according to my twitter feed it seems like the most existentially important issue of our times is canceling the student loan debt of upper middle class knowledge workers
I have said this before, but I would be very happy with a 10k loan forgiveness. Despite who gets airtime in the media, most of the actual loan defaults occur with people with low loan balances but no degree, and it will wipe out the debt for most of those people + a lot of people who took out loans to attend a public college.
But I would rather they did something to get tuition under control instead.
Turn off (or at least turn down) the free money spigot. No loans without strict conditions on the universities receiving them, e.g., minimum average salary upon graduation.
We could hope that this would lead to the administrations reducing their size, but since the administrations themselves would be deciding how to allocate the reduced funds I have my doubts they would unemploy themselves. After all, previous rounds of budget cuts haven’t done so.
You're right - the administrations would remain unchanged; they'd simply eliminate or phase out more full-time teaching positions and replace them with adjuncts. Problem solved!
Oh, right, fair point. But I hope it would at least slow the growth. Still, they would probably start slashing costs in other places, like hiring even more adjuncts to teach.
One thing that may be worth noting, which I think is rarely understood: an R1 university already brings in a lot more from federal research dollars than it does from tuition. So you can't just get rid of all the professors, who obtain those dollars and the massive indirects that come along with them, either. If tuition is limited, the administration may try to grow more on the research side.
What might be interesting is to see a greater separation between the research and teaching parts of universities, but now I'm just daydreaming.
I assumed by "they" and "Dems" we meant the government—do you think the government has hiring and firing power at universities (let alone the ability to eliminate entire job positions)? It seems like that would be pretty remarkable government overreach and not something I'd expect them to be able to do efficiently.
Regarding reducing guarantees, as I said in another comment I have no idea how this would result in smaller university administrations—that isn't what previous rounds of budget cuts have accomplished.
I thinkbit would probably be a good idea on balance, to cancel student loan debt, although I'm concerned about the immediate inflatin implications. However, it strikes me as off how important people make this out to be. Student load debt can be rough, but most people whobhave student loan debt are better off than if they hadn't gone to college.
I mean I don't blame people for supporting a bad policy that would result in them personally getting tens of thousands of dollars. I'd do the same (but that doesn't mean it's not bad policy).
The comparison to PPP is kind of disingenuous. PPP was designed with a provision that it would be cancelled if employers didn't lay off workers during COVID. It was called a loan but (insofar as it is cancellable) it was effectively a grant intended to subsidize payrolls.
The rules are pretty clear that you had to maintain employment/compensation and use most of the money directly on payroll (of course, money is fungible). Are people cheating/gaming the system? Wouldn't surprise me. But it doesn't change the fact that the expectation and intent of these loans was that they would function more as grants and that the intended beneficiary were really workers who would otherwise have been laid off.
Was there a better way to design the program or accomplish this goal? ¯\_( )_/¯. My recollection was that it was designed this way because it was necessary to allow them to shovel as much money out the door as quickly as possible to limit the impacts of a national emergency. "Waste fraud and abuse" is a cost you pay to ensure that you are getting the program to everyone who you want to get it to as fast as you can.
But ultimately saying "we forgave this loan to businesses that was designed to be forgiven if it was used to benefit workers, so we should also forgive this other loan that was expressly not designed to be forgiven which was intended to benefit (and typically did benefit) the borrowers" is a bit of a non sequitur.
Just anecdotal, but I know (1) a couple and (2) a sole proprietorship who both got PPP loans wiped away for their businesses. What payroll they were protecting, I have no idea.
First off, my comment was clearly sarcastic, but yes I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the establishment cares more about giving money to businesses then it does to people. I wasn’t party to the PPP discussions, but as far as how the program was structured: unsecured loans accruing interest at 1% with no payments due for a year, of which most were even forgiven before that date…you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. Oh and I bet you didn’t know that if you should negative book income in 2019 than you weren’t even eligible. Only businesses that reported positive income the prior year were eligible for funds.
Hell, TARP funds were immensely more punitive than this and yet the level of complaining about the program is completely different: those assholes at least paid it back. PPP was the largest permanent monetary expansion since I don’t even know when.
Look at the loan to deposit ratio in the banking system. Some of that is partially distorted by the fed, but most of it ramps up at the same time the C&I call code ramps down ie a ppp loan disappeared and what was left was just a bank deposit.
Think of student loans as the opposite of inheritance taxes - a poor tax on people that have don't family money. It may not be the most important issue, but student financial aid reform is a clear-cut equal opportunity issue that should be addressed to create a more fair society, instead of one where intergenerational wealth disparities are compounded.
The challenge, of course, is doing it in a way that doesn't lead to inefficiency and cost inflation. Whether it's healthcare or education, adding a third party payor to the mix creates bad incentives for providers that need to be countered with structural reforms to reward efficiency rather than bloat.
Except the people advocating for it never actually talk about reform in the future, only giving themselves a one time get out of jail free card. Kids were in high school get shit out of it. It’s pure selfishness on their part. They are not serious people.
The mechanism by which progressives got to this conclusion is interesting. They convinced themselves that there was a secret cache of voters, that actually aggressively's progressive legislation was _necessary_ to win.
"The way to get one thing I want is actually to get two things I want" is always dangerous reasoning.
They really do believe they’re so blindingly correct they can’t even imagine a good faith counter argument. That’s why they’re insufferable to talk to.
To be fair, that’s true of plenty of people across the political spectrum. It’s just that there’s no risk of me talking to people at most points on the political spectrum.
The "secret cache of voters" was the explicit theory behind the Bernie Sanders campaign (2020 edition). Not only did they not want to reach out to never-Trump Republicans, but they wanted to also take the "PMC" wing of the existing Democratic coalition and throw it overboard in order to attract and make room for the secret non-voters.
