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[Telgin]

Mueller also seemed reluctant to imply that Trump would be charged with anything once he leaves office, so I'm not confident he will be.

Also, did I misread or did Mueller confirm that there was evidence that Trump told his subordinates to falsify information to protect him?  That seems like something that is pretty blatantly obstructing justice.  I wonder why nothing has materialized from that.  No way to prove it?

[Frumple]

Like literally what meuller has said, repeatedly. His investigation didn't materialize anything actionable against trump by itself because they were operating under standards that held a sitting president cannot be indicted, period.

Nothing much direct has happened since because the people who are supposed to do something about this have a weak link in the GOP senate that is pointedly indicating they will refuse to do their fucking constitutionally mandated duty and impeach. Meuller's evidence was supposed to be used by a congress willing to uphold rule of law to oust someone pissing on said rule. Instead the republican part of it in particular whipped out their almost-entirely dicks and added to the stream.

[da_nang]

Sometimes I wonder why the US doesn't have a system for vote of no confidence. This whole impeachment process is so cumbersome, that even if you get rid of Trump, you still have to deal with Pence and leftover underlings.

[Lord Shonus]

The impeachment process is the closest we have, because votes of no confidence only work in systems where the executive branch and the legislative branch are combined. In a system where they are wholly seperate the notion can not work.

[smjjames]

Sometimes I wonder why the US doesn't have a system for vote of no confidence. This whole impeachment process is so cumbersome, that even if you get rid of Trump, you still have to deal with Pence and leftover underlings.

I think we kind of do, except that it's legally toothless.

The problem though is that impeachment is an inherently political proccess and it assumes that both sides are willing to do their jobs, if one side refuses to do their job, then the impeachment proccess is inherently broken and you might not be able to use it when it's most needed.

[smjjames]

Really, that's the biggest flaw in the American system. It was never designed with political parties in mind, so there is no actual mechanism for, say, a minority player in the government to hold the majority accountable. More specifically, there is no actual way for the party not in power to hold the party in power accountable.

Well, they did, at least as far as parliamentary rules go, but they've been chopping those off recently. And yeah, while they subscribed to the enlightenment era philiosophy, I'm not sure how deeply they bought into it because political parties formed almost instantly, even if they were somewhat amorphously divided into federalist and anti-federalist.

Furthermore, there's no way to hold the executive accountable unless either all of the legislature is held by their opposition, or that even their own party disagrees with their actions.

Ultimately, as long as you don't piss off your own party, you can do anything and get away with it. The party out of power is literally that- out of power.


In a sense, I can't help but feel that we'd be better off not without political parties, but with the reality of political parties enshrined into the structure of the government itself. At least then, even if it would be preferable to have none, that we're at least designed with something in mind for the actual rather than the ideal.

Well, we have the amendment proccess, but even that has a tortorous path. They could also fix back the parliamentary proccesses, but that'd take a huge amount of political will because right now, it's 99% guaranteed that the Republicans will just change it back when they are in power.

[McTraveller]

Total student loan forgiveness up to $50k on annual incomes up to $100k?  Total price tag of something like $1.6T?

That is not how you fix the student loan issues...

[Naturegirl1999]

Total student loan forgiveness up to $50k on annual incomes up to $100k?  Total price tag of something like $1.6T?

That is not how you fix the student loan issues...

Right, taxing colleges like public school would eliminate tuition fees, thus eliminating the need to fall into debt. Correct me if I’m wrong

[EnigmaticHat]

Total student loan forgiveness up to $50k on annual incomes up to $100k?  Total price tag of something like $1.6T?

That is not how you fix the student loan issues...

I'm not sure what this is in regards to so I can't comment specifically.

But I agree that would be kind of a betrayal if the government forgave *private* debt.  A one time student loan forgiveness for federal student loans would be a good thing IMO.  A one time payment isn't a big deal and it would be a huge relief to many younger Americans.

Anyway this is all kind of pointless, we've known what we need to do for years.  Obama tried to do it and he got blocked by congress.  We need to have our students go to school primarily on government loans rather than private ones.

The basic issue right now is that people will go to college regardless of what college costs.  That's because (in the short term) its banks that pay for college, not students.  And students/parents honestly believe that if they don't go to college they'll be flipping burgers for the rest of their lives.

Anyway, a generous and forgiving federal loan system, and if a school tries to gouge students just don't offer loans for students to go there.  But no because boo hoo we'll destroy jobs in the private sector and totally not create an equal or greater amount in the public sector.

[Lord Shonus]

That's Warren's proposed solution to the student loan debt crisis.

[Folly]

After more than a week of protests, the Governor of Puerto Rico has announced his resignation.

[McTraveller]

The basic issue right now is that people will go to college regardless of what college costs.

In the US, this also applies to health care, cars, housing... for some reason in the US we have this underlying culture of "I'm going to do it anyway, I don't care what it costs, because I want it."

