Talk about politics here.
Probably quite a quiet thread at the moment I expect.
Politics Discussion: Cynicism Always Warranted
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Truss or Sunak as the next PM then.
A bit like choosing between hanging or lethal injection.
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Truss or Sunak as the next PM then.
A bit like choosing between hanging or lethal injection.
I say hang Truss and inject Sunak.
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Liz Truss was a Remainer – and now she is asked by the BBC’s Nick Robinson why she changed her mind.
The Tory leadership hopeful says she has now embraced the decision of millions of Britons who voted Leave. On voting Remain, she says: “I was wrong and I am prepared to admit I was wrong.”
“Some of the portents of doom didn’t happen and instead we have actually unleashed new opportunities [after Brexit]”.
I think this is the first time I have heard a remainer say they were wrong since the vote. I’ve heard plenty switch the other way, but this could be a first.
Fair play, to Truss, though, if she’s willing to publicly say she was wrong. I wonder what are the exact circumstances that made her change her mind?
Some 76% of Conservative Party members – who will choose the next PM – supported Brexit.
Oh.
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The goal is simple: Get power. Keep power.
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Who’s behind it? Well in America it’s the ultra wealthy and corporations. The goal is power, control and increased wealth. I don’t think it goes much deeper than that anywhere really. Power corrupts and all that.
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Power corrupts and all that.
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Yeah, it’s the conundrum of political movements. Government or Federal action is sought by civil rights movements but we have limited government power to avoid tyrannical authority. While the Federal government was protecting civil rights in the 60’s, federal authorities were also harassing, infiltrating and undermining civil rights organizations. The powers we gave them to protect civil rights overtly were immediately used against activists.
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Green wrecked Sri Lanka’s agriculture and collapsed the country.
There’s a concept and then there’s execution. There are a lot of ideas in politics that get lost in the latter. South Asian politics is knee deep in open corruption. I can give you an example in the UK of excellent privatisation – telecoms – where splitting up BT led to better and cheaper service or conversely the railways where prices are ridiculously high and service awful. So is privatisation a panacea or a curse? The answer is neither, it’s how and why it is done.
I think it’s a very big step to equate a failure there with a green deal being untenable.
The truth is we will eventually move to greener options, for a start they are already or are becoming the cheaper option, the next UK nuclear plant (I know not fossil fuel) is charging double per unit as offshore wind is. Gas and oil are very unpredictable unless you can supply yourselves, which only OPEC members can – which means none of the countries we live in. So you can either design a plan around that shift and be ahead of the game or push against it and fall behind.
For example the UK is (mostly) an island surrounded by choppy seas, it has a big problem with geographical inequality (wealth is focused in the south east) yet all the best sites for windfarms are off the places that need a boost, the north east of England, west Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. The steel industry is struggling yet they import almost all the parts made to make a turbine. It’s a relatively simple strategy to say if you made the turbines locally you bring quality jobs into those areas, improving energy independence, wealth inequality and global warming at the same time. The breaks are put on things like that by short term thinking and lobbying from fossil fuel firms.
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Whatever you term the left and the right – and people are all over the place in how they use the terms, they’re practically useless – but it is pretty clear the two are not equal.
Show me the left-wing Fox News, the numerous left-wing newspapers, the left-wing think tanks, left wing judges and politicians in positions of power. What’s that? You can’t? Why not? Oh, there’s very few to zero of them.
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Whatever you term the left and the right – and people are all over the place in how they use the terms, they’re practically useless – but it is pretty clear the two are not equal.
Show me the left-wing Fox News, the numerous left-wing newspapers, the left-wing think tanks, left wing judges and politicians in positions of power. What’s that? You can’t? Why not? Oh, there’s very few to zero of them.
Yeah, but you need to understand that a whole three trans characters being in Star Trek is an assault on society.
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Yeah and Star Trek was never at all woke before.
(What the frell were those people watching?)
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Meanwhile, going to France via Dover? Allow at least six hours for security checks. So what is the Port of Dover’s grown up response to this? Blame the French.
Worse is I’m sceptical people will link this to Brexit, despite it being so.
Let me take you on a walk down memory lane to late 2018.
Brexit secretary Dominic Raab says he ‘hadn’t quite understood’ importance of Dover-Calais crossing
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Let me take you on a walk down memory lane to late 2018. Brexit secretary Dominic Raab says he ‘hadn’t quite understood’ importance of Dover-Calais crossing
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Meanwhile, going to France via Dover? Allow at least six hours for security checks. So what is the Port of Dover’s grown up response to this? Blame the French.