Yeah, I think Matt is under-estimating, here, the ability of prog college activists to talk themselves into the idea that the reason the youth vote is so chronically depressed is because young voters are waiting for the socialist of their dreams to inspire them to come out, as opposed to simply being more interested in their jobs and social lives.
Just mechanically on the numbers, if you could somehow cause the existing youth vote to expand to the rate of the senior vote, while the partisan tilt within it stayed the same, you would suddenly have overwhelming progressive victories all over purple states. I'm actually not sure that there are that many prog young people, though -- young people who vote are generally more partisan, in either direction, than their non-voting peers. The non-voters are squishier on both economic issues, and on some of the cutting edge social issues. (Although I would expect young people _very_ broadly to understand the housing shortage as a crisis, just due to their lived experience, in a way that older voters don't.)
I think many millennial progs, who were just coming of age around 2008, saw Obama win in 2008 with huge youth vote enthusiasm and high turnout, saw Democrats passing a watered-down agenda that disappointed them, and then saw Democrats get destroyed in 2010 as turnout cratered, and used these data point to conclude that Democrats lost in 2010 because the youth vote didn't show up and that they didn't show up because they were disappointed by the Democrat's agenda not going far enough.
This set of assumptions, of course, ignores a ton of other more important factors pertaining to how Democrats won in 2008 and then lost in 2010.
I'd say in particular it ignores the question of _why_ the bills passed in '09-'10 were watered down relative to what Obama supporters might have hoped for. Like, even before Ted Kennedy died, we never had sixty votes for, say, single payer healthcare. Hell, we never had _fifty_ votes for single payer healthcare. You could've had President Sanders, and unless we also elected enough Democratic Senators who wanted to play ball, we wouldn't get the Sanders agenda.
I agree the story you're telling here captures what a lot of people seem to think, I just find it frustrating. It seems like an attempt to take the politics out of politics. You have to work to elect the best person you can, given the electorate you're facing. We used to have a Democratic Senator from Wyoming! We still have one from Montana! Those folks have to answer to an electorate that is _much_ more conservative than the median voter of the country, and if you want to pass some big legislative package, you're gonna have to earn their votes. That's just the system we have. Unless we abolish the Senate, or at least admit DC and PR (and get some center-lefty Senators from PR, which would not be a given -- Puerto Ricans have the same kind of social-conservative tilt as a lot of Hispanic ethnicities), we have to campaign within the system we have, not the one we might want or wish to have. :-P
I appreciate you writing this very much, Matt, even though I know you're going to get absolutely torched for it. I've been pointing out for the past several years the bizarre disconnect between the progressive rhetoric of "Trump's a *literal* fascist who's going to declare himself president for life and *literally* re-enslave black people, reduce women to the status of 'The Handmaid's Tale,' and genocide the American LGBTQ population," with the continued progressive-business-as-usual take of, "Federalism is terrible and the states as sovereign entities should be destroyed; as much governing power as possible should be transferred to the central government and administrative agencies should be given maximum discretion to pursue their missions without interference by the courts."
I mean, for about 30 seconds in fall of 2020, progressives dialed down the latter, but it's really stunning to me to witness people in progressive spaces who are unironically talking about the urgent necessity of "blue state secession" flip five minutes later to how Biden should issue executive orders on gun control, overriding whatever DeSantis is doing today on COVID, federalizing the Texas National Guard to protect access to abortion, etc., etc. A world in which the latter is happening is a world in which the former is basically impossible. If someone sincerely thinks a totalitarian dictator is inevitably going to seize the presidency in the near future, then if that person is sane they would want maximum devolution of power *away* from the central government, and the failure to adopt that logical position gives away the game -- either the speaker is deeply insincere about their fears of such a takeover or that speaker is a totalitarian at heart themself and just hopes that someone who favors their views can seize that power in the future.
I tend to discount Option C because if the problem was mainly idiocy you'd expect to see a lot more "born-again federalists," who seem to very much still be the exception rather than the rule.
Progressives often act like they're too righteous to need to worry about reality. Centrists often act like it's 1982 and a couple of drinks with Republicans can fix everything. Journalists often amplify their audience's delusions. A rising tide of Patreon/Substack grifters is telling people that progress is easy and is only not happening due to deliberate betrayals by the leadership.
It's really a very bad system and it's not surprising it's working so poorly.
I absolutely would have taken this deal, and I think progressives would have taken it too. But it was even more of a non-starter for Manchin than BBB. The Democrats didn't make a calculated gamble that BBB was more important than democracy protection - democracy protection was never possible. And it wasn't possible because Manchin (and Sinema) unequivocally refused to entertain any changes that didn't have the imprimatur of the Republican Party. However, Manchin and Sinema expressed various shades of willingness to do reconciliation bills, including BBB.
The reason the Dems didn't run in 2020 on enacting none of the Democratic Party's ideas is not only because they wanted to take advantage of Trump's unpopularity to enact their platform - it's also that there's no viable cross coalition to make. There is no democracy-supportive Republican party (or Republican people) with which to form an alliance, and the Democrats have enough votes to take control of the country themselves. And I'm not saying this because I think Republicans are evil monsters who love fascism - it's just not in their political interest to support ending gerrymandering or reforming the Senate or the Supreme Court.
Which is why the hypothetical doesn't really make sense. These aren't common sense bipartisan procedural reforms - these are perceived by the other side (in some cases, correctly) as substantive advantages for the Democratic Party that are much more dangerous to them than 10 BBBs. There's no viable coalition for political reform outside the democratic party. And even within the Democratic Party you have a handful of veto point holders who strongly believe that these reforms are so substantively favorable to the Democrats that they can't be entertained without 10 Republican senators agreeing to them.
I think the point is that they didn't even try. There would have been some horse trading to get the votes democrat or republican, but no such effort was made.
There's nothing to try. There's no trade to make. DC Statehood, gerrymandering, court reform, these are all red lines for both Manchin and every single Republican. And we know this because Manchin and the Republicans were very explicit about it.
