Student loan cancellation seems to have been gained support over the last few years, but one other thing that would act a little less as a stimulus, but would be incredibly helpful for millions of people, would be to hack everybody's interest rate, or eliminate the interest rates entirely. There are federal student loans out there now that are over 10%. 8% is very common. Often on six-figure debt. That's basically impossible to ever dig out of. Plus it's had the impact of influencing people to re-finance into 5% private loans, thus disquaflying themselves from any loan forgiveness or cancellation in the future.

I was very fortunate to get my federal loans locked in at under 3% back in 2006 after law school. I focused paying the private loans off first. I still owe around $40k on the federal. With the low rates, and the interest being paused over the last year, I've slowed down payments - that also makes sense to do in hope of future cancellation. But I would definitely being living a different life, and contributing to the economy a lot less, if I had higher interest rates, and didn't have access to some public service grants that knocked off some of the balance. I started at around $125k. And my first job as a misdemeanor prosecutor paid under $40k. It was brutal starting out then, even in professional employment, and it's even worse now.

Republicans dropped it for Supreme Court justices just a few months ago. Its a silly rule.

If people really want to understand what the freedom of speech looks like and differentiate between the real thing, and getting kicked off twitter, they should pay attention to Russia today.

I actually didn't realize Fed student loans had rates that high? I always thought it was a low/favorable interest rate deal (like at prime + 1). Yeah, 8-10% is pretty bad so I like your option.

Fair observation. Here's another link, no idea how credible it is. If someone else has studies, please share it.

The Truth on Wait Times in Universal Coverage Systems - Center for American Progress

Comparing wait times with other countries, not sure how good the comparison is but a hint on "specialist appointments ... 6% waiting 2 months or longer". Not sure if you can extrapolate to mean 94% had less than 2 months to see a specialist.

No idea how credible of a threat the Alexey Navalny mass demonstrations are.

It's pretty obvious Putin is a dictator for life but still enjoys 60+% favorability ratings. I do think Putin did help Russia in the early days after the incompetence of Boris Yeltsin so he should definitely get kudos for that.

Western style democracies don't work for all countries and not surprised it didn't work for Russia.

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/20...ests-in-russia

My brother graduated in the early 2000s (maybe 2002), he had a rate of like 3% locked in while he was in school. As soon as he graduated, the company that held his loan sold it to a different servicer and they increased his rate to nearly 10% saying he did not have a long credit history (no shit). After years of paying it and fighting, he finally got them to reduce it to like 7% if he accelerated and paid it off in 2 years or something.

Mine was like 4% and I got deferrals while I was in grad school, and then paid it off as soon as I could. Hard to do when you are making $15k as a grad student and then $35k as a postdoc for 4 more years after that.

Changing rates seems pretty shady, especially for one who hadn't missed a payment.

Happened to me, too, on 2 of my loans. I consolidated them but it still was at a significantly less favorable rate (6%?). There's a lot of shady stuff going on in that industry and it genuinely is crippling the wealth of a significantly portion of younger generations.

SI

Same here. All my loans were ~3% through college, and shortly after I graduated, they were changed to ~6%. Not too big of a deal for me, though, since I'm old to enough to have gone to college when it was affordable. What I had in 4.5 years of loans is what someone takes on in just 1 now.

Yeah, I was fortunate as well - this was back in 2004 and I "only" had about $40K in loans. Made my last payment the month before I turned 30 and that was an amazing feeling.

Problem is that boring old public university cost is more that double what it was when I went and that was only about 15 years ago. In-state for most schools now costs more (sometimes significantly more) than out-of-state did when I went.

SI

We finally finished paying off my student loans last year at 1.25%. Took 16 years. I didn't even have that much (~50k). Thankfully my wife's parents paid for her college and grad school, but about 40% of the reason I decided not to skip law school acceptance was I knew we'd never have a family if I went.

Can we get back on point. There’s a caravan of brown people coming!

Oh wait, Fox News hasn’t focused on it since the inauguration. Almost like it was a nothing burger all along.

It’s funny to check their website daily to see what impending doom is coming while they try to sweep an insurrection under the rug.

Biden is pretty organized, he's got key themes for each day next week. Immigration and brown people this Fri.

In the meantime, he has supposedly proposed $4B to Mexico and LATAM.

At least Sinema and Manchin are strongly opposed to changing filibuster rules.

I know it's a little more complicated than this, but it's crazy how the GOP will do what it takes to enact a largely unpopular agenda while Dems won't do what it takes to enact a largely popular agenda.

Sarah Sanders' announcement that she's running for AR Gov contains the perfect summation of the emptiness of GOP policy.

To circle back on this, I haven't seen much lately about the stimulus, but one article did suggest that the additional $1400 would also phase out at $87k, meaning that a person that made $87k would get $0 from this overall $2000 while they did get something from the $1200 stimulus in 2020 (fully phased out at $99k).