Worse is I’m sceptical people will link this to Brexit, despite it being so.
That tune is so much better than the actual cliffs of Dover.
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I didn’t want to appear to be erasing the evidence of my own mistakes. But you’re right, it’s better to delete it.
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I didn’t want to appear to be erasing the evidence of my own mistakes.
I’d say you owned up to it pretty well by posting your own response there!
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If we added lying to the Just A Minute rules both Sunak and Truss would be serial failures.
It’s what makes them so depressing. They are casually crapping on the Nolan principles, have no honour and lie again and again.
Then there’s the casual cruelty and macho posturing to complete the set.
Even Last Leg is finding it hard to get comedy out of this. Rylan was great on last night’s though.
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Even Last Leg is finding it hard to get comedy out of this. Rylan was great on last night’s though.
Yeah – I had initially unfairly written him off years back as a vapid celeb due to his naff talent-show background, but over the years I’ve come to realise what a smart and funny guy he is.
Bet Jess Phillips wished she’d chosen a different week to go on – for someone usually quite assured she was in a tough position with some of those questions and gags about Labour.
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Bet Jess Phillips wished she’d chosen a different week to go on – for someone usually quite assured she was in a tough position with some of those questions and gags about Labour.
I thought she got an easy ride over the strike question, actually. The Last Leg is pretty bad about getting all doe-eyed over any politician that engages with them. Letting her deflect to making jokes about making up policy for ages (without asking what policy it was the Shadow Transport secretary supposedly made up) and then, the obvious response to “I wasn’t told I wasn’t allowed to go to a strike” seemed to me to be “so why weren’t you at one?” but Hills just rolled over and took her guff about Labour supporting strikes at face value.
Sacking the only shadow cabinet member that engaged with the strikers, even if he did “make up policy”, does not tally with their insistence that they support strikes and are deeply allied with unions.
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Trudeau follows the example of Sri Lanka. Honestly can’t be sure of anything, but it looks like they actually want food shortages.
A lot of Sri Lanka’s problems are consequences of their relationship to China and the “Belt and Road Initiative”
In Debt To China, What If Countries Can’t Pay Up? – YouTube
Sri Lanka ‘can’t get out of crisis without China,’ professor says (cnbc.com)
China’s emerging Belt and Road debt crisis | Financial Times (ft.com)
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Why most Republicans don’t support Trump anymore
“It’s Trump” is a valid reason.
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Talk is cheap. Prove it by not voting for his policies or following his politics? They can’t do it.
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Prove it by not voting for his policies or following his politics?
Well that kind of happened in 2020. Trump lost.
The truth is a lot of people are very entrenched and what this (awful click the image) story says is actually only a minority of Republicans are rejecting Trump but everything that makes a difference in FPTP politics, especially in the US with the electoral college is a relatively small bunch in the middle decide what happens.
The media tend to allocate huge social shifts based on actually very small margins. Like in 2016 the ‘rust belt’ went radically right wing, in fact Trump got no more votes than previous election there, it’s just the Democratic voters were more apathetic about Clinton than Obama.
Similarly in the EU referendum being in the pro remain land of Northern Ireland or pro leave land of Wales was in reality a difference in half a person in a group of 10.
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It’s politics. your cynicism is always warranted.
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It’s politics. your cynicism is always warranted.
Time for a thread title update.
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Why is Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan? This is really very stupid and has no useful outcome.
Will anyone in US politics ever get the concept of ‘face’? Taiwan has been able to do what it wants for decades and even if Xi is now more aggressive verbally they have long been happy to allow the status quo if people go along with their version. China itself works with Taiwan all the time, the infamous Foxxcon is a Taiwanese company.
Poking at the illusion has no good side, pontificating to make you feel good has no upside for anyone outside of Nancy Pelosi. Some quasi state visit by a very old senator is at best useless and at worst highly dangerous. Biden should have confiscated her passport and the US should maybe consider mandatory retirement ages.
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Ah, so my cynicism was warranted.
It is but I think maybe your hopes are aimed too high. For all our lives there will be a lot of people that disagree with you.
There can be a justifiable anger that people think characters like Trump or Johnson are genuine and not narcissists that will just make everything worse. However no politician in a major party using FPTP will drop below a certain percentage of true believers.