And any time Manchin showed any interest in talking about this, Democrats swiftly moved to give him whatever he wanted. When he came out with his voting rights proposal, Democrats fell over themselves to accept it, even though it created voter ID rules that many Democrats had previously opposed. But there's just no actual movement possible here, as long as Manchin is the 50th vote. Where there was a possibility for horse trading - the infrastructure bill, BBB - the Democrats worked hard on a deal.
The thing that makes us different than the Czechs or the Israelis is that there are only two parties, and one of those parties understands itself to benefit from democracy reforms, while the other regards those reforms as a mortal threat. In Israel or the Czech Republic, the various small parties can imagine themselves benefitting from those reforms. But how could Lisa Murkowski benefit from Biden getting to make Supreme Court picks? How would Romney benefit from Utah not being able to gerrymander? There's no deal to make.
If you immediately demonize the other party and give up, that's not a problem with the other party. Why not a real debate instead of a fantasy debate on MSNBC? If it's important, force the issue.
BBB was a half assed effort by house Democrats. Voting for the bill with the right list of programs was more important than passing a functional bill. If the goal was passing the legislation, we'd have had a reasonably solid bill but now instead of nothing. If we cared about democratic reform we'd be working hard on legislation instead of whining on Twitter. If we cared about climate change, BBB would not be hung up on childcare.
Sure, the House version of BBB was ugly. But if Manchin had said "Here's my version of the $1.75T BBB" my guess is that it would have passed. He could have, but he didn't (so far?) With great power, comes great, well, not responsibility but rather great jerking people around.
It's not a question of demonization. You can be as nice to them as you want - it's just not in their interest. I say this with a complete absence of malice. Just like you can be as nice to the Democrats as you want, they're just not gonna vote in favor of creating electoral colleges for gubernatorial elections or giving each county an equal number of seats in the legislature or giving only presidents who lose the popular vote extra supreme court seats to fill. You cannot expect the Republican Party to agree to weaken their ability to hold power.
Doubtful. No DC/PR Senators until 2022 at the earliest; gerrymandering's impact is grossly overstated; the Supreme Court expansion will be slowly phased in. Given that the Democrats would be virtually certain to lose the House in 2022 (especially with no other legislation to their credit), there would be *no* climate change legislation passed in 2023 or 2024.
Nothing prevents DC and PR from seating their delegations immediately. New states don't have to wait until the next elections to fill vacancies, just like old states.
ETA: But yes, assuming Manchin's condition holds, climate would be deferred until at least 2022.
Thank you for this comment - reading this piece, and especially the comments, was making me feel crazy because nobody seemed to acknowledge that Democrats are focused on relatively normal stuff _because they have no chance of addressing the radically dangerous stuff._
I think there’s an under-appreciated “chicken and the egg” aspect to all of this. Republicans are acting in maniacal, anti-democratic ways because they perceive Democrats to be acting in maniacal, anti-American ways. Is their perception accurate? Personally I think it’s warped by social media and their long-standing right-wing propaganda media universe. But it helps to see that an aggressive push to the left with policy is PART OF the justification the right uses for why they need a power grab to “save America.” It’s impossible to predict if they would perceive your recommended course of action as an aggressive Democratic power grab in order to substantiate their own.
Yes, and… I think both sides use the other side’s warped perception of reality as an excuse to grow into it. “Obama’s not a socialist anti-American, that’s ridiculous!” would have been totally true to say in 2009. Eventually you had influential liberals saying, “Well actually, maybe that was the problem, he wasn’t socialist enough! Maybe American democracy is fundamentally rooted in white supremacy and needs to be burned to the ground!” A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Now, if your point it “Republicans gonna hysteric, and there’s no amount of being sane we on the left can do to stop it,” you might be right. But there are certainly things some people are doing to make it worse.
>> Democratic platforms have gotten more left-wing
Not just that, but at least in the snippets Matt pulled, they've become largely performative documents that "call out" and complain without proposing solutions or promising action.
There's a striking difference in phrasing in the 2008 vs 2020 paragraphs. In 2008, there were a lot of "we will" statements. In 2020, there were none. It's all complaining and posturing with nothing whatsoever about how they will make it better.
The motives of the extremely progressive part of the left, I think, can be summarized by one unifying theme: they want to feel as if they're living through a time of revolution. Any proposal that would help save democracy in non-revolutionary ways (as opposed to packing the courts, etc.) is unwelcome. Any policy that would help to reduce racial inequality without upending established systems is dismissed. To me, this explains why people of this particular persuasion seem to be steadfastly dedicated to strategies that will almost surely hurt Democrats.
Combo of "the worse the better"-ism with a belief that "the other side is antidemocratic and that's good!" Having the country be permanently dominated by an entrenched minority is the ideal end-state for these people - they just want themselves to be that minority.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. To me it looks like more of a Twitter/media phenomenon. Congresspeople probably don't hold these views, but those in very blue districts might fear getting primaried if they don't pursue the interests of the Twitter/media crowd.
Personally, I’m getting a bit tired of everything being called a “five-alarm fire”. There’s enough stress going on in our own lives that I’m frankly just starting to ignore stories about what bad things the republicans are going to do next. And if even self described media junkies start tuning out, imagine how it must be for the rest.
We need people like Dave Roberts, Ian Millhiser, etc. to actually like, bet on whether or not democracy is going to fail. There needs to be a way for people to put their money where their mouths are.
man, reminiscing about the 2008 platform & Obama always warms my heart - and leads me off on a tangent...
Isn't the real problem that Obama could be incredibly reasonable, but the GOP tried to stop him anyhow - and critically, the voters did not punish them for thwarting Obama's moderate agenda? I don't know what to do with that actual history. Like every instinct I have says Dems should try to replay "Obama 08", but really, we tried that and it didn't work out the way I would have hoped...
