• RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Democrats read news like this and instead of just tossing people some peanuts to keep the circus running, they become angry and shocked that people are upset the person they voted for won’t help them.

      • Tinidril@midwest.social
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        10 months ago

        Biden has done far better on student loans than most people are aware. While the big policy battles have been going on, he has been quietly chipping away, with $132b in debt forgiven for 3.5 million borrowers.

        https://youtu.be/3Xe-Q8ORfWo?si=01NF7HCWenUMY1HC

        The only “fix” to the student debt problem is free public college. That’s not something anyone expected a Biden administration to fight for.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which the George W. Bush administration created in 2007 to encourage people to work for the government and nonprofits, has grown significantly during Joe Biden’s presidency. The Conversation asked economist William Chittenden to explain what this student loan program is, who is eligible and what has changed lately.

          How does the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program work? To qualify, borrowers must currently work for the government or a nonprofit.

          Americans getting this debt relief include many nurses, teachers, first responders, Peace Corps volunteers and social workers.

          Once enrolled, borrowers can have their remaining student loan balance forgiven if they remain employed in public service and make 10 years of monthly on-time payments.

          The government can cancel only the balance of the direct loans the Department of Education makes through this program. Any student debt that borrowers owe private lenders remains outstanding.

          Why are many more loans being forgiven now? Borrowers began to apply in 2017, after the requisite decade of on-time payments, for their remaining balances to be forgiven. However, nearly all of these applications were rejected – about 98% of them.

          The vast majority of these denials were due to technicalities. Many borrowers felt cheated after holding up their end of the deal but still finding themselves burdened with debts they didn’t believe they should have to repay. Some of them filed a class-action lawsuit, which the Biden administration settled in 2021. Recognizing these concerns, the government streamlined and overhauled the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

          The Department of Education announced several important changes in 2021. The federal government expanded the types of loans that are eligible for forgiveness and gave borrowers a way to get credit for past payments.** However, most student loan borrowers did not see the impact of this change until October 2023, when student loan payments resumed for other borrowers after being paused starting in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.**

          lmao amazing what some context can do. Loans that should’ve been forgiven years ago are only now being forgiven because the political cost of the other 40 million private borrowers resuming payments has to be covered-up somehow, so settling scores that should’ve already been settled is a good propaganda and optic boost for an admin that will never touch the 1.7 trillion in private loans

        • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          There’s 44 million Student loan borrowers carrying a total of 1.6 Trillion in student loans. That means Biden has forgiven about 8% of the total, and it has only reached 8% of the borrowers (worse than that if those numbers are recent and include what’s already been forgiven). Combine that with having actually started collection on the loans again, and just there you have policies which materially hurt millions more than they help but we’re all supposed to nod along and smile while we crank the blue lever on the “this machine kills Palestinian children” box.

          That’s not even getting into the way Democrats negotiated themselves down from $50,000+ in forgiveness, or how they chose flimsy justifications for their policy instead of more solid legal grounds to allow it to be torpedoed in court.

          • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            $1.6 trillion seems to be around the amount we used to fund the NDAA and it’s nearly monthly expansions of spending for backing genocidal fascists such as Zelensky and Bibi and other purposes.

        • Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          Awww a little pulverized stale crumb!

          Of which will be used to berate anyone wanting to go further for the next at least 16 years as maybe-later-kiddo we already did something kiddo!

          We could have had this. We still can, rather than blowing a trillion and a half a year on being the world’s largest terrorist. Heck it wouldn’t even interrupt us being a blood thirsty crime against humanity. It would have been “pragmatic” and the goons making stock trades would barely have noticed a blip. I do some trading and would not miss these costs as they are lower than a daily normal fluctuation.

          bernie-chair https://berniesanders.com/issues/free-college-cancel-debt/

          Tax Wall Street Gambling to Cancel All Student Debt and Pay for College for All We can guarantee higher education as a right for all and cancel all student debt for an estimated $2.2 trillion. To pay for this, we will impose a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy a decade ago. This Wall Street speculation tax will raise $2.4 trillion over the next ten years. It works by placing a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades.

    • M68040 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      It’s fucked in particular because even Richard Nixon - a perennial on my shit-list - got that you had to make some concessions sometimes.

      • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        And H W strong armed Israel into a ceasefire. The Overton window is so fucked in America these days it’s not even ironically funny.

    • Kaplya@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I have said before, the system is designed to punish voters who even dare to think about stepping out of line.