My more pragmatic take is that you can never get rid of the arseholes, they have to be baked in. Winning elections and political arguments has never been about converting the population to your worldview, it as about the 10% that sit a lot of the time on the fence.
All very true, nor do I need everyone to agree – that’d be a boring world.
But do they have to lie all the goddamn time? It should be possible for a Conservative politician to lay out why they are so without the total disconnection from reality that both Truss and Sunak exhibit.
And yeah, I’m posting this as someone who worked for Johnson when he was Mayor of London. If you can’t work with or for the “other side” you’re not going to last long working in any level of government.
As the song lyric goes: I’m young and bored of being young and bored, if I was old I could say I’ve seen it all before, in truth, I’m tired of giving a shit.
Of course I can never really stay this way, it’s a bad habit.
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The truth is a lot of people are very entrenched and what this (awful click the image) story says is actually only a minority of Republicans are rejecting Trump but everything that makes a difference in FPTP politics, especially in the US with the electoral college is a relatively small bunch in the middle decide what happens.
True –
Three Republicans who backed impeachment face the voters – Roll Call
Offering a sense of the electoral hazards for Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, four of the 10 opted not to run for reelection. One, so far, Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, has lost a primary. One has survived an all-party primary: California Rep. David Valadao. And Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney will face voters Aug. 16 in a race where she has become the underdog to a Trump-backed challenger.
RINO is becoming more common, and to be honest, I think a lot of the RINO’s would be better off forming their own party or just joining the Democrats. At the same time, the DNC will promote extreme right republicans that have Trump support with the idea being that they cannot win statewide. Even right-leaning independents will not vote for Trump’s candidates.
Though that means that in general, Democrats will move even more center right which is the real layout of the party.
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Wow, Kansas just did a face turn. Good for them.
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Wow, Kansas just did a face turn. Good for them.
It’s a good example of how few people the Republicans actually represent, the vast majority of Americans support abortion access. And it’s worth noting that the Republican-controlled state government in Kansas held this referendum on the day or the Primary election rather than the midterm in the expectation that fewer people would come out to vote.
But, as someone who’s campaigned for a referendum on abortion access – you should never have to vote on human rights issues, it sets a terrible precedent that you’ll allow the morality of the state to be determined by a vote which can be manipulated, gerrymandered, or otherwise suppressed.
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It’s an awful decision with no logic attached outside of ego.
I will rate Nixon far above Pelosi in understanding how east-west relations work.
She’s gained fuck all in protecting Taiwan, she could have talked to them over Zoom or Whatsapp for actual trade stuff, trade is not an issue the US and Taiwan and China trade freely now, but by attending in person accelerated aggressive military contests.
China are now more likely to invade Taiwan as she wants to posture on the world stage for no benefit to anyone. In the end too the USA will not defend Taiwan, they will do as they have in Ukraine and run it all by proxy because of mutually assured destruction by nuclear powers.
This OAP will leave having contributed nothing other than moving the Doomsday Clock on a few seconds and her own ego stroked.
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It is an interesting point. I think the CCP would prefer to have Taiwan like it has Hong Kong. Blowing the place up would not be the most beneficial object.
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I don’t believe China would invade Taiwan.
Neither do I really, they don’t have a history of invasion compared to most big countries and I agree with the technical difficulty of it, but stunts like this make it more likely and Xi’s shift to autocracy over more recent technocracy adds a wild card element.
China does some very bad stuff but public posturing is the least effective method of addressing any of it. There is no benefit to this visit by Pelosi, it won’t change anything between the US and Taiwan but just make relations with China worse. It won’t change any policy in China because they culturally react negatively to being called out and positively to private discussions. She can pretend the US will defend Taiwan directly with their military but they won’t because China has nukes.
It is a bizarre state of affairs really that Taiwan operates as a sovereign independent democracy as long as we all pretend it isn’t but it has worked for 70+ years and I don’t know what great insight Pelosi had to suggest changing it now.
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“In our nation’s 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.” Dick Cheney pic.twitter.com/erBPBNy8ah
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 4, 2022
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Trump buries his ex-wife on a golf course for a tax break, next thing Cheney says Trump is the worst thing to ever happen to the US. Hmm.
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It is a bizarre state of affairs really that Taiwan operates as a sovereign independent democracy as long as we all pretend it isn’t but it has worked for 70+ years and I don’t know what great insight Pelosi had to suggest changing it now.
