Go go go

You sound lovely

Let me turn it around since the opposing claim is that he worked with Republicans to soften the bill. Where did he come out specifically against it? Finding clips of Biden back then is near impossible with all the results that come up from his presidency, and I honestly don’t care enough to keep digging.

Okay so you have literally no idea whether he even ever expressed any specific approval for the part of the bill you’re blaming him for being more responsible for than any other US senator. He didn’t write it, he didn’t make that amendment, and he supported some other parts in debate. But you definitely know he’s most responsible. Out of everyone.

Good to know.

I’m just saying that isn’t how most voters make their decisions. It absolutely should be

Correct, which is why the awful quality of our media and the prevalence of propaganda in our discourse should be a much bigger deal than it is considered as. If you and me want to talk about how important that is, instead of shitting on Biden for some random reason when Trump undoes some good thing that he did, we can do that, but you’re clearly not into that.

I don’t even know what to say about all the rest of this stuff. The point is: Your thing about Biden being “most responsible” even for this very, very loosely connected bit of policy that impacted student loans was a deliberate lie. Whether you were lying, or just repeating some lie that you genuinely believe, is not as important to me anymore. I feel like our interaction here can conclude.

If someone wanted to have a decent career and life, and signed for some student loans not really grasping the implications, and now they’re subject to neo-slavery for the bulk of the part of their adult life when they’re even trying to get themselves established, that’s fucked. Especially since a lot of the time, the promised job security that was supposed to provide the income to pay back the loans hasn’t materialized, and a variety of interest and related fuckery have come into the picture to mean that they’re on a more or less neverending treadmill of servitude they didn’t sign up for.

There are wide varieties of scenarios where a democratic government is supposed to step in and realize that even though “the rules” are being followed, the outcome is horribly unjust, and they fix it. Forgiving student loan payments is one of the obvious ones of those in the modern day. “The rules” is just something we all made up.

Just because it’s written down, doesn’t make it right.

See “Sec. 220. Nondischargeability of certain educational benefits and loans.” Also, the following is from the Wikipedia entry on BAPCPA.

Got it. Where did he come out specifically in favor of this one specific provision?

President Biden was a huge improvement over Senator Biden, and I give him full credit for that.

Yeah, I’ll make sure not to go back in time to 2005 and elect him for anything back then. Back then, I didn’t support Democrats either, they were mostly shit with Al Gore as a rare exception. Now they’re getting significantly better, and you are casting this massive multi-decade net to try to find little individual things somewhere in the history that you can bring up and make this freakout about, and misrepresent.

Like I say, now that I understand the full scope better, it is impossible for me to see this any other way than just finding random bullshit to throw at Biden.

Dude… I think you are literally just making this up (or repeating it from someone who made it up.)

I looked into the 2005 bankruptcy bill which they are arguing about in this clip. I couldn’t even find anything in it about student loans. I searched the text, and followed the links to read the article Mother Jones wrote about the issue. Nothing about student loans. The Wikipedia page does have a single sentence claiming that it impacted student loan formulas in some way, with a “citation needed.” Where in the text does it do that?

I have found some pages (one, two) that claim that the 2005 bankruptcy reform included making private student loan debt non-dischargeable. So maybe there is something to this argument? Like I said, I couldn’t find it in the actual text.

As far as I can tell, deciding whether student loans are dischargeable mostly roots back to a 1987 court case and has to do with having to prove certain elements in bankruptcy court. I don’t really know. But regardless, this whole bankruptcy bill had a huge impact on a wide variety of stuff, Biden didn’t create it or sponsor it. It does look like he went to bat for it, which was probably bad, but the student loan stuff was a tiny part if it even existed in the bill at all. (Which, maybe it did, I reached my limit for wanting to look into this.) And saying that he was “the Senator” who was most responsible for this thing is just weird, even if he supported it. Presumably, a lot of people supported it, including the authors of the legislation.

Also, micro-focusing on just whether student loan debt is dischargeable in bankruptcy, and saying that is the issue that is competitive with the issue of forgiving loans for the vast majority of people who are paying them who are not bankrupt, is super weird.

Also, you know what Biden is responsible for? In 2022, the DOJ released new guidance indicating that they would not oppose in bankruptcy court anyone who wanted it discharged and could prove that it would be a hardship otherwise.

I have reached a firm conclusion that you are twisting facts around to bad-mouth Biden on this issue.

That was his sales pitch, and one that I am totally behind, but those are promises, not a narrative.

No, that was reality. That’s what happened. The promises were twice as big, but the reality was still enormous.

“Biden caused inflation to go up” was a narrative, and it sold like Nintendo Switch. “Biden caused wages to go up” is not an equally compelling narrative… why? That is what happened. I mean, I know why that one wasn’t a narrative, but the reason has absolutely nothing to do with either reality or the inherent nature of the narrative.

His “big raise” proposal wouldn’t even return rates to where they were before Trump slashed them.

Most working people made way more even after adjusting for inflation after Biden was done than before.

