Back in 2016, Trump would at least nod to a couple of policies that he knew were popular. Well, no more:
One of the things that Kyle Clark did well in the CO-4 shitshow/debate was to ask those fuckers how, exactly, they’d deport all the immigrants that they want to deport. Basically, “details, bitches!” That approach, x100, should be the way Trump’s “reinstate student debt” nonsense should be handled by the press. For example, what about all the people who went out and got mortgages, or car loans, based on having no student debt and no loan payment? Does Trump want them to turn their car back to the dealership, or sell their house, because they can’t make the payments anymore?
The big problem is that Trump gets the “bullshit by the hundredweight” discount since pretty much every “policy” proposal that comes out of his senile yap is stupid, not to mention unimplementable. If the press stopped treating him like the grandpa at the coffee shop spewing takes driven by resentment, spite and Viagra overuse, and instead took what he said seriously, the Ariana Grande voters might get a few tidbits of information that could possibly influence their votes.
(This is via a Steve M post that makes a broader point — all they have is spite — and is worth reading. )
Baud
Is student loan forgiveness popular?
Other MJS
That’s OK, he’ll be able to cause a lot of pain for people his rubes hold in contempt, which is the main point anyway.
karen gail
Off topic: Jeff and daughter’s trip to Milwuakee. Find a place that does Friday Nigh Fish fry, which is unlimited fish, chicken and slaw. For one of best dinners find a place that does patoatoe pancakes; they are usually extra but the worth the price.
I have been away from Wisconsin for ten years so can no longer say, go there.
Jeffro
@karen gail: hi Karen – is this for me? (if so, thanks!) she’s the only one that’s going (with classmates) but I’ll pass the tips along
NotMax
Beatles cover by the parody band NFLTG.
//
Jeffro
Back on topic re: “all they have is spite”
💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯
”We don’t care about the details like unwinding other loans, slowing down consumer spending, or anything else – we just know it will HURT and that’s really the goal here” – MAGA, all day every day
$8 blue check mistermix
@Jeffro: Yep – and the student loan forgiveness that’s happened so far has been targeted at groups that are generally well-liked (except by MAGAts): teachers, health care workers, etc.
hueyplong
My immediate reaction to Trump’s absurd reinstatement announcement was that lenders nationwide were going to have to increase their loss reserves. Not just lenders on the college loan debt, but all the other recent lenders who would immediately have whole portfolios of loans that now haven’t been issued pursuant to their lending guidelines because of all this large, additional debt on the side. You wouldn’t want to be an already shaky lending institution hearing this from your accountants and/or your regulators.
If we weren’t in the age of the cult clown deity, the Trump campaign would be under nonstop pressure to walk back this idiocy (among others). Instead, we can probably expect him to keep vomiting out this and similar nonsense as some of the things he can remember when bloviating at a podium in a state he doesn’t recognize.
Scout211
Trump is breaking records in his recents rallies. For the number of lies that he spews regularly.
At least some reporters are reporting that he is lying. Most just report what he said with zero correction.
ETA: added a paragraph
JaneE
When I paid off my loan, any type of loan at all, I got a piece of paper attesting to that fact. Sometimes they returned the original loan document I had signed, other times a separate declaration that the loan had been paid in full.
If they did the same for student loans forgiven, how will they reinstate the loans if they have already said they were paid? Would not the reinstatement be a form of ex post facto order?
J. Arthur Crank
To be fair, what if those loans were child molesters? Forgiving those loans then might be a bridge too far for a lot of people.
hueyplong
@JaneE: I’m not at all sure they can reinstate the loans, in part because of the very things you say.
Scout211
Is reversing student loan forgiveness the new “build the wall?” Or is it the new “lock her up?” I can’t keep these things straight.
J. Arthur Crank
@Scout211: I think it is actually “lock up the wall”.
Leto
There’s two groups: the average MAGAT who just wants their fellow citizen to suffer, and then there’s professional conservative class. The people who put together Project2025. In the latter category, all Trumpov is is a figurehead so they can implement wholesale destruction of the social fabric of society. Destruction of government, implementation of christofascism, and all the bells and whistles of that document. As long as Trumpov is able to seek retribution against whomever he pleases, and can sign his scribble signature, they’re totes good. Which is also why this plan will stay around even if the tango traitor doesn’t win in Nov. It’ll just transfer to the next Republican candidate. We need the Ariana Grande’s to wake the fuck up, but it’ll be easier to teach calculus to a goldfish.