Politically, it is surprisingly valuable. If you turn it around, what value does China gain from going ballistic in its objections?
No matter how much the United States may be messed up, internally it is still in a stronger and more prosperous position than the CCP. China is suffering protests, civil unrest driven by economic crises in banking and real estate. Like Russia did with Ukraine, this sort of instability and fears of internal disruption of power can lead a superpower to seek external reasons to enforce or recruit internal loyalty. Taiwan is and has been a “good selling point” for the Communist Party. Also, it’s not like the US government – especially the Democrats – can’t use this to their advantage and turn some attention away from their own domestic challenges.
Looking at the size of China’s GDP is deceptive as its population is so large. Taiwan has the 18th largest economy while China is second, but per capita, Taiwan’s economy is twice that of China’s (hell, most countries are economically better off per person than China) though about half the size of Hong Kong if it is separated from China’s total. Taiwan is both valuable and important to Asia and the Pacific and a strong anchor point of US influence.
Taiwan is also valuable as a kind of canary in a coal mine for the other US allies in the nation who are even more vital politically – S. Korea and Japan specifically. Also, China has only been growing more aggressive towards its claims on Taiwan in the past few years — likely driven by its own internal problems. The impression is that this is coming out of nowhere, but we were not in a stable or standoff position and then Pelosi decided to throw a brick at it. It was already deteriorating only the mainstream news wasn’t really paying attention or reporting it very clearly.
As far as the remaining superpowers in the world, America is still the most stable, democratic and liberal (in a strictly classical sense) pseudo-empire still around. Though it would be good if superpowers and empires were allowed to eventually fail, it is probably still the best of a lot of bad options if the United States retained a strong position around the world as the alternatives are far more authoritarian and likely to lead to far worse outcomes for those under their control or influence — and considering how bad US actions can be, that is saying something. Unfortunately, I don’t see good alternatives emerging if the US declines, as the competition that would step in are either authoritarian, corporate (which is just authoritarian economic power) or a combination of both.
“In our nation’s 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.” Dick Cheney
Note, Cheney finds him a threat to our “republic” rather than to our “democracy.” A true republican even when he’s attacking other republicans. It’s more an academic point, but back during the Civil Rights movement, when the Democratic and Republican Parties essentially switched their bases (the Dixie-crat South turned Republican and many African Americans whose families had been Republican since the Civil War started voting for democrat candidates), there was a sense that they had changed their philosophies — or that they simply had the same philosophy.
However, you can still see that the Democrats emphasize democracy and the Republicans still emphasize the republic. Essentially, even during the Civil War, the Democratic party was fighting for the rights of citizens over those of the Union – or state. Though their citizens, of course, were the slave owners or those that supported slavery. While the Republicans emphasized the power of the State – the republic – over individual rights, even though they were fighting to free millions of individuals that had no rights.
Their more direct interest though was to protect “free labor” that was necessary to the new class of urban industrial capitalists who needed to free up labor to be more mobile as they exploited the west with railroads, new mills and factories. You couldn’t do that with millions of laborers stuck on plantations when you could have them running all over the country and building it for low costs just above slave wages (but without housing and food included).
Republicanism still derives from the constitutional urge to protect elite interests. Democratism (I wouldn’t call it democracy) is the urge to protect individual civil and property rights — though often this only applies to a certain upper segment of the party’s base so in practice it is also a kind of elitism. It’s kind of an ongoing conflict between the few people that own the country and rely on the government to protect their wealth and influence against the many people that live and work in it but have little capital or hope of achieving more and so rely on the government to protect them from exploitation, foreclosure or disenfranchisement.
Of course, it is going to be a big mess as both sides seek to get the most advantage out of their opposing positions. So, if it seems like it is all on the verge of crumbling at any moment — that probably means that it is actually working as, realistically, it should not work out at all. Much less for 246 years.
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Why don’t they just make Larry the next Prime Minister?
Larry is overqualified to be Prime Minister.
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Watching this in 2022 is like a bad joke:
This is a genuine Leave campaign video from the 2016 referendum.
Notice how absolutely none of the claims it makes have since come true, and in fact they provide a useful shopping list of things that have been made worse by Brexit.pic.twitter.com/aFchySamGx
— Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 (@edwinhayward) August 5, 2022
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“In our nation’s 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.” Dick Cheney pic.twitter.com/erBPBNy8ah
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 4, 2022
Did I hear a fucking war criminal who should be in prison say something there?