At this point, with Dems refusing to even do what it takes to be the majority and GOP/Dem moderates complaining about the cost of the bill, I doubt we'll see anything close to 1400 if anything passes at all.

I have to think that McConnell threatening to filibuster the "Dems get to be in charge because they have the most votes in the Senate" resolution was kind of a "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" kind of thing.

I can't imagine that even he expected the Dems to be this inept.

Hello, darkness, my old friend

SI

Start investigating Manchin's criminal daughter and I have a feeling he will come around.

Biden moving quickly to replace Andrew Jackson (Democrat) on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman (Republican).

#Unity

Really this is the one putting it over the top? Nobody but racists would give a flying fuck over this.

My wife's Facebook feed is full of doom and glooming Biden:

The pipeline order eliminated 50,000 jobs

Illegals will now count in the census

The stock market is dropping

China has a green light to take over our power grid

Biden has said he's not going to do the $1400 stimulus

China is crossing our air space and we're doing nothing

And on and on and on.

So that's why it was put on hold for four years!

my sister in law with similar they must share posts somewhere :)

I keep seeing the one about the XL Pipeline and counter with, "So as long as abortion clinics stay non-union, you should be opposed to those closing too, right? Because the most important thing is jobs."

I keep seeing ads for Energy Transfer. Their argument is that without the pipelines, we won't get our sweet, gas/oil energy (so, alternatives?) -- at least not without more trains, and WAY more tractor trailers (so, jobs??).

Manchin now on record saying he won't change the filibuster rules even to pass a rules package. I guess the GOP runs things.

I would have never predicted that Manchin would completely hold up the Democratic agenda. Oh, wait. I did.

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To be fair it's apparently Manchin and Sinema at least.

Like I said, investigate his crooked daughter and he'll come around.

McConnell is going to allow the power sharing now. He says he feels assured by the two Democrats who promises to never allow the Fillibuster to end. McConnell still dictates the Senate.

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Schumer and the Dems let him dictate the Senate. Just another example in how incompetent Congressional Dems are.

I am happy with Biden getting running right out of the gate though.

She is already universally loathed in the state. For those that don’t know, Manchin’s daughter was an executive at a locally founded (by a beloved West Virginian - WVU’s football stadium is named after him), successful generic pharmaceutical company. She was not well qualified, did not do the coursework but received an MBA that was revoked and resulted in the University’s president and department chair having to resign, and then became the president of the company. The company is/was headquartered in WV with great paying union jobs.

Under her watch, she moved the headquarters out of town, outsourced a lot of the manufacturing jobs, have had a few rounds of layoffs despite being very profitable and growing, and had a big scandal because they owned the patent for Epi-Pens and jacked the prices up to ~$700.00 (Epi-Pens are required for folks with allergies, so you need several for home/work/travel and they are rarely used because they expire in about a year). Last year, they merged with Upjohn and formed a new company and, right before Christmas, they announced they were closing most operations and laying off the great majority of employees (they will have laid off almost 1500 of their union employees in the last few years). She resigned last year and is now worth over $30-million.

I really don't get it. If Schumer tried to do the same thing: drew a line in the sand and McConnell refused to budge and then Schumer said, oh due to statements by Romney, I'm going to be satisfied even though it wasn't agreed to by GOP leadership, you'd be all clowning on Schumer. But McConnell caves (because he was afraid that the longer it dragged on that Manchin and Sinema would at least agree to end the filibuster on Committee reorganization resolutions and they didn't want to set a precedent) and y'all are like haw haw, McConnell wins.

Because McConnell got what he wanted. He showed how weak the Democrats are. With the filibuster there is next to no chance the Democrats are getting voting rights passed, which is vital. The GOP lead legislatures across the country are sharpening their swords and are going to cut access to voting to rival the Jim Crow era. McConnell proved that Schumer has no way to even threaten removing the veto, which is one of the few ways to at least force negotiation.


Edit: Btw, even your comparison is flawed. Schumer would have at best threatened to hold up the rules, but he would have never actually done it. Instead he would have given "a grave day" speech, and then went to get McConnell his coffee and donut.

50/50 means you don't get to ram much of anything, much less killing the filibuster through. I could have told you that months ago. They probably needed 53-54 seats.

Right. The last time there was a 50-50 split in the W Administration there was this exact power sharing agreement.

And once again, there was no agreement to commit to the filibuster. McConnell took statements from Manchin and Sinema saying they didn't want to get rid of it as " good enough". He didn't get the Democrats on record saying they were going to keep the filibuster, which is what he wanted so he could hammer them if they ever tried to limit it.

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I see lots of criticisms of Schumer without concrete ideas for what he should've done instead.

Dems got what they wanted without giving up on removal of the filibuster. This could easily be spun as McConnell caving before too much pressure was put on Manchin and Senima and risk them changing their mind.

The basics of this is one party got what they were originally seeking and the other didn't.