And yes, all they have is spite, but for almost 47% (ding, ding, ding) of the population that’s good enough for them!
chrisanthemama
@Baud: Voters split on student loan forgiveness, new poll shows (nbcnews.com)
Matt McIrvin
I always remember Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s answer: “It’s totally doable, libs, Hitler put that many people in concentration camps without breaking a sweat!”
Scout211
@chrisanthemama: From your link:
That shows he’s on the right track to get votes.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I know some people who are really pissed off about student loan forgiveness. They have a sort of quasi-progressive beef about how it’s a “giveaway to the rich” but their attitude really seems to be laissez-faire, get the government out of everything, let people suffer and the hand of the market will make it OK.
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211: If the independents are plurality against it, then it’s a vote-loser–unless the people who are for it are more motivated by the issue than the people who are against it.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
reinstitute student debt and make Mexico pay for it
zhena gogolia
How about if it’s the right thing to do?
Chet Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Some progressive pundit had a good riposte to this, and to all other “but we need to means-test this!” plaints. He replied:
“The means-testing is thru progressive taxation [unsaid: you idiot!]”
karen marie
Stupid motherfuckers.
smith
@Matt McIrvin: I would guess that the only people for whom it might be the vote-deciding issue are those whose loans have been forgiven. Others may have opinions when asked, but probably focus on other issues when thinking about which way to vote.
karen marie
@Scout211: How about instead of polling the motherfuckers, we pole them.
Quaker in a Basement
“And after I reinstate their debt, I’ll put ’em on a boat. A yuuuge boat with a tremendous battery! And sharks! There will be sharks!”
hueyplong
@smith: It’s important that you be correct. It’s also logical, but I am losing faith in logic as relevant to discussions about the American electorate.
karen marie
@hueyplong: I see you’ve met my neighbors.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Matt McIrvin:
who doesn’t love a happy ending
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@zhena gogolia: Thanks – the political ramifications of a policy are not the only important considerations, despite what the FTFNYT and other political media say. Sometimes you need to spend your political capital on something because it is the right thing to do.
BR
I wonder if New Deal Democrat will weigh in about whether student loan forgiveness has been working as a stealth stimulus this year. Every month or so they announce another 10-20 billion in loan forgiveness. I know that isn’t directly money in people’s pockets, but it’s money that is not taken out of their pockets each month. Maybe it’s too small to end up boosting consumer spending by much, but I don’t know this stuff.
BlueGuitarist
Speaking of debate questions, wondering if Tapper or Bash will ask Trump what the 10 commandments are. (Maybe preface by asking about Louisiana requiring posting 10 commandments).
Unlikely Trump would do better than the fool Congressman Colbert asked to name the commandments who could only come up with 3.
alas also unlikely this will matter to his supporters, all Chrinos.
hrprogressive
This is why shit like Project 2025 has to be stopped, because if you ask a question of one of those architects, the answer will be “We’ll just fuckin’ do it, because we can” and there seems to be little anyone can do to stop them, if they go about seizing power, at least, again, without a quote-unquote French Revolution Moment.
Trump himself doesn’t have any idea about implementing anything, and he doesn’t need to.
The rest of the Fascists basically are just hoping to get into a position where they can just start seizing things and destroying anything they don’t like, and essentially daring the public to stop them, because the government won’t be able to.
If we didn’t have a corprofascist-owned mass media, the normies would be told this via your news outlets, and so forth.
eclare
@BR:
That’s a good point because instead of affecting the economy in one boom, it’s $6B here, $4B there. It’s a smaller impact, but it’s continuous.
sdhays
It’s worth holding Republicans’ feet to the fire over how Dump would implement this, but I think it’s important to take him at his word and will at least push the federal government to harass people who have had their loans forgiven.
To some degree, the mechanism by which he intends to achieve this is irrelevant. He wants eliminate any check on his power as President, and he will succeed, to some extent at least, if he is re-elected.
So people should make sure that doesn’t happen!
zhena gogolia
Okay, now that I’ve watched Tinker Tailor, next up: The Aristocrats!
gene108
Didn’t realize Willie Mays died yesterday at the age of 93.
Baud
FWIW, Biden is talking up forgiveness I’m his speeches.