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“In our nation’s 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.” Dick Cheney pic.twitter.com/erBPBNy8ah
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 4, 2022
Did I hear a fucking war criminal who should be in prison say something there?
Don’t be so hard on JR. Sure, he posts some shady articles from time to time, but prison is a little harsh.
A good caning shall suffice.
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“In our nation’s 246 year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.” Dick Cheney pic.twitter.com/erBPBNy8ah
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 4, 2022
Did I hear a fucking war criminal who should be in prison say something there?
Don’t be so hard on JR. Sure, he posts some shady articles from time to time, but prison is a little harsh.
A good caning shall suffice.
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You’ll never guess what the FBI found in Trump’s safe…
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Giuliani is target of election probe, his lawyers are told
Does anyone see Rudy falling on his sword for Trump, or will he turn rat?
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That does support Gar’s point more in this case. If the United States is not willing to change direction and support Taiwan independence, then what are they doing?
It kind of does, but not really.
The support of the ‘one China’ policy was one of optimism to begin with. Western powers thought economic moves towards capitalism would end in democratic reforms too, so eventually Taiwan would be fine with joining. This has not happened with either China or Russia as western powers are thick as shit and obsessed with the idea that economic deregulation ends up in many scenarios where it doesn’t, like trickle down. Their infrastructure is slowly decaying for the same reason. In truth their obsession with free markets fucked up Russia, Gorbachev wanted a gradual move to a Scandinavian style model but the Chicago School zealots pushed through an instant massive shock of privatization that created the oligarchs and led us to Putin.
The other as I keep coming back to is pragmatism and culture. I want to emphasise again that I am not lecturing appeasement or giving in to principles, just the method of getting to where you want. Asian culture is just different, it is not transactional like in Europe or the US. If I want something in the west I click a button, make an offer, make a phonecall. In Asia that does not work, you will get nowhere if you don’t set up a relationship, meet face to face, discuss over a meal, in private. Calling shit out loudly and publicly produces a negative result. Not publicly questioning ‘the boss’ is why Asian countries struggle with innovation but that’s a change you cannot make by just declaring it sucks, it takes time.
There may be a point you can do nothing else, if Xi like Putin goes all imperial minded, but as Taiwan has remained independent and actively trading with both China and the US to maintain, that using illusions of agreement actually does work.
In the end if China truly wants to invade and take Taiwan they can and will, at great military cost and loss of life, but Ukraine has shown us nuclear powers will not square up troops so let’s not ‘whip out our cocks’ in rhetoric and pretend we will.
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This story sums up UK politics neatly.
It’s known that, when available, The Last Leg is my preferred news management tool. Couple of weeks back I couldn’t find Ep 5 on All 4, they hadn’t put it up. At the time I concluded this might be good, as everything was so badly messed up.
Watched Ep 6 last weekend. There was still no ep 5. Went looking for ep 7 today and there it was. Might as well catch up then. Did the jokes still work? Yes, because all the same crap of a fortnight ago still applies!
It is quite scary with the combination of trouble in the UK, plus the ludicrously arrogant, divorced from reality politicians in power. And it’s not getting better.
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Examining 3 of the arguments of the student loan forgiveness debate : NPR
In general, forgiving student loans is probably more beneficial than detrimental, but everything has consequences as inflation pressures and energy prices combine to increase cost of living irrespective if there is an economically official depression or not.
The problem here is similar to the problem at the center of the Affordable Care Act. That act was focused more at a separate issue – health care management – rather than the actual causes of unaffordable health care. The more serious problem wasn’t that people could not afford health insurance (which really isn’t insurance since there is no risk on the part of the so-called ‘insurer’) – that was the result of the more important problem in that health care – surgeries, lab tests, hospital visits, and primarily medical prescriptions – cost to damn much! And that a lot of this had to do with the central incentives and disincentives regulatory policy imposed on the industry. Focusing the cost of health care programs really was treating a symptom rather than cause.
Forgiving student loan is going to release a lot of pressure for people, but it won’t address a central problem in the way colleges charge tuition and that people pay for it AND more importantly, the way people are educated (or NOT educated) to provide necessary contributions in the economy and society in the future.
Forgiving loans would would effectively transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in debt from individuals and families to the federal government, and ultimately, the taxpayers.
