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Student debt bribery for votes: Will he or won't he? (Biden style)

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C C Offline
What Biden can't do on student debt and what he won't do
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk...he-wont-do

EXCERPTS: . . . Joe Biden, then the leading moderate candidate, began getting questions about debt cancellation, and, as he often did during the campaign, he forged a compromise between the left and the center. In April, 2020, Biden pledged to “immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person.”

[...] During his first month as President, at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee, Biden was asked how much debt he planned to cancel. He spoke for several minutes, mentioning that one of his sons had graduated from Georgetown and Yale Law School “a hundred and forty-two thousand dollars in debt” but that he had paid it off, in part, by working for “a parking service down in Washington.” (The same son, of course, also earned astronomical sums of money while working for a hedge fund, lobbying for various companies, and serving on the board of a Ukrainian natural-gas company, but Biden happened to omit those details.)

Finally, he concluded, “I’m prepared to write off the ten thousand dollars’ debt, but not fifty. Because I don’t think I have the authority to do it by a sign of the pen.” He appeared to be suggesting that the President has the power to cancel debt up to but not beyond some unspecified amount of money—an interpretation that is, at best, legally ambiguous.

The members of the Debt Collective were both encouraged and dispirited. They had moved their proposal from the fringes to the mainstream more quickly than they had thought possible. And yet, for all their momentum, they wondered whether they were running into a brick wall: they could make the legal arguments; they could get their allies hired by the Administration; they could even draft an executive order, but they couldn’t make the President sign it.

Some activists thought that the problem was ideological—that Biden, a son of corporate Delaware, believed deep down in the free market, not a free ride. Or perhaps he was waiting for his lawyers to tell him what he could do.

[...] After reviewing Gokey’s documents, I asked both the White House and the Department of Education whether the department’s internal legal review was complete, but I didn’t get a specific answer. Nor is it clear whether, if Biden’s lawyers do conclude that he has the authority to cancel a large (or unlimited) amount of student debt, he is willing to use that authority.

“The Department of Education is continuing to work in partnership with colleagues at the Department of Justice and the White House to review options with respect to debt cancellation,” a spokesperson from the Department of Education told me. A White House official told me that the President “continues to look into what debt-relief actions can be taken administratively” but that “these steps take time.”

The Debt Collective is not mollified. “We’re a signature away from wiping out everyone’s federal student loans, and Biden apparently just doesn’t want to,” Gokey said. “We’ve given him a magic wand, a way to help millions of people and get them excited to come out to vote for him. Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

The President’s party almost always loses seats during a midterm election—which would mean, in this case, that the Democrats would lose control of one or both houses of Congress next year. A way to prevent that, Astra Taylor said, “would be to materially improve people’s lives in ways that are intelligible to them. And, believe me, if you cancel forty-five million people’s debt, they will notice.”

On Friday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram that it was time to “bring the heat on Biden to cancel student loans. He doesn’t need Manchin’s permission for that.”

As of now, the two bills that comprise most of Biden’s agenda are still stalled in Congress. They might soon pass, in some form, but they are likely to be Biden’s last major legislative accomplishment before the midterms, if not the last one of his Presidency.

After that, if Biden wants to get big things done, he will have to do most of them via executive order. But if the protracted and bitter struggle over debt cancellation is any indication, Biden’s base may want to temper its expectations.

In early 2020, Taylor, who is also a filmmaker, made a short documentary called “You Are Not a Loan.” “We filmed it in February, when the Bernie dream was still alive,” she said. What happened over the next year and a half—Biden campaigning on a promise of broad-based debt cancellation but, as President, hesitating to deliver—struck her as disappointing but not shocking. “The only thing that does continue to surprise me,” she said, “is the Democratic Party seems so unwilling, or unable, to act in its own self-interest.” (MORE - missing details)
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CYNIC: Same old tactical philosophy. You help out a troubled population group just enough that it makes them feel grateful, and thereby reciprocate in regard to your self-interest faction (as votes, if it's a political party). But minus actually solving their problem(s). Because the last thing you want is to lose that dependency, for them to become weaned.

After enough time passes to either repair the "damage" of that helping hand or rig a one-step forward two-steps back outcome, you toss them another $10,000 cancellation (or whatever applicable bone for the context of that population group's difficulties).

One's conscience can often be salved by the potential fact that _X_'s crisis or various crises couldn't be so easily resolved anyway without wrecking the country or whatever collective body. So you might as well be exploiting them in savior or rescuer mode. (At least some set of careers is benefiting from the arrangement.)
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