@Matt McIrvin:
That was the argument of centrists and righties opposed to forgiveness, which I recall the progressives rejected uniformly.
eclare
@BlueGuitarist:
That was one of Colbert’s best bits, when he held up his fists and said name them.
cc.com/video/tlf8t3/the-colbert-report-better-know-a-district-georgia-s-8th-lynn-westmoreland
He is stunningly stupid.
Sure Lurkalot
Hmm, let’s see, about $145B of loan forgiveness, a trickle in the bucket compared to the $2.3T in tax cuts given to the already wealthy (not to mention $4T more promised if Trump’s reelected).
Ask your friends who are angry about the debt forgiveness, are they angry about giveaways to the richest Americans? One is an undeserved, unfair moral hazard and the other is something something job creators?
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: The Lennox sisters or the world’s dirtiest joke?
satby
Just going to note (and it’s worth reading again) that Paul Krugman wrote about this in 2009:
The Politics of Spite
It’s gotten lots worse, of course.
Bill Arnold
@hrprogressive:
Americans need to individually decide what (sorts of) things they would be willing to do to block seizure of power by Republicans, then tool up[1]/skill up as needed, and do those things.
It is an order of magnitude easier/less painful to prevent seizure of power than to overthrow a seized government.[2]
[1] Metaphorically! Guns are not the only tools, or even always the most powerful tools.
[2] Israel is learning this lesson. The Israeli polity allowed Netanyahu to slime his way back into power in a coalition with religious supremacist political arsonists.
cain
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, until they are affected and then it’s nothing but whining.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: The latter.
O. Felix Culpa
@satby: Wow. That was a trip down bad memory lane. Krugman was right, of course, and the Republicans have become a thousand times worse since then.
japa21
@chrisanthemama:
That poll was from 2022. I have a hunch the responses may well be different now.
frog
@Matt McIrvin:
“Make the government really small …”
Except we have to keep laws about trade secrets.
And copyrights.
And patents.
And special tax rates for corporations.
And corporate subsidies.
And the corporate veil.
And corporate bankruptcy.
And corporate protections and privileges.
This country was founded with the ideals of protecting stuff. So we have courts, military, police. Protect stuff. Labor is not stuff, so it gets no protection.
Harrison Wesley
Lots of really deep economic thinking. Reinstate student loan debts; abolish the income tax and replace it with tariffs on imports. Sounds like a plan Rand Paul might come up with after a light lunch of peyote buttons and kovfefe.
Geminid
@Scout211: I’m not surprised Trump thinks he can get away with saying he withdrew US forces from Syria. He might even think he did. That mission receives very little attention from US media, and the Pentagon wants to keep it that way.
I think the US will pull that mission out next year, along with the mission across the across the border in Iraq. They total around 1500 very alert Army soldiers. Between ISIS remnants, Iranian-supported militia, Syrian government forces, Russians and Turkiye fighting our YPG allies, Eastern Syria is a tense place, and the Iraqi government is ready for US forces across the border to leave.
We have another military mission in lraq that supports the Kurdish Regional Government, in the north. That one will stay. I think there have been US troops in the Kurdish region of Iraq since 1991.
scav
@frog:
Well, except when labor was outright property, and then they made a right solid attempt to protect their rights to it.
eclare
@zhena gogolia:
It’s pretty good. Been a while since I’ve seen it.
hrprogressive
@Bill Arnold:
I wholly agree. I admit, beyond the first tool you mentioned, I don’t know what else needs to be done, what I / others should be prepared to do.
I really do hope it won’t come to that, but I’m clear-eyed enough to know it could.
m.j.
At LGM there was a video of Trump saying he wouldn’t give a penny to any school that had a vaccine mandate.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that is every single public school in the United States of America when it comes to the MMR vaccine.
Scout211
I didn’t notice that. Thanks. Here’s a recent poll from AP News:
More details and chart at the link.
ETA: And more details at the source (AP-NORC) link in block quote above.
Baud
@m.j.:
Two rules of US politics.
Both sides lie, see.
smith
@m.j.: Make Measles Great Again!
JML
The rise of the culture of selfishness (which I maintain is a massive problem in US society) is driving the discontent related to student loan forgiveness. People who didn’t go to college often see it as a giveaway to people who are supposedly well-off (they were able to go to college in the first place, right?), and some people that have already paid their loans off are mad they missed out and someone else gets a benefit they “should” have gotten. Because that’s how people are being trained in the US (and the GOP is massively responsible for it, with their focus on the politics of resentment): if someone else gets something that you don’t, it’s not fair. everything is zero-sum.
it’s a shame we’re in this position, but it’s not that surprising to me.
