forgiven.
It’s also not something Congress is going to go for, when we can’t even get them to pass a second stimulus bill. Yet, apparently, student loan forgiveness is enjoying bipartisan support.
Politics is the art of the possible. You have to take what you can get. If a politician opposes X because Y is better, but X has tons of support and Y has little likelihood of passing, then said politician is just covering ro not supporting the goal in teh first place. They’re betting that they can make sure neither X nor Y occurs.
If it ever becomes possible to try your Y, then that’s what we should do. But I can’t see how doing X, forgiving student loans, in any way would preclude doing Y in the future if it ever gets support. This is true for basically every single proposal that has been given as an alternative.
As such, the comparison is not between X and Y, but between X and not X. Any valid argument has to show why not forgiving student loans results in a better outcome.
As much as I think poorly of the people @Velocity describes*, his argument about resentment is a genuine downside. I would just argue that it’s not necessarily a showstopper—we’d need to keep an eye on the polls. Compare the numbers strongly for to those strongly against.
Ultimately every political decision will make those vehemently against it angry. The question is how many people that is, and how powerful they are.
*And I think I have a right to. I am someone who dropped out of college to avoid taking on student debt, because I’d seen how debt could cripple people. I now regret my decision. It would suck that others would have gotten something I could have gotten, but that’s life in general, and something you have to accept. Other people get lucky in ways I don’t, and I get lucky in ways they don’t–and it doesn’t average out.
I’ve (or they have) suffered, therefore you too must suffer - that’s not a good argument.
I’d bet there’s a component of return on investment involved there. If you forgive student debt, you generally are going to free up a lot of otherwise disposable income for people who presumably are making good money with their college-educated jobs. In other words, you pay 50k today, and you get some multiple of that back as spending over the time that they’d otherwise have paid that loan off. Or you end up with that money being saved and invested/used as home downpayments, etc… The assumption is that student loan debt is a sort of economic brake or anchor that is limiting their full economic participation as someone of their income level.
Just giving the same one time 50k to people under the poverty line isn’t automatically going to result in the same long-term effects to society and the government. Sure, it’s better for the poor people, but is that also necessarily the most effective way to spend that money?
On a similar note, I believe that all the R&D that has gone into creating the COVID-19 vaccine should be destroyed, as it wouldn’t be fair to the people who died before a vaccine was available.
Cite? I mean by Presidential fiat.
Per news articles I could find in circulation, the legal basis for “Biden can cancel student loans by executive order but can’t arrange other kinds of stimulus programs” seems to be:
*Chuck Schumer says this is the case but offers no legal reasons why he believes it to be so.
*Donald Trump made some executive orders about student debt and no one complained.
*Since student debt relief may have some degree of “bipartisan support” no one would object.
There are also multiple bills regarding debt relief working their way through the House, which suggests that the legislature may in fact have some role to play here.
So, other than just being something that’s made up to try to pursue the case for the debt relief goal, the notion is essentially an extension of the government by Presidential fiat that has been growing since the GWB administration and came too close to making Donald Trump a king. I think restoring the guardrails on American democracy so that Trump cannot happen again is about one billion times more important than making sure people with PhDs in grievance studies can afford to upgrade the sunroom this year. I do not support Biden doing ANYTHING by executive order other than ordering that the presidency start functioning according to its constitutional limits again.
A more apt analogy would be: We’re going to distribute the vaccine ONLY to people who spent the last six months going to bars and yelling at Costco employees that they don’t have to wear masks.
So you don’t support Biden doing anything, then, since the Republicans in the Senate have made it clear that they will block all legislation just for the sake of denying him any achievement.
It sets a terrible example. Taking out 6 figures for a degree not worth much is not really the fault of the general public.