I think the big problem wasn't policy moderation, but PROCEDURAL moderation. Rerun 2008, but get rid of the filibuster (and be a bit less deficit averse.)
It’s notable that the sticking point then was Joe Lieberman at 60 votes. I suppose the technology of using reconciliation to do big things hadn’t been developed yet.
You don’t remember how the Affordable Care Act got passed in the end? They did try to get it through bipartisan process, when that didn’t work they had to negotiate with themselves (to get Lieberman et Al on board, then Kennedy dies and they were forced to resort to reconciliation. This year, with 50 vote majority and the last 10 years experience of how Republicans operate, reconciliation is the starting point.
Just to nitpick, the ACA was passed in the Senate over the filibuster, 60-39. The House also passed it as written to avoid another Senate vote. Reconciliation was used for a second bill with some minor fixes immediately after.
Even I didn't remember it being two separate bills until I just looked it up.
The U.S. has never been a democracy. Abolish the Senate, strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction, adopt the national popular vote compact, and the U.S. would still be a republic with huge House districts that only prominent, well-funded candidates could win.
I suspect MY’s true fear is that the US might become a big Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties. This is actually a threat, but Wisconsin is hardly hell.
In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities. Sometimes, there has been a Tory government even though 60% of the electorate voted for candidates to the Torys’ left. Britain isn’t hell either. Nor are there many formal safeguards. Nothing other than decency and maybe the queen prevents a Tory parliament from postponing the next election indefinitely.
If Matt wants to say America is at risk of a 4 to 30 year period where legislative majorities are based on a 45% vote share, I don’t disagree. It’s just that prospect is hardly terrifying.
How is this not terrifying? Like I live in Florida which is using the power of the state to target my political views from being expressed. It doesn't care about the teacher who literally says she thinks dinosaurs and men lived together, but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable.
Then leveled up to a much more powerful government, by a coalition which has a lot of axes to grind with people like me even participating in life.
"but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable."
People aren't being targeted for saying that.
The pushback is against the "anti-racist/CRT/woke" agenda which says that all white people are oppressors. That says stupid shit like math or being on time is racist. That is trying to re-segregate us by dividing us into affinity groups, and that says the single most important thing you can know about a person is the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
I don't know how you have certainty from the text of these laws. They all contain vague lines that are designed to allow people to be harassed by lunatic parents. And it's only against people with liberal views. The teacher who says she thinks dinosaurs and mankind coexisted is totally safe but there's no way to tell what is safe.
"Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties."
I think the actual number is more like 40%. In 2018, Republicans got 44.75% of the vote but 63/99 of the assembly seats. As wikipedia notes "Based on the 2018 results, the tipping point district was District 29, which the Republicans won by a margin of 12.12%, therefore Democrats would have needed to win the statewide popular vote by a margin of 20.36% to win a majority of seats." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election
(Also, clustering certainly plays a role in this imbalance, but there's gerrymandering in there too.)
"In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities."
This is an unfair comparison. *No party* has polled over 44% since 1970 (in no small part because of third parties), but this cuts both ways: Sometimes the conservative party wins a majority with ~40%, and sometimes the Labour party wins with ~40%. If it cut both ways in WI, I'd be less concerned about it. However, it doesn't; the Democrats will never win in WI with 40%. They won't even win with 55%.
I’m more concerned than David because the WI status quo is insane and unsustainable, but less concerned than you because it cannot be replicated nationwide.
Could you explain what you mean by this? Not all states can be put into a WI-like situation? (No surprise there; most states aren't swingy.) The congress can't be put into a WI-like state?
First, most states don't have an electoral geography that lends itself to this quite so well, aside from the old rust belt states. WI, MI, OH, PA, and IN are about it. PA is somewhat protected by the makeup of the state Supreme Court, MI now has a non-partisan redistricting commission, and OH/IN/WI are already lost causes.
The West Coast and New England are so blue that you'd have to gerrymander *to avoid* disproportionately blue maps.
The New South and Mountain West are growing too fast in urban areas to do anything except play defense.
Second, to pull a Wisconsin everywhere would require you to control every state's redistricting at every ten-year interval, which is somewhere between astronomically unlikely and outright impossible.
Third, all of the more extreme alternatives (tossing of votes, etc) will provoke a hell of a lot worse problem than a period of herrenvolk democracy.
according to my twitter feed it seems like the most existentially important issue of our times is canceling the student loan debt of upper middle class knowledge workers
and pretending its a civil rights issue that would mostly benefit latinx and BIPOC
I have said this before, but I would be very happy with a 10k loan forgiveness. Despite who gets airtime in the media, most of the actual loan defaults occur with people with low loan balances but no degree, and it will wipe out the debt for most of those people + a lot of people who took out loans to attend a public college.
But I would rather they did something to get tuition under control instead.
How could they even do so?
Turn off (or at least turn down) the free money spigot. No loans without strict conditions on the universities receiving them, e.g., minimum average salary upon graduation.
We could hope that this would lead to the administrations reducing their size, but since the administrations themselves would be deciding how to allocate the reduced funds I have my doubts they would unemploy themselves. After all, previous rounds of budget cuts haven’t done so.
You're right - the administrations would remain unchanged; they'd simply eliminate or phase out more full-time teaching positions and replace them with adjuncts. Problem solved!
Oh, right, fair point. But I hope it would at least slow the growth. Still, they would probably start slashing costs in other places, like hiring even more adjuncts to teach.
One thing that may be worth noting, which I think is rarely understood: an R1 university already brings in a lot more from federal research dollars than it does from tuition. So you can't just get rid of all the professors, who obtain those dollars and the massive indirects that come along with them, either. If tuition is limited, the administration may try to grow more on the research side.
What might be interesting is to see a greater separation between the research and teaching parts of universities, but now I'm just daydreaming.
Fire 25% of all non teaching university employees at random?
Make it 60-80%, and you have a deal.
