What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Admiral Yi]

Anyone seen a price tag?

[The Brain]

Forget about it.

[PDH]

Terrible policy that benefits me. I'll take it.

Spend it on hookers and blow.

[PJL]

To be fair, the more educated you are, the more likely you vote for the Democrats / the left in general. So it makes good political sense from that perspective.

[Admiral Yi]

So the first you have heard of immigration / migrant problems was this busing story? Most neutral news outlets don't gratuitously throw around the term "illegal immigrant" like you were.

I've read one or two stories about immigration before this one.

Most or all neutral news outlets did gratuitously throw around the term illegal immigrant in the 70s.  It was only in the 80s (iirc) that an attempt was made to replace that with undocumented worker, which I found ridiculous, and made a choice to continue using illegal immigrant on the basis of accuracy.

[crazy canuck]

What is the argument against relieving some student debt?

[OttoVonBismarck]

I would say on a strict, put me on the spot level, I oppose forgiving most student debt. I am generally strongly in favor of forgiving student debt from for-profit colleges that were shown to largely operate as scams--the borrowers often got educations far different than what was advertised and many of these schools have been shut down by the Feds.

That being said, I'm perfectly "fine" with Biden doing this.

The policy arguments against it:

1. It does nothing to control the costs of attending college; while forgiving the debt is a nice gesture, this is IMO a much bigger problem.

2. It's probably going to cost around $300bn over 10 years, my feeling is in a country with some really atrocious services for the genuinely poor, it's not the best thing to spend that kind of money on people who are mostly middle class and the majority of whom have been paying off their loans just fine. I would probably be fine with a program that is more selective and looks at someone's last x years of earnings, and forgives loans if that person is just clearly deep underwater (they aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy.)

3. There's also a legal / constitutional issue in that I'm not really even sure the President can just forgive debts owed to the Federal government, but I haven't studied the issue fully.

Now that being said, the reason I'm not really up in arms about it is:

- We have funneled massive amounts of money to the wealthy and large, highly profitable businesses. Going back to TARP, the auto bailouts, the PPP loans, the Trump wealthy tax cuts, we're probably pushing $4 trillion in handouts to the moneyed interests in this country since 2009, maybe more depending on how you look at things like QE2 which disproportionately benefit the wealthy also. I guess if we're going to just go hog wild, I am frankly not going to get hot and lathered over some of it going to people who need it a lot more than those other entities did.

- I think despite claims of the punderati, this is a net gain for Biden politically, and my main concern for the rest of my life is seeing Republicans lose any and all elections possibly until they are forced to reform as a party, and only losing elections will inspire them to do so. The reason I think it is a net political gain: the people who shriek about "undeserving Libtard baristas" getting their loans paid off were cultural grievance voters already, and never "Gettable" by Dems. Student loan forgiveness appears to be very popular with younger racial minority demographics and people under age 40 in general, demographics that often have "turnout issues" and that generally the Democrats do much better when those people do turn out.

[DGuller]

I hope that at least it would serve as an effective bribe to a Democrat-friendly electorate.  Directly buying voters like that is a really bad precedent, but having authoritarians elected is an even worse one.

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296

Wondered how much Joe had added to the debt so I poked around and got this.

Not so bad by modern standards.  I thought it was a lot bigger, but I guess a lot of stuff didn't get passed.

[Threviel]

https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296

Wondered how much Joe had added to the debt so I poked around and got this.

Not so bad by modern standards.  I thought it was a lot bigger, but I guess a lot of stuff didn't get passed.

President Clinton increased the national debt by almost $1.4 trillion, almost a 32% increase from the $4.4 trillion debt at the end of President H.W. Bush's last budget.54

Surprising, I've read lots of comments that Clinton actually decreased the debt.

And the latest president to oversee a decrease was Calvin Coolidge...

[OttoVonBismarck]

Clinton had budget windfalls in his final years in office due to higher-than-expected revenue collection due to the economic boom, this created I believe 2 FY of budget surplus for discretionary spending. I think the government was still actually losing money each of those years because of non-discretionary spending (don't quote me on that, going from my right winger memories of Clinton.) I think Clinton's budget windfall was largely not used to pay down debt, either, so there is that.

Nixon also ran a budget surplus for a year or two as well IIRC.

[Valmy]

Clinton may or may not have gotten a surplus during his last few years but like most Presidents he had a deficit during most of his presidency, so of course the overall debt went up. I wanted them to use the...um...what may or may not have been a surplus to secure the future of the federal budget and the United States but then Dubya did his tax cut. That was my rage quit moment from the Republicans.

When Cheney said that Reagan showed us deficits don't matter, clearly both parties took Ronnie's demonstration to heart because nobody cares about budgets and deficits anymore except in campaign bullshit. And so long as we are not caring we might as well give money to the poor. So hence my move leftwards.

Well that and certain things the Republicans just suck on like Global Warming and social issues. Back in the 1990s there was less of a distinction between the parties and those issues.

[Berkut]

OvB, I thought that was an excellent overall summary of immigration/illegal immigration.

Do you have any sources for the data points, like the point that asylum seekers are the vast majority of people who cross the border without a pre-existing visa?

[OttoVonBismarck]

The data on crossings is a little hinky these days, but probably the best "single view" would be this:

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics-fy2021

The way we collect data on apprehensions and categorization is not the cleanest.

For example that dataset is showing Title 42 expulsions and Title 8 apprehensions, so you aren't comparing like to like. Title 42 expulsions are people who, under our "normal" immigration laws, would be entitled to adjudicate their stay in the country, but under Title 42 are being immediately deported. We had around 1m such removals in FY21.

Title 8 apprehensions are people who are in custody and basically are not admissible. Not admissible has a lot of reasons, it could mean they have a felony, previous deportation, it could also mean they had an asylum claim that went against them in the immigration courts (so confusingly, asylum seekers can be in both datasets.) Not every asylum seeker is being sent back via Title 42 right away, some are still going through the system, and some % of those don't win their asylum claim. We had 600,000 Title 8 apprehensions in FY21.

[Berkut]

Thanks.

Nuance is a bitch.