You can talk all day about policy, but until the American culture itself changes, there isn't really much that is going to be truly beneficial.  Forgiving a bunch of student debt now is going to be like an energy drink if you're tired: yeah it may provide a short-term boost in consumer goods spending, but the crash is going to be hard.

A one time student loan forgiveness for federal student loans would be a good thing IMO.  A one time payment isn't a big deal and it would be a huge relief to many younger Americans.

No, it is a huge deal.  The article I read about the Warren plan was to allow conversion of private loans to public, then forgiving the public loan. So it is forgiving private debt.  Then consider you're setting a precedent; some future generation will come along and say "but we did it before!".  There is massive moral hazard here.

I did find an error in my previous post though - the $1.6T number is the cost of making all college free to the student; the number for debt forgiveness is something like 4M students at an average $35k each, which is only about $140B.   So the one-time cost of the forgiveness would not be that high in "government spending" terms.

The bigger costs are by far the moral hazards: teaching a population that if it cries loud enough its debts will be forgiven is not a lesson I'd like to instill in future generations...

What I would do instead would be to do something like no-cost refinancing to the inflation rate (so, 2% or so) and allow terms of 30 years like a mortgage instead of 15 which is a more common student loan term.

[Frumple]

Don't think there's much moral hazard in unfucking years of having offloaded the costs of increasingly necessary and increasingly, probably unethically, expensive education on our citizens, personally. Get varyingly ruinous student debt off the back of our population, give a legit public option to education (not loan crap, and pervasive easy full-ride access especially to people in lower income brackets), and go from there. Crack the fuck down on student loan companies on top of it so this shit doesn't happen a second time.

Right now the pressures of student debt is basically economically fucking entire generations sideways. It's an immediate problem that could stand an immediate solution. Potential "moral hazard" bullshit is something we can worry about later, and put down systems to prevent even being an issue in the interim once entire generations are no longer being economically fucked sideways.

This isn't a matter of people crying loudly, it's a matter of a substantial economic millstone hanging on our collective necks, fucking with a host of other industries and distorting the hell out of markets labor and otherwise. It's not a moral weakness, it's a not particularly minor economic disaster dragging down chunks of our economy. Fixing that is more important than hand wringing about the potential woes of people wanting to unfuck a major economic problem again at some indefinite point in the future.

[wierd]

There's this problem with education costs in the US.

1) Primary education (I include highschool here, even though the term has specific meaning for gradeschool in the US) has had severe quality issues because they want to genericize curriculum instead of tailor it for each classroom, to meet certain standardized metrics which has resulted in school systems tailoring education to meet the letter but not the intent of those standard metrics. The result is very poor education in general. To add insult to this, keeping underperforming children back a year is a big black mark against the school, and so schools will pull every dirty trick imaginable to prevent it happening. The result is the defacto pushing along of students that really really really do need extra effort and teaching time through the system. The consequence of this leads to...

2) Employers have noticed. They have resorted to making "college degree" the new standard for "Yes, I can read, do mathematics, and follow basic instructions", and NO-- THEY WONT COMPROMISE ON IT.

3) Since the baseline for "It's a job that isn't flipping burgers" is now "at least an associate's degree" and "A job that actually pays something I can live on" is now "At least a bachelor's degree", the college education system is just overloaded with students to the point where tuition and fees balloon into the stratosphere.

4) The legislature does nothing about this, because:

 A) That would require admitting that their well-meaning policies at the federal level have resulted in a situation that is absolute shit.
 B) There is blowback from the voter-base about increasing spending to pay for remedial education, or to provide incentives for better quality education and materials
 C) A certain political party is just in fucking love with ideas that create perverse incentives in the educational system that cause this kind of mess, and wont relent on the inclusion of these policies
 D) "How DARE you try to dictate to businesses!" should you try a top-down smackdown on demanding college degrees for menial labor
 E) Generally, trying to accomplish anything is like herding cattle

Meanwhile, people gotta make enough money to eat, business owners dont want to hire the drooling, slack-jawed idiot that knows how to throw a ball real good, but cant tie his shoelaces, and HR has to try to find some way to weed those people out of the hiring process without running foul of equal opportunity labor law.


Basically, the issue starts with primary education, and specifically, how the fed has mangled it with their bullshit implementation of funding allocation, penalization practices for underperforming schools, and pedantic metricification of "success!"


Even if the policies that CAUSED the problem are addressed, it will be 15 to 20 years before the system resets itself.  In that time, how do you ensure that employers do not demand degrees for bullshit reasons, so that people can actually, you know-- NOT STARVE TO DEATH-- should they decide not to seek higher education?

[Frumple]

Like... mostly it just strikes me that if bloody anything is the point of government, getting student debt off our backs is an example of it. You have millions of people who by and large made the best decisions they could figure out at the time, and due to unscrupulous actors and changing circumstances it's led to notably shitty outcomes both for them and the country as a whole.

If not to unfuck situations like that, which student loan forgiveness or other sorts of mitigation would immediately do, why the hell does a government even exist to begin with? This is a pointed example of why we have these goddamn things.