Biden/Harris Legislative/Policy Discussions - Now with a Republican House starting 2023

[Cooked Crack]

 

[EmirOfShmo]

 

 

[goskins10]

24 minutes ago, EmirOfShmo said:

 

 

 

He would rather **** be broken so he can campaign agaisst than help people who are suffering. Republicans submit HR 2, a bi-partisan group send a compromise back that contains much of HR 2 but without the draconian parts and republicans don't want it. Talk about disingenious. 

Edited February 7 by goskins10

[Larry]

11 hours ago, EmirOfShmo said:

 

 

 

Nope. Trump isn't casting those votes. People who are willing to harm the country on command are. 

[EmirOfShmo]

I'm going to put this here as it relates to the Biden IRA. 

 

 

[China]

Red states are big winners of Biden’s landmark laws

 

Last month, battery recycling company Redwood Materials broke ground on a $3.5 billion battery plant in South Carolina that is expected to create 1,500 new jobs.

 

The plant aims to eventually make enough battery components to power more than a million electric vehicles a year. Redwood Materials specifically cited the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, America’s biggest-ever climate investment, as a reason why it decided to build the facility.

 

This is just one example of a Republican state benefiting from the private investment boom set off by the IRA, a signature legislative achievement for President Joe Biden that every Republican in Congress voted against.

 

It’s part of a broader trend where red states have emerged as big winners from both the IRA and the CHIPS and Science Act, another signature Biden law that passed with some Republican support in 2022.

 

Most (51%) of the investments directly tied to incentives from the IRA and the CHIPS Act are flowing to Republican states, compared with 20% to blue states, according to a Fitch Ratings analysis shared exclusively with CNN. Fitch defined red states as those that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 by more than three percentage points.

 

Fitch found that another 29% of the investments linked to those laws went to swing states, ones that were decided by fewer than three points in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[The Evil Genius]

This is a huge win for the people and the administration. 

 

 

 

[tshile]

Basically he took the rule of relief after 20 years of payments, and added relief after 10 years for people who borrowed under 12,000

 

seems reasonable, without understand the numbers on those loans. 

[goskins10]

I am very glad they are providing much relief from these student loans. However, I am still not seeing what they plan to do to keep us from getting in the same position in 5 to 10 yrs. Banks and Universities have to be held more accountable. Universities push and advocate student loans to increase thier income with little to no concern for what degree the student is getting or capable of getting and them giving no support once they either stop gonig to school or graduate leaving them with this massive obligation and little to no way to repay it. Not relieving the students from responsibility. They need to be more educated on the consequences of taking out the loans. Maybe a mandatory class on managhing money before recieving funds. 

 

 

[The Evil Genius]

Government backed loans for education need to be interest free. It'll never happen but people paying the required minimum for 10+ years for a 12k or less loan and still owing nearly the entire balance is bonkers. 

[TheGreatBuzz]

 

 

1 hour ago, The Evil Genius said:

Government backed loans for education need to be interest free. It'll never happen but people paying the required minimum for 10+ years for a 12k or less loan and still owing nearly the entire balance is bonkers. 

 

I disagree but with the small tweak of being revenue neutral. Charge 1.5% or whatever for admin fees, etc.

 

Add: I also would like there to be limited sectors that get different bonuses or whatever to encourage STEM and other public good.

Edited February 21 by TheGreatBuzz

[PleaseBlitz]

14 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

 

I disagree but with the small tweak of being revenue neutral. Charge 1.5% or whatever for admin fees, etc.

 

Add: I also would like there to be limited sectors that get different bonuses or whatever to encourage STEM and other public good.

 

This is the way.  

 

 

 

[PeterMP]

17 hours ago, The Evil Genius said:

Government backed loans for education need to be interest free.

 

Why?

 

I completely support coming up with a system that includes low costs options.  The federal government should either find ways to incentivize low in state tuitions or open federal institutions of higher learning that are very low costs.  We need not to just stop the increases in state higher ed tuitions but to roll them back or come up with something else. 

 

But if you want to by pass that sort of option and don't have the money, why shouldn't you pay interest on that?  Why shouldn't people consider the value of the education/experience they are getting in terms of their ability to pay back a loan with interest set at the market rate?  Does it make sense to disconnect the true costs of an education/college experience with the economic out come of that education/college experience?  That argument seems circumspect to me.

 

If we are going to say this about education, what about other things?  Business loans?  Etc.

 

(It also seems you might dry up the market for federal loans servicers.  If I'm only going to make 0-1.5% on my money, then why wouldn't I put money into something else that is similar risk and is going to pay me more?  e.g. bonds.  It seems like it would at least have to be set up to bonds/the fed rate or those companies couldn't be private companies.  munis even have the advantage of having tax benefits. The government would have to take over servicing the debt themselves.  But realistically even the government is paying interest on the money.  So it seems people should at least pay that (T-bills).