EDIT: Exempt the custodial, maintenance, and cafeteria staff, and maybe staff health practitioners so long as they are free for students.
I assumed by "they" and "Dems" we meant the government—do you think the government has hiring and firing power at universities (let alone the ability to eliminate entire job positions)? It seems like that would be pretty remarkable government overreach and not something I'd expect them to be able to do efficiently.
Regarding reducing guarantees, as I said in another comment I have no idea how this would result in smaller university administrations—that isn't what previous rounds of budget cuts have accomplished.
The most tweeted priority. The “real” priority is actually getting the SALT deduction… even more than child poverty and the child tax credit.
We are all Republicans now.
what would economic impact of cancelling student debt be? would more people in 30s start to buy homes?
Remember only 1/3 of home buyers went to college.
I thinkbit would probably be a good idea on balance, to cancel student loan debt, although I'm concerned about the immediate inflatin implications. However, it strikes me as off how important people make this out to be. Student load debt can be rough, but most people whobhave student loan debt are better off than if they hadn't gone to college.
I mean I don't blame people for supporting a bad policy that would result in them personally getting tens of thousands of dollars. I'd do the same (but that doesn't mean it's not bad policy).
Maybe if students declared themselves as LLC’s it would get cancelled faster, like the PPP program.
The comparison to PPP is kind of disingenuous. PPP was designed with a provision that it would be cancelled if employers didn't lay off workers during COVID. It was called a loan but (insofar as it is cancellable) it was effectively a grant intended to subsidize payrolls.
As someone who actually works in commercial lending I can assure you it actually didn’t play out that way.
The rules are pretty clear that you had to maintain employment/compensation and use most of the money directly on payroll (of course, money is fungible). Are people cheating/gaming the system? Wouldn't surprise me. But it doesn't change the fact that the expectation and intent of these loans was that they would function more as grants and that the intended beneficiary were really workers who would otherwise have been laid off.
Was there a better way to design the program or accomplish this goal? ¯\_( )_/¯. My recollection was that it was designed this way because it was necessary to allow them to shovel as much money out the door as quickly as possible to limit the impacts of a national emergency. "Waste fraud and abuse" is a cost you pay to ensure that you are getting the program to everyone who you want to get it to as fast as you can.
But ultimately saying "we forgave this loan to businesses that was designed to be forgiven if it was used to benefit workers, so we should also forgive this other loan that was expressly not designed to be forgiven which was intended to benefit (and typically did benefit) the borrowers" is a bit of a non sequitur.
They weren’t that strict. Nobody is even really monitoring it.
Just anecdotal, but I know (1) a couple and (2) a sole proprietorship who both got PPP loans wiped away for their businesses. What payroll they were protecting, I have no idea.
To me, the subtext of your first comment is something along the lines of "establishment cares about giving businesses money but not regular people".
But to make that subtext accurate you have to argue that was the *intent* of PPP, not what actually happened with it.
First off, my comment was clearly sarcastic, but yes I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the establishment cares more about giving money to businesses then it does to people. I wasn’t party to the PPP discussions, but as far as how the program was structured: unsecured loans accruing interest at 1% with no payments due for a year, of which most were even forgiven before that date…you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. Oh and I bet you didn’t know that if you should negative book income in 2019 than you weren’t even eligible. Only businesses that reported positive income the prior year were eligible for funds.
Hell, TARP funds were immensely more punitive than this and yet the level of complaining about the program is completely different: those assholes at least paid it back. PPP was the largest permanent monetary expansion since I don’t even know when.
so many people forgiven that should not have
How did it turn out?
Look at the loan to deposit ratio in the banking system. Some of that is partially distorted by the fed, but most of it ramps up at the same time the C&I call code ramps down ie a ppp loan disappeared and what was left was just a bank deposit.
Think of student loans as the opposite of inheritance taxes - a poor tax on people that have don't family money. It may not be the most important issue, but student financial aid reform is a clear-cut equal opportunity issue that should be addressed to create a more fair society, instead of one where intergenerational wealth disparities are compounded.
The challenge, of course, is doing it in a way that doesn't lead to inefficiency and cost inflation. Whether it's healthcare or education, adding a third party payor to the mix creates bad incentives for providers that need to be countered with structural reforms to reward efficiency rather than bloat.
Except the people advocating for it never actually talk about reform in the future, only giving themselves a one time get out of jail free card. Kids were in high school get shit out of it. It’s pure selfishness on their part. They are not serious people.
Ha!
The mechanism by which progressives got to this conclusion is interesting. They convinced themselves that there was a secret cache of voters, that actually aggressively's progressive legislation was _necessary_ to win.
"The way to get one thing I want is actually to get two things I want" is always dangerous reasoning.
They really do believe they’re so blindingly correct they can’t even imagine a good faith counter argument. That’s why they’re insufferable to talk to.
To be fair, that’s true of plenty of people across the political spectrum. It’s just that there’s no risk of me talking to people at most points on the political spectrum.
Wait, now there’s a Mark Robbins AND a Marc Robbins?? And Mark has a cat while Marc has a dog?
I was hoping the other one wouldn't renew his subscription. Sigh.
The "secret cache of voters" was the explicit theory behind the Bernie Sanders campaign (2020 edition). Not only did they not want to reach out to never-Trump Republicans, but they wanted to also take the "PMC" wing of the existing Democratic coalition and throw it overboard in order to attract and make room for the secret non-voters.
And for many on the progressive left, that this is such an obvious reality that Democrats must be actively trying to lose elections 🙄
Yeah, I think Matt is under-estimating, here, the ability of prog college activists to talk themselves into the idea that the reason the youth vote is so chronically depressed is because young voters are waiting for the socialist of their dreams to inspire them to come out, as opposed to simply being more interested in their jobs and social lives.