Some believe that transfer effectively penalizes people who scrimped and saved to pay for college, as well as the majority of Americans who don’t go to college.
They might not mind subsidizing a newly minted social worker, making $25,000 a year. But they might bristle at underwriting debt relief for a business school graduate who’s about to go to Wall Street and earn six figures.
This is not exactly accurate in a fundamental sense, but it is essentially true. I would just point out that the nature of real money creation doesn’t necessarily support the idea that tax revenue is essentially what the government uses to pay for things. Tax function is essentially a negative process in relation to the flow of public and private funds through the economy.
Money may be created by the Federal Reserve, but really most of the money we’re spending every day is the result of bank loans, and the money the federal government spends hardly takes into account the expected tax revenue. The Federal Interest rate has more impact than taxes in that regard. In real terms, essentially the government borrows the money it spends in the federal budget and revenues are just a factor in the repayment of debt (or really, the ongoing management of debt payment).
Government fees and taxation removes that money from public circulation through the economy while government spending puts money into the public economy. A government surplus is not a sign of good budgeting – it is not something that the government should be trying to do. There is nothing inherently good or bad about a surplus, but it results from government activity, intended or accidental, that slows the private economy most of us participate in. Essentially, it means that the government took more money out of the economy than it put into it, which is a good thing if the economy is running too “hot” (try to find two economists to agree on what defines “too hot,” though) and a bad thing if spending restrictions are imposed during an economic recession (like the austerity measures).
That’s not really directly important to this particular article, but the media generally relies on an elementary school idea of money and ignores the deeper complexities of commercial banking and lending, federal budgets and finance and the role of taxation. While those complexities are often at the heart of why something like Student Loans work the way they do and cause these problems.
However, the point is that no matter which students we’re bailing out – those who can afford to pay those loans and those that can’t – the problem seems to be that these loans are too high and as a result tuitions are too high. Essentially – and I haven’t looked into it in detail yet – it just seems to me that these loans are too attractive. Unless I’m mistaken, it seems like they are practically guaranteed to be paid no matter what.
In fact, in general, that seems like the major problem. Loans are too risk-free. Some of this may be pressure provided by government incentives to get banks to loan to people that they normally would not, but there is really nothing riskier than loaning money to a student. They have no assets, no experience, no credit record. So, the government would basically need to be their co-signers for a loan program to even exist.
However, once the government becomes your backer, then lenders are incentivized to loan as much money as possible as this is the safest bet available. Then colleges, universities or anything that throw up a website that looks like a college will be incentivized to raise tuitions to support this essentially sub-sub-prime loan scheme – though they may be doing it simply from supply and demand. The demand rises significantly as more students can obtain loans for tuition, the school needs resources to accommodate more demand, etc.
If the government simply made the loans harder to obtain or had stronger limits on the amount that could be loaned, then tuitions would stabilize and students would not leave universities with debt they may never be able to pay off. We’d also see students going into more necessary but less lucrative professions because they won’t have the pressure to start making money quickly to pay off those loans. We might end up with a thousand lab techs that can all find a cancer ten years earlier than the previous generation to the one oncologist PhD grad who would actually be able to treat it. However, if the government expected leaders to actually take any risks with these loans, we might see fewer loans to minorities or poor families and communities.
Also, these loans can go into default, and that can lead to another financial crisis of a kind whose impact is unpredictable. However, defaults really put the greatest pressure on the lendee as they really can’t simply not pay them unless they physically are incapable of doing so. The current system is really a potential economic time bomb, but it can manifest as one big nuclear explosion or millions of sticks of dynamite going off randomly over a long span of time. Nevertheless, there is nothing good about a financial holocaust rather it happens all at once or over a manageable span of time. So, in that sense, it is another reason to support the immediate debt relief proposed by the administration even though we’re still heading toward a cliff.
But it is all absurd – if the government had simply spent grants of “hundreds of billions of dollars” directly for tuition rather than supporting loans from private financial institutions, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. It really is spend a lot now with a direct government assistance program or spend a lot later to bail out the private lending policies. Ideally, the vast majority of tuitions in the United States should be paid by private citizens with their own incomes – also probably considered tax write-offs as well. The second most should be paid by government grants (focused on poor communities, I think) and then student loans should be a separate option for the middle class willing to go into debt to improve opportunities for their youngest generations.