      It’s going to be “so you really want to throw tantrum and risk having a Republican elected huh? Well here you go, enjoy 4 years of conservative presidency! Let’s see how much you’re gonna regret when it happens. All you minorities who didn’t vote for us, enjoy the punishment! We’ll see you in 4 years’ time when you finally crawl back to us to beg for mercy. Then we’ll reconsider if we’ll change our stance about your welfare.”

      The two party system is designed to work in such synergistic fashion to make sure that American democracy functions as smoothly as it could.

  • Greenleaf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    In a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, Biden’s failure to consolidate support in key parts of the coalition that elected him in 2020 has left him narrowly trailing Trump, the likely Republican nominee, 39%-37%; 17% support an unnamed third-party candidate.

    The possible good news for the president is that much of the support he needs to rebuild has drifted to third-party candidates, not into the camp of his likely opponent. Twenty percent of Hispanic and Black voters, and 21% of young voters, now say they’ll back someone other than the two main contenders.

    I’m not going to read too much into any one poll, but these results are genuinely surprising to me. This shows there is a sizeable desire among young people and black and hispanic voters for someone presumably to the left of Biden, and they may be willing to put their money where their mouth is and actually vote for Cornel West or Claudia de la Cruz. Although the article says RFK Jr is pretty popular, so idk.

    A candidate or candidates to the left of Biden that liberals believe “spoil” the election and causes them to lose would at first cause them punch left like E. Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap… but in the end it would show that there are plenty of people to the left of the Democrats who aren’t going to play ball anymore, so the Dems can either make actual concessions or keep losing.

    • Kaplya@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      The donors want Biden, that’s all that matters.

      Despite everything we dunk on Biden here, he has done an exceptional job in making the lines going up for every segment of the bourgeois class, from the oil and gas industry, to the military industrial complex, to the financial sector. S&P 500 is now 50% (!!) higher than the highest point under Trump’s presidency. Banks and credit institutions are now raking in more profit than ever from penalties and interest payments from the Fed rate hikes.

      Biden is a great president because of that. Not to you, but to them. Even if Biden loses, as long as the Democratic Party continues to demonstrate their loyalty to the wealthy donor class, they will continue to get the money.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I know people hate to hear this, but Biden has also secured American hegemony for the short term. The war in Ukraine has cut off the EU from Russia both in terms of international relations and natural resources (nordstream anyone) and got Europe firmly back into the US fold for the foreseeable future. The US has won its inter imperial rivalry with Western and Central Europe, and Japan is a non factor at this point in time. The stage is set for the next action, a united front of the imperialist triad (US, EU and Japan, along with their vassals) to take on China.

        All this sucks terribly for the people of the world, but is great for the dogs and stooges of the US empire. They can sit comfortably atop their mountain of skulls, for now.

        • xj9 [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I don’t think the Hegemony is as secure as it seems. Did you see how that “Operation Prosperity Guardian” thing went? From my perspective, the US has continually been losing face on the international stage for a while now. While I highly doubt that convicting the US and Israel of genocide will have much of an enforceable outcome, they are both deeply reliant on global trade which is very easy to disrupt (see Yemen vs. Israel rn). Internally Empire faces widespread dissatisfaction, economic struggles for the lower class, dwindling military recruitment, and is pretty much entirely reliant on “developing countries, including China” for manufacturing. They are clearly trying to posture as if all this is business as usual, but I’m not sure everyone is convinced.

          That said, I could be way off and this is just wishful thinking.

        • Tunnelvision [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          Japan recently received a huge sum of money to buy western weapons. Like overnight became the largest army in terms of military budget in the region.

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    This country has only two responses to genocide: Apathy and Enthusiasm

    So the poll results have to be driven by something else, my money is on student debt payments which began back in October

    Which means the poll results are shallow and ephemeral and likely to shift back when the media begins its “vote blue no matter who” push

    As always nothing has changed, the vast majority of the working class rightfully remain estranged from electoralism, while the people who do vote remain middle class freaks who will be whipped back into line the minute a DNC aligned influencer calls them Kremlin agents

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I mean, when push comes to shove, enough bodies in swing states are going to hold their nose and vote for Biden just because of the threat of Trump to keep the race close.

    I do wonder if enough Republican voters will stay at home because they’re kinda tired of Trump and his shenanigans or will they embrace their Id and vote Trump for no other reasons than to make the libs cry… thonk