Just mechanically on the numbers, if you could somehow cause the existing youth vote to expand to the rate of the senior vote, while the partisan tilt within it stayed the same, you would suddenly have overwhelming progressive victories all over purple states. I'm actually not sure that there are that many prog young people, though -- young people who vote are generally more partisan, in either direction, than their non-voting peers. The non-voters are squishier on both economic issues, and on some of the cutting edge social issues. (Although I would expect young people _very_ broadly to understand the housing shortage as a crisis, just due to their lived experience, in a way that older voters don't.)
I think many millennial progs, who were just coming of age around 2008, saw Obama win in 2008 with huge youth vote enthusiasm and high turnout, saw Democrats passing a watered-down agenda that disappointed them, and then saw Democrats get destroyed in 2010 as turnout cratered, and used these data point to conclude that Democrats lost in 2010 because the youth vote didn't show up and that they didn't show up because they were disappointed by the Democrat's agenda not going far enough.
This set of assumptions, of course, ignores a ton of other more important factors pertaining to how Democrats won in 2008 and then lost in 2010.
I'd say in particular it ignores the question of _why_ the bills passed in '09-'10 were watered down relative to what Obama supporters might have hoped for. Like, even before Ted Kennedy died, we never had sixty votes for, say, single payer healthcare. Hell, we never had _fifty_ votes for single payer healthcare. You could've had President Sanders, and unless we also elected enough Democratic Senators who wanted to play ball, we wouldn't get the Sanders agenda.
I agree the story you're telling here captures what a lot of people seem to think, I just find it frustrating. It seems like an attempt to take the politics out of politics. You have to work to elect the best person you can, given the electorate you're facing. We used to have a Democratic Senator from Wyoming! We still have one from Montana! Those folks have to answer to an electorate that is _much_ more conservative than the median voter of the country, and if you want to pass some big legislative package, you're gonna have to earn their votes. That's just the system we have. Unless we abolish the Senate, or at least admit DC and PR (and get some center-lefty Senators from PR, which would not be a given -- Puerto Ricans have the same kind of social-conservative tilt as a lot of Hispanic ethnicities), we have to campaign within the system we have, not the one we might want or wish to have. :-P
I appreciate you writing this very much, Matt, even though I know you're going to get absolutely torched for it. I've been pointing out for the past several years the bizarre disconnect between the progressive rhetoric of "Trump's a *literal* fascist who's going to declare himself president for life and *literally* re-enslave black people, reduce women to the status of 'The Handmaid's Tale,' and genocide the American LGBTQ population," with the continued progressive-business-as-usual take of, "Federalism is terrible and the states as sovereign entities should be destroyed; as much governing power as possible should be transferred to the central government and administrative agencies should be given maximum discretion to pursue their missions without interference by the courts."
I mean, for about 30 seconds in fall of 2020, progressives dialed down the latter, but it's really stunning to me to witness people in progressive spaces who are unironically talking about the urgent necessity of "blue state secession" flip five minutes later to how Biden should issue executive orders on gun control, overriding whatever DeSantis is doing today on COVID, federalizing the Texas National Guard to protect access to abortion, etc., etc. A world in which the latter is happening is a world in which the former is basically impossible. If someone sincerely thinks a totalitarian dictator is inevitably going to seize the presidency in the near future, then if that person is sane they would want maximum devolution of power *away* from the central government, and the failure to adopt that logical position gives away the game -- either the speaker is deeply insincere about their fears of such a takeover or that speaker is a totalitarian at heart themself and just hopes that someone who favors their views can seize that power in the future.
Option C is also on the table: this person is an idiot.
I tend to discount Option C because if the problem was mainly idiocy you'd expect to see a lot more "born-again federalists," who seem to very much still be the exception rather than the rule.
I tend to think that if a problem is "people are idiots," then that's at least partially resolvable by education.
Progressives often act like they're too righteous to need to worry about reality. Centrists often act like it's 1982 and a couple of drinks with Republicans can fix everything. Journalists often amplify their audience's delusions. A rising tide of Patreon/Substack grifters is telling people that progress is easy and is only not happening due to deliberate betrayals by the leadership.
It's really a very bad system and it's not surprising it's working so poorly.
I absolutely would have taken this deal, and I think progressives would have taken it too. But it was even more of a non-starter for Manchin than BBB. The Democrats didn't make a calculated gamble that BBB was more important than democracy protection - democracy protection was never possible. And it wasn't possible because Manchin (and Sinema) unequivocally refused to entertain any changes that didn't have the imprimatur of the Republican Party. However, Manchin and Sinema expressed various shades of willingness to do reconciliation bills, including BBB.
The reason the Dems didn't run in 2020 on enacting none of the Democratic Party's ideas is not only because they wanted to take advantage of Trump's unpopularity to enact their platform - it's also that there's no viable cross coalition to make. There is no democracy-supportive Republican party (or Republican people) with which to form an alliance, and the Democrats have enough votes to take control of the country themselves. And I'm not saying this because I think Republicans are evil monsters who love fascism - it's just not in their political interest to support ending gerrymandering or reforming the Senate or the Supreme Court.
Which is why the hypothetical doesn't really make sense. These aren't common sense bipartisan procedural reforms - these are perceived by the other side (in some cases, correctly) as substantive advantages for the Democratic Party that are much more dangerous to them than 10 BBBs. There's no viable coalition for political reform outside the democratic party. And even within the Democratic Party you have a handful of veto point holders who strongly believe that these reforms are so substantively favorable to the Democrats that they can't be entertained without 10 Republican senators agreeing to them.
I think the point is that they didn't even try. There would have been some horse trading to get the votes democrat or republican, but no such effort was made.
There's nothing to try. There's no trade to make. DC Statehood, gerrymandering, court reform, these are all red lines for both Manchin and every single Republican. And we know this because Manchin and the Republicans were very explicit about it.