In that sense, I have to believe that the Biden administration and the Congress all know this isn’t a solution, but they are doing it anyway for political advantages at the next election. However, neither the democrats or republicans really want to solve the problem as that would mean taking on powerful financial institutions and the funds they have to influence elections as well.
According to the White House, the plan will “provide relief to up to 43 million borrowers, including cancelling the full remaining balance for roughly 20 million borrowers.” But it does not go far enough in addressing the root of the problem: a postsecondary education system that has seen tuition rise three-fold in the last 30 years. That same system will put future borrowers in peril.
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In times of crisis they are needed but I am never a huge fan of ‘handout’ payments. Primarily because they are all a sticking plaster over a fundamental problem behind it as you say. Loan forgiveness doesn’t solve why college has increased in cost way beyond inflation, or why employers demand degrees (increasingly upping it to masters level) that are not genuinely required for the job.
Our reactive friend Bill Maher moans about people going to college when they don’t need to and on one level he has a point but on another they have no choice. If Citigroup demands an MBA for a certain job then you have to do an MBA and pay for it.
It’s the same now in the UK. The government have given £400 rebate on everyone’s energy bills because of the increases but a lot of those recipients don’t really need it (but the admin of means testing is so expensive it saves nothing) and many need more. It does nothing to address the fundamental issues why this is a problem. The UK used 4% Russian gas, which they have reduced to 0% this year. Renewable energy, which is quite a big percentage now in the UK is charged at the same rate as natural gas even though it has cost no more to generate in the last year. My little bit of the UK in Wales produces double the energy it uses and none is from coal, so it is green and plentiful but prices are trebling. There are major issues with the whole energy business which need to be fixed and £400 a head of borrowed money isn’t going to solve any of them.
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as that would mean taking on powerful financial institutions and the funds they have to influence elections as well.
Yeah the student loan bail out bails out the students, but also the banks that lent them the money and the schools demanding ridiculous fees.
Maybe there should be a rule that schools can’t demand more than say 150 % of the money state universities ask from their students.
Or put a cap on interest rates for student loans. The rate cannot exceed 3% or the prime interest rate, whichever was lower at the time the loan was taken out. This would apply to student loans for universities and trade schools.
I read something the other day: Harvard University’s endowment (somewhere in the multi-billions) is so large that they could pay for every student to attend for free for practically forever. I believe I saw another article where University of Texas’ endowment may now exceed Harvard. I can imagine that there are other universities that could fund their students if they wanted to.
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What is your take on this response?
If you look at January 6th it was both a terrible affront to democracy but also a rather half hearted rabble who didn’t achieve much and wandered off after realising that (and by bizarre coincidence I know one of them who’s now in jail).
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and by bizarre coincidence I know one of them who’s now in jail
It’s Will, isn’t it?
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What is your take on this response?
If you look at January 6th it was both a terrible affront to democracy but also a rather half hearted rabble who didn’t achieve much and wandered off after realising that (and by bizarre coincidence I know one of them who’s now in jail).
Honestly I find most of these accusations of instigating political violence bullshit if both parties do it. Lefties are all too happy to riot for their cause, light some shit on fire for some woke shit, when they feel it is demanded so they can’t be on their high horse about it. Political violence is fine, as long as it is for the right side.
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and by bizarre coincidence I know one of them who’s now in jail
It’s Will, isn’t it?
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as that would mean taking on powerful financial institutions and the funds they have to influence elections as well.
Yeah the student loan bail out bails out the students, but also the banks that lent them the money and the schools demanding ridiculous fees.
Maybe there should be a rule that schools can’t demand more than say 150 % of the money state universities ask from their students.
Or put a cap on interest rates for student loans. The rate cannot exceed 3% or the prime interest rate, whichever was lower at the time the loan was taken out. This would apply to student loans for universities and trade schools.
I read something the other day: Harvard University’s endowment (somewhere in the multi-billions) is so large that they could pay for every student to attend for free for practically forever. I believe I saw another article where University of Texas’ endowment may now exceed Harvard. I can imagine that there are other universities that could fund their students if they wanted to.
Sure, you can just look at the colleges like Texas, Georgia, Michigan and Ohio State. They make well over $100 million off their sports programs alone (so off the backs of their students). Now obviously they put plenty f that back into the sports program. But I think there’s at least a solid argument that they shouldn’t be, say, spending $7 million on a coach like Jim Harbaugh while also charging in state student $16k a year…and out of state students over $50k a year.