Democrats made a conscious decision to abandon working class Americans in favor of urban professionals. It wasn’t a slow devolution, it was a pivot.

True that. It is the source of most of their troubles today, not only because of the history and people’s pattern recognition, but because they’re still doing it. And yet, one singular Democrat broke with that, and here you are shitting on him.

Why?

Have I said anything that’s not true?

According to logicbomb, you’re misrepresenting Biden’s involvement with the student loan bill you’re talking about. Was the 2005 bill the one you were talking about? What was in it that you didn’t like and how was Biden responsible for that part of it?

The only time Democrats have a narrative is when Republicans do something awful, which requires Republicans to be in power.

Biden’s narrative was that we need to have a big raise in corporate taxes, spend almost a trillion dollars finally doing something about climate change, bring domestic manufacturing back to the US and give people working-class jobs again. I sort of suspect that’s why the corporate press was so silent about the good things he did, and so aggressive and loud about the various attacks against him (like that inflation was all his fault, things like that that would resonate with the voters). It’s practically a built-in reflex to them at this point: They know the Republican will set the economy on fire, but they’ll be fine even if some other people won’t be, so by simply setting a line that if anyone crosses them, they will tank that person’s chances even if they’re otherwise doing some good things (and even if doing those things is really necessary for the US to keep functioning) (and even if the alternative is active widespread destruction), they keep teaching the lessons that people in power need to have taught to them. So they can keep control.

You’re not wrong in most of your analysis, I don’t think. But the Democrats didn’t get this way overnight or by accident. It happened on purpose, through natural selection and legalized bribery and threat. And, also, any time they do do something good, someone like you comes along and makes sure to shit all over it and “call balls and strikes” and try to “put it in context” and try to cancel it back out again.

There’s a whole other way to respond to blaming Reagan which is “yeah sure but we have a lot of momentum in people who are sick to death of the same bullshit, Bernie and AOC are drawing record crowds and there’s not even any kind of election going on that would motivate it, we actually probably have a chance at building a framework to do something about this whole broken system. Certainly Trump trying to gut the country for its fixtures and send everyone to ultra-prison will galvanize some opposition, let’s do something with it.”

But no. Instead it’s just this drumbeat of “whoa whoa whoa if you’re talking about Reagan let’s shit on Biden instead” “Democrats are shit” “let’s get discouraged” “it’s all his fault” “no wonder people aren’t excited” “neoliberalism” “doesn’t have a story” “get sad” “it’s all his fault” “remember when he betrayed you?” “most voters aren’t policy wonks” in big discouraging paragraphs.

There’s always something you can dig up, to do it with. And in the end, isn’t demotivating any kind of action or hope or credit for good things, the most important thing?

There is one type of person who looks at a fucked up situation in the world, and things “Who can I talk about who is responsible?” They often pick the biggest, or most recent or relevant target.

There’s another type of person who looks at a fucked up situation in the world, and thinks “Can I connect this to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in some way?”

It really looks a lot to me here like you are doing the second of those things. You’re allowed to, sure, just like we’re allowed to tell you that it’s a weird thing to do.

Yeah, I generally agree with all of this. It’s a little confusing to me because:

Biden was a shitty Senator and a much better President.

the reign of fascism will last until the Democratic party turns into something capable of defeating it

Is a weird juxtaposition. If someone in the Democratic party did turn himself on a personal level into something capable of going good things, why would you want to emphasize how shit he was 30 years ago? I mean, it is true, but also, these were some of the things that a lot of people used to attack him and pretend he wasn’t good now and help lay the electoral groundwork for the horrors we’ve got going on now.

I feel like if you’re motivated to speak honestly, but you’re only speaking about one side of the equation and the one that was less relevant and in fact actively misleading in the election, that’s dishonest. Maybe not. Maybe I am just sensitive about it because of the quantity and volume and variety of dishonest stuff that was levied at him. But that’s where I am coming from in it, at least.

Joe Biden forgave half a trillion dollars worth of student loan debt, the Supreme Court told him he couldn’t, and he still managed to get a couple of hundred billion forgiven.

All this stuff Trump is now undoing is stuff that Biden did. All these people having their wages garnished, are suddenly having problems because of Biden’s people losing the election.

I don’t know what or when you’re talking about here although I assume it is roughly accurate. Biden did all kinds of fucked up stuff from supporting segregation to supporting Clinton’s neoliberalism to the Iraq War and all of it, sure. Israel too, even up to the present day. If you want to tell me we need to get rid of every one of those 1990s Democrats I will 100% agree with you because they are fucking everything up. Biden somehow turned himself into not one of them (except on Israel) even though he was the same age.

I think people are still attacking Biden just out of habit at this point, because what’s done is done. But if his party had won, this particular instance of bullshit (along with an incredible amount more) would not be happening. That’s what is most relevant here. If you want to look at a broader scale, then let’s say that if not for Reagan and for a generation of young people too cool to vote for Democrats because they thought it would help end the Vietnam War if they stopped voting, maybe we’d still be able to support a family on a single income and go to the doctor when we needed to.