And any time Manchin showed any interest in talking about this, Democrats swiftly moved to give him whatever he wanted. When he came out with his voting rights proposal, Democrats fell over themselves to accept it, even though it created voter ID rules that many Democrats had previously opposed. But there's just no actual movement possible here, as long as Manchin is the 50th vote. Where there was a possibility for horse trading - the infrastructure bill, BBB - the Democrats worked hard on a deal.
The thing that makes us different than the Czechs or the Israelis is that there are only two parties, and one of those parties understands itself to benefit from democracy reforms, while the other regards those reforms as a mortal threat. In Israel or the Czech Republic, the various small parties can imagine themselves benefitting from those reforms. But how could Lisa Murkowski benefit from Biden getting to make Supreme Court picks? How would Romney benefit from Utah not being able to gerrymander? There's no deal to make.
If you immediately demonize the other party and give up, that's not a problem with the other party. Why not a real debate instead of a fantasy debate on MSNBC? If it's important, force the issue.
BBB was a half assed effort by house Democrats. Voting for the bill with the right list of programs was more important than passing a functional bill. If the goal was passing the legislation, we'd have had a reasonably solid bill but now instead of nothing. If we cared about democratic reform we'd be working hard on legislation instead of whining on Twitter. If we cared about climate change, BBB would not be hung up on childcare.
Sure, the House version of BBB was ugly. But if Manchin had said "Here's my version of the $1.75T BBB" my guess is that it would have passed. He could have, but he didn't (so far?) With great power, comes great, well, not responsibility but rather great jerking people around.
Just write the damn bill, Manchin.
Feel like revising this take at all?
Hope springs eternal
It's not a question of demonization. You can be as nice to them as you want - it's just not in their interest. I say this with a complete absence of malice. Just like you can be as nice to the Democrats as you want, they're just not gonna vote in favor of creating electoral colleges for gubernatorial elections or giving each county an equal number of seats in the legislature or giving only presidents who lose the popular vote extra supreme court seats to fill. You cannot expect the Republican Party to agree to weaken their ability to hold power.
I'd rather have $550B in climate change spending than anything on that list.
Though both are soooo hypothetical right now :-(
If you get DC and PR statehood, ban gerrymandering, and give Biden supreme court picks, you could get a trillion in climate change spending.
Doubtful. No DC/PR Senators until 2022 at the earliest; gerrymandering's impact is grossly overstated; the Supreme Court expansion will be slowly phased in. Given that the Democrats would be virtually certain to lose the House in 2022 (especially with no other legislation to their credit), there would be *no* climate change legislation passed in 2023 or 2024.
Nothing prevents DC and PR from seating their delegations immediately. New states don't have to wait until the next elections to fill vacancies, just like old states.
ETA: But yes, assuming Manchin's condition holds, climate would be deferred until at least 2022.
This is the first time either of you mentioned anything about *when* this hypothetical climate change spending would happen.
HR1 wasn't democracy protection. It would have inflamed the right, an destroyed trust in elections and democracy.
A. Matt is not proposing HR1, but something that goes in some ways considerably further.
B. But to the extent HR1 is dead on arrival for all the way you mention, a fortiori Matt's proposal is too.
Thank you for this comment - reading this piece, and especially the comments, was making me feel crazy because nobody seemed to acknowledge that Democrats are focused on relatively normal stuff _because they have no chance of addressing the radically dangerous stuff._
I think there’s an under-appreciated “chicken and the egg” aspect to all of this. Republicans are acting in maniacal, anti-democratic ways because they perceive Democrats to be acting in maniacal, anti-American ways. Is their perception accurate? Personally I think it’s warped by social media and their long-standing right-wing propaganda media universe. But it helps to see that an aggressive push to the left with policy is PART OF the justification the right uses for why they need a power grab to “save America.” It’s impossible to predict if they would perceive your recommended course of action as an aggressive Democratic power grab in order to substantiate their own.
You’re not unscrambling that egg. There is no way to change that perception because it’s literally never been rooted in reality.
Yes, and… I think both sides use the other side’s warped perception of reality as an excuse to grow into it. “Obama’s not a socialist anti-American, that’s ridiculous!” would have been totally true to say in 2009. Eventually you had influential liberals saying, “Well actually, maybe that was the problem, he wasn’t socialist enough! Maybe American democracy is fundamentally rooted in white supremacy and needs to be burned to the ground!” A self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Now, if your point it “Republicans gonna hysteric, and there’s no amount of being sane we on the left can do to stop it,” you might be right. But there are certainly things some people are doing to make it worse.
>> Democratic platforms have gotten more left-wing
Not just that, but at least in the snippets Matt pulled, they've become largely performative documents that "call out" and complain without proposing solutions or promising action.
There's a striking difference in phrasing in the 2008 vs 2020 paragraphs. In 2008, there were a lot of "we will" statements. In 2020, there were none. It's all complaining and posturing with nothing whatsoever about how they will make it better.
Do the 2020 documents get to policy aims later?
Good question. I assumed Matt's snippets captured the gist correctly, but I didn't dig up the full text.
The motives of the extremely progressive part of the left, I think, can be summarized by one unifying theme: they want to feel as if they're living through a time of revolution. Any proposal that would help save democracy in non-revolutionary ways (as opposed to packing the courts, etc.) is unwelcome. Any policy that would help to reduce racial inequality without upending established systems is dismissed. To me, this explains why people of this particular persuasion seem to be steadfastly dedicated to strategies that will almost surely hurt Democrats.
Combo of "the worse the better"-ism with a belief that "the other side is antidemocratic and that's good!" Having the country be permanently dominated by an entrenched minority is the ideal end-state for these people - they just want themselves to be that minority.
Maybe, but I don't think this characterizes the views of anyone in the Democrats' Congressional caucus.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. To me it looks like more of a Twitter/media phenomenon. Congresspeople probably don't hold these views, but those in very blue districts might fear getting primaried if they don't pursue the interests of the Twitter/media crowd.
