Biden doesn’t do anything!
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He is!
I know. It’s an example of good messaging.
A good thing, but not a new thing, just bragging about a good accomplishment (as he should). He’s also sending an email to people who are within 2 years of loan forgiveness to let them know, which is very good strategically.
I hope when he brags about this on the campaign trail, he has a good pivot to other things he’ll do if reelected, because this round of forgiveness impacts fewer than 0.05% of voters.
It also accounts for less than 0.026% of GDP. So again, it’s good, but in the grand scheme of how the economic pie gets divided up, this is barely even a crumb.
Overall the program has helped about 0.5% of voters, which is pretty good but narrowly targeted obviously. That forgiveness amount is 0.61% of GDP, so again, not much more than table scraps in the grand scheme although it’s meaningful to the people who get it.
come on dude. What’s the standard here exactly? Student loan reforms also go waaay beyond actually using PSLF. The SAVE plans are also huge wins. These are massive wins for young people with student debt, and also not the totality of what biden has done.
I said they’re good and he should brag about them. But in the grand scheme of things, they’re small. I wouldn’t base a campaign around helping 0.5% of voters. It should be mentioned, but the campaign should be about abortion first, abortion second, and helping the working class in significant ways third (ideally targeting the housing crisis).
This article gets at the crisis somewhat, and he seems to be putting a plan together. It needs to end up being big and attack the problem from all sides IMO (incentivize better zoning/more building, rate buydowns or a new way to lower mortgage rates, down payment assistance).
The report documents how, over the past decade, home prices have significantly outpaced wage growth for American families. That has pushed ownership out of reach for middle-income home shoppers and left lower-income renters on the brink of poverty.
A quarter of tenants — about 12 million households — now spend more than half their income on rent. Prices are so high that if a minimum-wage employee worked 45 hours a week for a month, a median rent would consume every dollar he or she made.
The lack of affordable housing particularly hurts lower-income families and couples starting out. Millions of lower-cost apartments have essentially disappeared over the past decade, either through rising rents or by falling into disrepair. At the same time, smaller and lower-cost “starter homes” are a shrinking share of the market.
No one is basing the campaign on student loans, what are you arguing against?
Your apparent point that he’s doing a good job, evidenced by student loan forgiveness. It’s either that or you’re attributing to us the point of view that student loan forgiveness doesn’t count as something good he’s done, which would be a strawman.
Trump crowed about stock market gains at every opportunity.
People ate it up because they either were rich or aspired to be rich. And a lot of people think the stock market is the economy.
The market is up 10% this year already. News says average 401k is up $12K. I don’t see any problem with Biden and surrogates mentioning this and reminding people things are getting better. “Stock market at all time highs” seems like a gift regardless of complex factors, might as well exploit it.
I’m torn on how much Biden’s campaign should focus on making fun of Trump. But surely Trump’s claims that recent stock market gains should be attributed to his impending victory (and not in any way to Biden!) are worthy of some clowning.
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Student loan forgiveness is one thing, it is obviously not the totality of things Biden is doing. Criticizing as if it’s the only thing he’s doing like you are here isn’t fair.
Average 401k is up 12k but only 58% of households even own a single share of stock. The wealthiest 10% own 93% of the stock market so I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the median household doesn’t give a shit.
That word average sure is deceptive. Here’s a fun one the top 10% of Americans on average owned 969k in stocks. How many of us are in the top 10% and own more than 969k in stocks? Roughly zero of us? Wow such stats much wow.
Income inequality is the whole ball game. Fuck the total output that isn’t getting passed along at all in any way. Fuck the unemployment rate that doesn’t track people who gave up on looking for a job or how much those jobs actually pay. Come to me with the total number of hours worked along with the gross national income (which is GDP - the value of raw materials extracted and capital replacement costs), median family income, and a very detailed breakdown of the homeless population and then we’ll have something resembling a useful view of how the economy is doing. I would also like to very closely track food, housing, healthcare, education/childcare, power, and fuel spending (aka necessities) so that we can figure out how much spending power the peasants actually have. I don’t care that personal electronics are cheaper those are luxury items that have minimal impacts on the health and wellbeing of the population and should never ever ever be mentioned in the same sentence as actually important shit like having food to eat and a roof over your head.
I would probably just straight up exclude the entire top 5% from econometrics because they make words like ‘average’ totally useless and obscure what’s really going on, which is that they are getting a whole bunch richer at the exact same time as everyone else is getting poorer at a time when the country as a whole is objectively getting richer by the minute. They’re taking more than their share to the point where they’re taking all of the gains that should be apportioned to labor + some of labors already tight spending power in an economy that is growing by 3%+ a year. Why? Because my stock portfolio did a hell of a lot better than economic growth that’s why.
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I’m in favor of this, along with being in favor of mentioning the faulty economic indicators. It should just all be immediately followed by a pivot to why that’s not being felt by everyone and how he’s going to help and expand the middle class now since they didn’t enjoy all those benefits.
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Guessing there are older upper-middle class posters that fit in there too, why would think it’s zero?
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It’s on a very short list of things he did that helped regular people. Capping some drug prices did too, but he took a very small nibble on that and it needs to be drastically expanded. The middle class tax cuts expired iirc and need to be renewed, and I think the ACA subsidies are expiring too?
We’ll see what happens with infrastructure, the projects ramping up should help the broad economy but most of that will be captured by the top 1% or maybe top 10%. Obviously some people will get jobs and benefit personally, but that’s not going to be a huge number. Some of the restoring definitely helps some people, too.
This is kind of the point, though. Things are totally fine for the wealthy and the old people who were at least middle class. This is what a lot of this discussion has been centered around. People earning “middle class” money who are under ~40 and don’t own homes (a big chunk of the under 40) are getting smoked.
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- Massive student loan reforms, attempted forgiveness but lol SCOTUS
- Insulin price caps
- Overtime for >3 million people who didn’t use to qualify
- OTC birth control
- Largest investment in renewable energy of all time, renewables now > coal
- New mortgage red lining rules
- Aggressively going after various junk fees
- Huge investment in cancer research
- NLRB now actually does something for labor
Again, you can want more all you want and that’s more than fair, but I question what you’ve been reading if you think it’s a ‘very short list’
Got an actual infrastructure bill passed. Lots of manufacturing jerbs being repatriated.
Considering he had narrow majorities and now a hostile house. Plus a terrible SCOTUS. Better than I expected.
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oh god and yeah that.
Biden has had a very long set of accomplishments that are roundly ignored by republicans because they don’t care and by some leftists because… I don’t know really. Because they wanted Bernie? Because they’re doomers (I don’t think CW is this fwiw)? Because they want failure thinking they’d get radical change? Because they missed Biden doing things?
It really is puzzling to me.
CHIPs Act is also a pretty big deal. Biden was in Phoenix yesterday to announce big grants to intel that will create 10000 jobs.
I remember some talk over the past few months that infrastructure and other stuff would hopefully get more and more visible and tangible as we get closer to the election. This is that.
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