 

Reading, it looks like they are set to Treasury notes.

 

https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/current-interest-rates/#interest-rates-set

 

That seems reasonable to me, especially if there is a low cost option. )

Edited February 22 by PeterMP

[PokerPacker]

Is it possibly time to consider providing public schooling past grade 12?  There was a time when you would pop out of high school and start in on a job that you could raise a family off of.  And if you went to college (at an affordable price that you could pay-off working summers), and got a diploma, you could get a significant boost to your earnings ability even with a degree in English going into a career that has no need for someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare.  But now in modern times with technology automating out many of the jobs that used to pay well without an education, and jobs requiring an education needing more specialized knowledge than ever just to begin, and still have depressed pay compared to the before-times, while the schooling itself requires children to go into massive amounts of debt... maybe we've reached a point where higher education is our duty to provide the next generation.

 

I posit that the more advanced a civilization becomes, the greater the knowledge requirements grow to be productive members of society.  Just some quick statistics I found:

(This statistic is for men, so it isn't affected by women being left out of education and the work force until more recent times) https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2664307/Goldin_AmericaGraduation.pdf?sequence=4

                    Percentage Distribution of Highest
                        Grade Completed by Grade
Cohort Born in Year |  >=8 | 9-11 | 12   | >12
1946-1950           |  6.6 | 12.5 | 45.6 | 35.3
1926-1930           | 17.4 | 21.2 | 42.3 | 19.1
1886-1890           | 72.5 | 10.7 |  8.3 | 8.6

From 1886-1890, 72.5% of the population had no more than an 8th grade education; only 17% had graduated high school, and half of them went on to college.

Jump to the 1926-1930 with all the industrialization that happened since the 1800s and the script is flipped with over 60% graduating high school, 19 percent going to college.  Only 20 years later with much more rapidly advancing society technologically, we've got an 80% high school graduation rate and a third going to college.  That high school diploma was enough, but college was a differentiator.

 

Nowadays, as of 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States), it seems we're around 90% with a high school diploma or GED, and around 65% going to college, and about 35% achieving a Bachelor's Degree (42% if including Associate's).  A High School diploma today seems to be more analogous to an 8th grade education 100 years ago, and college now seems to be in a similar level of importance now as High School was 100 years ago, but instead of being free to attend like High School, you instead have to mortgage your future to attend.

 

Of course there is a lot that would have to be figured out to have college retain its value since we don't seem to place any value on public school teachers.

[Renegade7]

@PokerPacker

 

Maybe not the best thread for this, but where does it end if we keep having to move the goal post on education necessary to make a living?

 

Folks shouldn't live in poverty if they work 40 hours a week, shouldn't matter what they do.  The same should be said for folks finishing high school.

 

What I hear is need to end the 12th grade and gives kids a break to make sure they aren't rushing into a pipeline they can't afford or don't want and making community College free so they can learn a trade that pays the bill before they're even an adult.  I look back and realize this was a major reason I didn't finish high school and glad I found a trade school when I did at 19.  I kow know folks who got the same IT certifications as me in high school.

 

A masters cannot become the new bachelors but it's jus feels like thats where we're heading.  It's unsubtainable, folks will figure out they need more then they can do and start giving up earlier, college is not for everyone, so making it required for everyone jus to survive is not addressing the disconnect on what a living wage should be in this country.

 

So many in my generation were scared into going to college, generations after us have figured that out.

 

Edit: Automation is a real threat to what we do on this matter no matter what we do about it and needs to be taken seriously and legislatively.

Edited February 22 by Renegade7

[PeterMP]

9 hours ago, PokerPacker said:

Is it possibly time to consider providing public schooling past grade 12?  There was a time when you would pop out of high school and start in on a job that you could raise a family off of.  And if you went to college (at an affordable price that you could pay-off working summers), and got a diploma, you could get a significant boost to your earnings ability even with a degree in English going into a career that has no need for someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare.  But now in modern times with technology automating out many of the jobs that used to pay well without an education, and jobs requiring an education needing more specialized knowledge than ever just to begin, and still have depressed pay compared to the before-times, while the schooling itself requires children to go into massive amounts of debt... maybe we've reached a point where higher education is our duty to provide the next generation.

 

I posit that the more advanced a civilization becomes, the greater the knowledge requirements grow to be productive members of society.  Just some quick statistics I found:

(This statistic is for men, so it isn't affected by women being left out of education and the work force until more recent times) https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2664307/Goldin_AmericaGraduation.pdf?sequence=4

                    Percentage Distribution of Highest
                        Grade Completed by Grade
Cohort Born in Year |  >=8 | 9-11 | 12   | >12
1946-1950           |  6.6 | 12.5 | 45.6 | 35.3
1926-1930           | 17.4 | 21.2 | 42.3 | 19.1
1886-1890           | 72.5 | 10.7 |  8.3 | 8.6

From 1886-1890, 72.5% of the population had no more than an 8th grade education; only 17% had graduated high school, and half of them went on to college.