Such a different vibe:

PETER DOOCY: Mr President, what did you talk to Vladimir Putin about?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: You. He sends his best. pic.twitter.com/Fq0zglc9aK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 26, 2021

Thank you for this correction. People with personal experience in the Canadian system have said it is the case there and I thought the UK system was the same; I've been told it's considered an essential cost-control measure due to the value of preventative care.


There is a huge, fundamental difference when a government agency does it though. If you don't like what a business does, you stop being a customer of theirs. You can't 'opt out' when something is the law of the land. In one case the government tells you how to live your life, and requires you to pay into the system whether or not you use it. In the other, you are able to make a decision as a consumer.


This is an excellent post, I apologize for taking so long to get back to it. I guess it depends on what you mean by lately. I had oral surgery a couple of years ago, and about 6-8 years ago I had an operation on my right foot to remove bone and reattach a tendon. The latter was more of the specialist variety, as the doctor who did the operation was, from what I'm told, the top foot-and-ankle guy in this part of the state. The wait was actually less for him, a couple weeks, while it was close to two months for the oral surgeon.

To get into the rest of your point, I think there is a clear and basic distinction between military, law enforcement, transportation, etc. and something like health care. But to repeat what I've said previously in the thread, I am in favor of universal health care. I think it's worth the price in liberty that is paid. This all came up because tarcone was asking what is wrong with it, I gave two examples of opposition POV, and then this discussion eventuated.

A personal example. In the case of the foot surgery I mentioned, I was uninsured due to all alternatives including ACA being prohibitively expensive. I burned through my savings getting XRays, bone scan, MRI, etc. to nail down the problem. I should have been able to have Medicaid cover the cost of the surgery, but I was unable to bludgeon my way through the beauracracy with repeated attempts including writing a letter at one point to do so, so I was in debt for years including getting sued by the surgery center before eventually paying off the amount in full, . Many people have suffered worse of course, but the point is that this is the kind of issue that those who oppose a government-based solution are concerned about. Beauracracy doesn't have to concern itself with satisfying customers. It's in their interest not to in fact, because that creates demand for a larger budget. Meanwhile, what you described as inadequate choice in the private system still affords them the opportunity to simply not participate in it.

Hope the news on Senator Leahy isn't bad. Goes to show just how small their margin is in the Senate. Time to stop fucking around and get stuff done.

I can't find any kind of confirmation that people in Canada are forced to have physicals. You have some kind of verification? What they do if you don't? Fine? Prison? Execution?

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Not sure what thread is the best, but good to see state Senator Jeff Jackson announce he's running in NC for Richard Burr's opening seat. It always should have been him over Cunningham against Tillis, but (not to pull a Rainmaker) he didn't like Chuck Schumer telling him he needed to spend his time fundraising over the phone instead of meeting voters or actually legislating.

It'll be interesting because you do have a black woman in Erica Smith who lost to Cunningham in the primary running again and arguing she can pull a Stacey Abrams, but from what I can tell she's not Stacey Abrams, and despite all the yankees moving in North Carolina isn't as ready for a flip to a black woman as Georgia is. (NC is still like 75% white, Georgia is closer to 60% according to my quick wikipedia research). More importantly, I think Jackson is a really good politician!

Not sure how much it will matter, because if the Senators keep being soft the Republican Party will quite likely nominate Lara Trump, wheeeeeeeeeeeeee can't wait to be THE battleground in 2022 along with Ohio.

(But also yeah, this is why people hate Schumer)
Power to the Person - The American Prospect


That's two good D candidates in NC who were sidelined, and are now quoted in prominent political publications saying they were pushed out of the race by the Senate Majority Leader in their own party, while we had to watch Cal Cunningham blow another race vs Thom Tillis. But hey, the D's won because Trump was a uniquely unpopular candidate and the R side is more openly divided in some cases, so let's leave Schumer & Pelosi in charge.

Good thread with lots of fun little minimum wage facts:

"$15 an hour will increase prices"

Costco: pays workers well, same prices as Walmart's Sam's Club

In-n-Out: pays workers well, same prices as McDonald's

Best Buy, Target & Home Depot: raised pay 20% in pandemic, same prices

All 5 pay over $15. They made $15B+ profit in 2020.

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) January 26, 2021

No I don't. It would be weird for actual Canadians to lie about that while touting the virtues of their system, but I suppose it's possible.

Actual Canadian here. I've never heard of anyone being required to have routine physicals, nor denied healthcare for not doing so. I think you have to undergo a physical before certain procedures, but I believe that is so they have a proper health record to assess your treatment and care upon (but I'm not a doctor so I don't really know for sure).


I had to have a physical a couple years ago in order to qualify for private life insurance, but that has nothing to do with the universal health care system.


I'm no expert in these matters so I may be overlooking something, or perhaps there is some missing nuance in what your Canadian friends were describing that has gotten lost in translation. But as far as I can tell no one forces me to see the doctor nor will I face punitive repercussions of any kind for not doing so.