Something needs to be done about runaway tuition costs. And definitely agree that interest should be capped at a very low rate. After all, student loans are basically the only loans given out without proof of employment and income to actually pay them off.
Ultimately I’m fine with this $10k forgiveness, but unless the root causes are addressed it’s just a band-aid over a bullet hole.
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Will is far too sensible I’d imagine.
It’s a guy called Guy Reffitt who is probably the most famous of them because his son ratted him out to the CIA and it made loads of US TV shows and stories. He just happened to live in Penang for a few years and they have expat meetups here where I ran into him and his wife Nicole (who I knew better and is a very interesting person) quite a few times.
A couple of months back I chanced on a podcast about the January 6th stuff and one episode is pretty much a long interview with her. He was working in oil here and getting very well paid in a cheap place to live so they had a very luxurious lifestyle with a penthouse condo facing the beach etc, the job ended because of a slump in the business and they tried to extend the lifestyle for quite a while until they had to return to the US pretty much penniless, renting a small place with no furniture where they slept on a mattress on the floor.
He said he supported Trump when I spoke to him here but was generally reasonable about it and didn’t seem to mind me too much saying that was dumb but it was after that big fall from grace he got into the conspiracy sites and Qanon and all that shit. The maddest thing is the US has decided, for some unfathomable reason, to put all the convicted Jan 6th people in the same place, their cells are all next to each other. So nobody is being ‘de-radicalised’ they are all stoking each other up and getting more entrenched.
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The UK lack of identification is more useful for the rich, from where a good few MPs come from. After all, if we knew who was rich we might bar them from using the generous Parliamentary expenses policy. Poor Mr Zahawi would have to pay to heat his stables.
Zahawi and that hypocrisy sucks but I want to clarify what I mean there with the ID number. It doesn’t mean everyone’s income is transparent and available. My internet company has no idea what I earn, just that if you wanted to give everyone in the lower 20% percentile a discount you have an identifier that could do that. The tax office could release the B20 numbers in a file and the company match them and apply the discount.
The reason there are many non means tested benefits in the US and the UK is you can’t.
Each time you want to do it you have to get people to make claims and employ people to vet them, which ends up often costing as much as you save. When you look at the free prescription system Wales brought in and later adopted by Scotland the reason they can afford that is 90% of the cost comes from eradicating the eligibility checks. Before you had free drugs for kids, the elderly, unemployed and people with certain conditions like HIV or diabetes, every one having to be checked and authorised. If you just make it free for everyone then the whole red tape around prescriptions goes in the bin.
I do understand the uneasiness about why people don’t want ID, especially when you fear government overreach, but it is really inefficient too and makes operating beyond the law much easier. The paradigm being changed in recent times because 90% or more of the population that do thing like order deliveries have their every location and most of what they buy and even read tracked by Google Inc.
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Logically, you’d think the Welsh and Scottish examples of how not doing means testing delivers an overall benefit would influence people away from the idea, but it keeps going.
Ideally you want to find a way to automate the means testing.
I mean Zahawi, Rees-Mogg, Elton John and JK Rowling are going to get £400 rebates to their energy bills. Most likely more than once as they own several homes. It’s a waste of fucking money and you’d hope they redirect that money to a charity but the problem is to filter those people out you need to employ an army of checkers which will cost several million pounds from the same taxpayer pocket.
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Yep, humans are needed
They are because the data management is flawed. You could manage it at a very very basic level.
HMRC knows how much everyone in the country is paid either through PAYE or self assessment, they know what my UK income was and yours.
Really once you have that you don’t need to manually means test, you could just say everyone paying less than 40% income tax gets the rebate or under £28k which was the average wage last I checked. They just have no method to use it effectively. You don’t need AI, this is stuff a pivot table in Excel could do if any of this spoke to each other with a common data identifier.
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to filter those people out you need to employ an army of checkers which will cost several million pounds
Give the checkers guns, it’ll be a one-time cost.
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Well, the interminable leadership contest that the majority of the country has no say in has ended with Truss as PM.
But, ahead of her victory, Truss was dealt a greivous defeat that will haunt her, from an unexpected direction and individual – comedian Joe Lycett.
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Liz Truss as our new PM is just …
Edited to delete a rant that adds nothing to the conversation and includes the word “fuck” a lot. A. Lot.
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