Jump to the 1926-1930 with all the industrialization that happened since the 1800s and the script is flipped with over 60% graduating high school, 19 percent going to college.  Only 20 years later with much more rapidly advancing society technologically, we've got an 80% high school graduation rate and a third going to college.  That high school diploma was enough, but college was a differentiator.

 

Nowadays, as of 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States), it seems we're around 90% with a high school diploma or GED, and around 65% going to college, and about 35% achieving a Bachelor's Degree (42% if including Associate's).  A High School diploma today seems to be more analogous to an 8th grade education 100 years ago, and college now seems to be in a similar level of importance now as High School was 100 years ago, but instead of being free to attend like High School, you instead have to mortgage your future to attend.

 

Of course there is a lot that would have to be figured out to have college retain its value since we don't seem to place any value on public school teachers.

 

1.  Nothing is stopping any state from making college free now.  It doesn't happen because there isn't enough political will to make it happen (i.e. voters won't support the increase in taxes it would require).  We do have a bit of a problem that earlier generations got to go to school cheaply and then decided they didn't want to pay for other generations to do the same.

 

2.  The K-12 system in the US stinks (compared to other first world countries).  The university system is still considered one of if not the best in the world.  And not just the Ivys.  Even good colleges attract people from over seas that are looking to get an education and then go back home.  Moving to make the university system more like the K-12 system seems like a mistake.

 

3.  I think we have a problem of everybody needs to be able to do X.  Everybody needs to graduate high school (no child left behind).  Everybody needs to go to college. Etc.  If you can't/won't do the work, then you shouldn't.  In the late 1980s/1990s, there were efforts in many states to institute state wide exams to ensure a high school degree had some value.  In many states, those have now been dropped or enforcement has been watered down.  Even in colleges this has happened some.  My father in law (early boomer) went to an average sort of college, and they really planned on 1/3 of their students to drop/fail out by the end of the first year.  Today if you are a college and you aren't graduating 66% of your students in 6 years, that's considered pretty bad.  The world is getting more technical.  But I do wonder if people aren't going to college because a high school degree is less rigorous than it was.  And today more people are going to grad school because a college degree is less rigorous than it was.  In terms of your table, the % of people graduating from high school goes up if graduating from high school is easier.  The % of people graduating from college goes up if graduating from some college with some degree is easier.  Certainly, a lot of students work harder than students used to, especially in certain programs.  But there are also colleges/degrees that are known for being easy.  Free college with low barriers to get into college (as we have now at many places) to me is just likely going to result in a college degree meaning even less unless something is done to ensure at least a certain rigor to programs.  Which states in many cases have failed to do in the K-12 system and so I doubt they could/would do for colleges.

 

4.  In some European countries college is (essentially) free.  But it is much harder to get into.  There isn't the low barrier that we have many places here.  They have to take extensive tests and they shunt people into different tracks pretty early.  They're looking at people at least 9th grade and putting them in tracks and then once you are in a track it is hard to get out of.  There are very few places that work like the US where essentially anybody can go to college anywhere in the country.  If you are not a good student in VA, some college in CA will take you if you can figure out how to pay, and then the loan system doesn't much take into account if you paying that much makes sense. 

 

5.  I'd be more supportive of changing the loan system if there was an effort to take into account does the decision make sense.  You live in VA, you're a good student but not stellar, you're in at VA Tech, but you want to go to Clemson.  Sorry.  That doesn't make sense.  We'll give you a loan to go to VA Tech but not to Clemson.  When people talk about loan forgiveness, they often talk about how 18 year olds don't understand what they are really doing because they're 18, and now that person is being punished for a bad decision they made at 18 that they didn't really understand.  That's fine.  But then to have in place a system where the country as a whole is paying for those decisions doesn't make sense.  The decision needs to be largely taken away from the 18 year old.  A lot of suggestions are essentially, we should run the system essentially the way it is now, allow the 18 year olds to make "bad" decisions with greatly reduced consequences, and everybody else should pay for it.  To me, that doesn't make sense.

 

(And I'm for forgiving college debt where out and out fraud took place.  But otherwise, I'd prefer efforts be put in to actually fix the system rather than do things that seem like they are helping perpetuate a broken system.)

Edited February 22 by PeterMP

[tshile]

13 minutes ago, PeterMP said:

I think we have a problem of everybody needs to be able to do X. 

This is the problem with the democrats platform. 
 

they operate under this mindset, and believe it’s the governments job to fix/provide it. 
 

and it’s always someone else that’s supposed to pay for it

 

and if you have, and someone else doesn’t, the only explanation is you’re lucky and they’re not. 