Personally, I’m getting a bit tired of everything being called a “five-alarm fire”. There’s enough stress going on in our own lives that I’m frankly just starting to ignore stories about what bad things the republicans are going to do next. And if even self described media junkies start tuning out, imagine how it must be for the rest.
We need people like Dave Roberts, Ian Millhiser, etc. to actually like, bet on whether or not democracy is going to fail. There needs to be a way for people to put their money where their mouths are.
Predictit!
I wish predictit were more imaginative with their markets.
https://kalshi.com/ has more interesting markets, but I'm not crazy about their fee structure.
man, reminiscing about the 2008 platform & Obama always warms my heart - and leads me off on a tangent...
Isn't the real problem that Obama could be incredibly reasonable, but the GOP tried to stop him anyhow - and critically, the voters did not punish them for thwarting Obama's moderate agenda? I don't know what to do with that actual history. Like every instinct I have says Dems should try to replay "Obama 08", but really, we tried that and it didn't work out the way I would have hoped...
I think the big problem wasn't policy moderation, but PROCEDURAL moderation. Rerun 2008, but get rid of the filibuster (and be a bit less deficit averse.)
It’s notable that the sticking point then was Joe Lieberman at 60 votes. I suppose the technology of using reconciliation to do big things hadn’t been developed yet.
You don’t remember how the Affordable Care Act got passed in the end? They did try to get it through bipartisan process, when that didn’t work they had to negotiate with themselves (to get Lieberman et Al on board, then Kennedy dies and they were forced to resort to reconciliation. This year, with 50 vote majority and the last 10 years experience of how Republicans operate, reconciliation is the starting point.
Just to nitpick, the ACA was passed in the Senate over the filibuster, 60-39. The House also passed it as written to avoid another Senate vote. Reconciliation was used for a second bill with some minor fixes immediately after.
Even I didn't remember it being two separate bills until I just looked it up.
(just remembered I could edit this comment now!)
The U.S. has never been a democracy. Abolish the Senate, strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction, adopt the national popular vote compact, and the U.S. would still be a republic with huge House districts that only prominent, well-funded candidates could win.
I suspect MY’s true fear is that the US might become a big Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties. This is actually a threat, but Wisconsin is hardly hell.
In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities. Sometimes, there has been a Tory government even though 60% of the electorate voted for candidates to the Torys’ left. Britain isn’t hell either. Nor are there many formal safeguards. Nothing other than decency and maybe the queen prevents a Tory parliament from postponing the next election indefinitely.
If Matt wants to say America is at risk of a 4 to 30 year period where legislative majorities are based on a 45% vote share, I don’t disagree. It’s just that prospect is hardly terrifying.
How is this not terrifying? Like I live in Florida which is using the power of the state to target my political views from being expressed. It doesn't care about the teacher who literally says she thinks dinosaurs and men lived together, but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable.
Then leveled up to a much more powerful government, by a coalition which has a lot of axes to grind with people like me even participating in life.
"but that racism still effects people living today in subtle ways is unacceptable."
People aren't being targeted for saying that.
The pushback is against the "anti-racist/CRT/woke" agenda which says that all white people are oppressors. That says stupid shit like math or being on time is racist. That is trying to re-segregate us by dividing us into affinity groups, and that says the single most important thing you can know about a person is the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/19958/urlt/7-4.pdf
I don't know how you have certainty from the text of these laws. They all contain vague lines that are designed to allow people to be harassed by lunatic parents. And it's only against people with liberal views. The teacher who says she thinks dinosaurs and mankind coexisted is totally safe but there's no way to tell what is safe.
I agree that some of the anti-CRT rules are poorly written.
Ehh, you're all public servants.
Now, if we can just get the *politicians* to acquiesce to their weekly colonoscopy too...
"Wisconsin, where 45% of the voters can assemble legislative majorities because Democratic votes are inefficiently clustered in Milwaukee and Dane counties."
I think the actual number is more like 40%. In 2018, Republicans got 44.75% of the vote but 63/99 of the assembly seats. As wikipedia notes "Based on the 2018 results, the tipping point district was District 29, which the Republicans won by a margin of 12.12%, therefore Democrats would have needed to win the statewide popular vote by a margin of 20.36% to win a majority of seats." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Wisconsin_State_Assembly_election
(Also, clustering certainly plays a role in this imbalance, but there's gerrymandering in there too.)
"In the UK, the Tories haven’t polled over 44% since 1970. They have consistently polled less than the combined votes of the parties to their left, yet they’ve often had parliamentary majorities."
This is an unfair comparison. *No party* has polled over 44% since 1970 (in no small part because of third parties), but this cuts both ways: Sometimes the conservative party wins a majority with ~40%, and sometimes the Labour party wins with ~40%. If it cut both ways in WI, I'd be less concerned about it. However, it doesn't; the Democrats will never win in WI with 40%. They won't even win with 55%.
I’m more concerned than David because the WI status quo is insane and unsustainable, but less concerned than you because it cannot be replicated nationwide.
"because it cannot be replicated nationwide"
Could you explain what you mean by this? Not all states can be put into a WI-like situation? (No surprise there; most states aren't swingy.) The congress can't be put into a WI-like state?
Couple of points:
First, most states don't have an electoral geography that lends itself to this quite so well, aside from the old rust belt states. WI, MI, OH, PA, and IN are about it. PA is somewhat protected by the makeup of the state Supreme Court, MI now has a non-partisan redistricting commission, and OH/IN/WI are already lost causes.
The West Coast and New England are so blue that you'd have to gerrymander *to avoid* disproportionately blue maps.
The New South and Mountain West are growing too fast in urban areas to do anything except play defense.
Second, to pull a Wisconsin everywhere would require you to control every state's redistricting at every ten-year interval, which is somewhere between astronomically unlikely and outright impossible.
Third, all of the more extreme alternatives (tossing of votes, etc) will provoke a hell of a lot worse problem than a period of herrenvolk democracy.