Baud
@Scout211:
Government doesn’t hold medical debt. Really crazy.
Baud
@JML:
Agree. And unfortunately it’s not limited to the GOP. But they are the biggest pushers of it.
cmorenc
@Harrison Wesley: Trump’s notion to replace income taxes with revenue from large tariffs on imports is oblivious to how that worked out with the Smoot-Hawley tariff that was a major contributor to the dynamics that resulted in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
TS
@satby:
I am amazed the nyt still has columns from Paul Krugman – maybe his Nobel Prize has saved him from being replaced by a monetary policy apologist.
Baud
@TS:
E.
@hrprogressive: I think the gist of Bill’s comment is stopping it before it takes hold is best, so work hard now. I am canvassing for local dems. I can’t help Biden in this red state but I can help elect local blue representation. Action is the antidote to despair, and sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
BC in Illinois
@BlueGuitarist:
I would love to hear both candidates answer this question.
I keep waiting for someone to ask which version of the Ten Commandments you want on the wall:
Wikipedia, from which all knowledge flows, has a handy chart.
karen marie
@Bill Arnold:
I don’t know your neighbors but you clearly haven’t met mine. If there were an apocalypse, the motherfuckers couldn’t figure out how to bang two rocks together.
Scout211
@BC in Illinois:
And we also all know that Trump never actually answers any questions. He goes on his own personal rant or verbal meandering and makes shit up along the way. He might use a few words that relate to the question, but he doesn’t ever answer the question. And inside his head he tells himself, “Nailed it!”
So he doesn’t have to learn all the 10 commandments, even the ones in the Trump Bible.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe remind them that much of the forgiveness is simply the government keeping its promise to the people who took out the loans.
“Sanctity of the Contract!!”
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Harrison Wesley
@Scout211: Well, he does know the first five by heart: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” That’s all part of having the bigliest brain.
Another Scott
@frog: Speaking of labor, I saw something this week (possibly on Mastodon/explore) that is possibly relevant. (Of course, I cannot quickly find it again.) (Roughly) Seems that vagrancy laws in the middle ages were ramped up on order of the king – first offense – flogging, 2nd offense – losing 1/2 an ear, 3rd offense – death. People had get jobs so they wouldn’t be arrested for vagrancy. That meant going to work off the farm, labor being a buyer’s market, laborers being at the mercy of the PTB, etc. Marx apparently used this as a jumping off point for his thinking and writing.
(I only read a little Marx in college and most of it didn’t stick with me, so maybe this is all old-hat, but it was a new to me.)
It seemed a little heavy on the glories of the Jeffersonian Yeoman Farmer trope, but his point that – yet again – our economic system isn’t just some natural consequence of the way a modern economy has to work, it is rather a result of policy choices made by people in power, is one well worth remembering.
Cheers,
Scott.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@JML: i mean, if they were well off, they could afford schooling. they wouldn’t be taking out loans.
Soprano2
@chrisanthemama: I wish they would ask people if they support forgiving loans under current law, because that’s what he’s doing. I think a lot of people think he’s forgiving everyone’s loans.
wjca
@Scout211:
Vastly more important: how many folks who have had their loans forgiven, and were not particularly inclined to turn out to vote, take this as a big 2×4 upside the head, and make sure they turn out.
RevRick
@Harrison Wesley: As Krugman has pointed out, Trump’s tariff proposal to raise them high enough to replace the income tax is insane. It fails on the math since it would require at least a 60% tariff to replace income tax revenues, but, of course, tariffs at that level would make our trade partners retaliate and would make US consumers cut back on purchases of foreign goods. And that would necessitate jacking up rates even higher. Krugman estimates 133% tariffs.
It also fails on fairness since it would shift the tax burden from wealthier citizens to the poor and to the working and middle class.
What goes unsaid is the macroeconomic havoc it would wreak. It would simultaneously increase inflation and decrease overall economic activity, leading to massive layoffs in retail, shipping and export industries. And that contagion would inevitably spread to the financial sector. It is Smoot-Hawley all over again. Depression 2.0 . Only this time Trump won’t allow an election to change direction. Whole swaths of the population will be immiserated.
On the upside, we would probably meet our 2030 climate goals.