[tshile]

33 minutes ago, PeterMP said:

But then to have in place a system where the country as a whole is paying for those decisions doesn't make sense. 

(Sorry I’m only picking out bits and pieces because you laid a lot of what I think out better than I could)

 

not only pay for the decision - but enable the decision

 

i understand the need to not make the loans merit based - it’s not good for society to punish people for decisions they made in high school. 
 

but what the loan is for should be merit based. What you said about which school (cost wise), but also which program. Not every degree is worth the money spent on it (if you want to spend your money to something like that - fine. But when you’re spending other people’s money then it matters (to me))

[Renegade7]

I agree with need to be a little more restrictive on student loans...

 

On the condition it's not done first in a vacuum like the "value" of K-12 in this country isn't still a problem.

 

There's been waaaaaay too much jus saying yes to young folks getting these loans with little to no resistance.  Jus a little bit could go a long way and force some conversations that need to be had while addressing other related issues.

[tshile]

22 minutes ago, Renegade7 said:

There's been waaaaaay too much jus saying yes to young folks getting these loans with little to no resistance.  Jus a little bit could go a long way and force some conversations that need to be had while addressing other related issues.

And the loan services don’t care, they just want more borrowers to collect

 

and neither do the universities because they thrive off more students with access to cheap money, and it’s not their fault of the 80k art degree doesn’t get them a job when they’re done. the same places that care more about their student athletes skipping bowl games than skipping class and having others take their tests. 
 

and there’s an interesting argument to listen to about how easy access to loans with little to no oversight has contributed to the overall rise in the cost of education. 
 

 

[bearrock]

On the Biden policy angle, I think student loan issue is another place where Biden and his administration shows their chops as competent people who just knows how to get things done in Washington.   Early on, the narrative swirled around how is he going get massive student loan forgiveness past Congress.  When the new law approach failed, they looked for other avenues to get a lot of forgiveness across the finish line.  That's just good, competent governing as the Chief Executive.

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, bearrock said:

On the Biden policy angle, I think student loan issue is another place where Biden and his administration shows their chops as competent people who just knows how to get things done in Washington.   Early on, the narrative swirled around how is he going get massive student loan forgiveness past Congress.  When the new law approach failed, they looked for other avenues to get a lot of forgiveness across the finish line.  That's just good, competent governing as the Chief Executive.

 

And I, as someone who was against blanket forgiveness, support most of what he's done here. Targeted relief to those who actually got ****ed over. So he should be gaining even more supporters with this approach. 

[PleaseBlitz]

13 hours ago, PeterMP said:

But if you want to by pass that sort of option and don't have the money, why shouldn't you pay interest on that?  Why shouldn't people consider the value of the education/experience they are getting in terms of their ability to pay back a loan with interest set at the market rate?  Does it make sense to disconnect the true costs of an education/college experience with the economic out come of that education/college experience?  That argument seems circumspect to me.

 

I agree with most of the other things you've posted on this page.  The answer to your questions here are:  (1) loan pricing (i.e., interest rates) are a function of the risk associated with making those loans and not getting paid back, (2) the vast majority of student loans in this country are fully guaranteed by the government, (3) student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy and (4) therefore, the 7-8% rates on student loans are above well above market.  Further, since the government retains 100% of the risk, there is no reason for profit to be baked into student loans (which is why I would reduce the interest rates to 1% or whatever it needs to be to cover the costs of servicing, but otherwise require repayment in most cases).  In other words, people should pay back what they borrowed, but they shouldn't have to pay back double what they borrowed to get an education.   

[tshile]

Yes. 1000x yes. 
 

im against blanket forgiveness. But the system should have never been allowed to be predatory, and I’m ok with doing something to help the people that were preyed on. But also fix it so it stops happening. 
 

it’s when we venture into forgiving loans because “the cost is too high” that I put my foot down. I’m ok with that - but only if you’re going to do something for the people that decided to not go to school because of cost, or joined the military, or opted for CC for 2 years to keep the loan amount down, or worked and paid in cash in payment plans. 
 

people who took loans are not the only ones that had to deal with the high cost. Everyone did and does. Acting like the people who took loans are the only ones impacted, and worthy of relief, is total bull****. 

However - I wish we had exceptions. Grade school teaching is not great for paying off loans. Especially when they require a masters degree now, plus continuing education throughout your career, like my system does. 
 

I’d be ok with some program to relieves the burden of student loans for people that are teachers for some certain threshold of years. If you expanded it to things like police, emt, firefighters, and nurses I would also be ok with considering that. 
 

if we aren’t going to fix teachers pay, we could at least provide relief like this to them. 

[The Evil Genius]

Fwiw, we essentially already have blanket forgiveness for walking away from much more debt (mortgages) though. And from what I recall, students loan debt cannot be walked away from as easily.