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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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I still don't get how folks don't love this president. All these things are great for typical folks like me.
Well the repubs stopped him from doing all the things that would have made him amazing, so he obviously totally sucks.
I would love to hear "listen Jack, we want to get stuff done but the Republicans are blocking everything we try to pass. Give me a strong majority in the house and senate and we will pass x, y, and z. If the supreme court blocks us, we'll look at ways we can balance the court."
I just want to hear a plan and what we need to do to make that plan happen. You need 60 senate votes to pass universal healthcare? Say "give me 60 senate votes and we'll pass universal healthcare"
Because it’s all tiny changes that don’t effectively help people. No big structural changes cause the billionaires managed to put a stop to that with their agents in the Senate. And so the average citizen is left to blame the person they see as the cause of it all, cause he’s the big boss obviously.
Citation: gestures at everything
The things he has done do effectively help people, but since he doesn't constantly brag about it people don't notice.
yeah still. I have never had so many beneficial things come out of a presidential term in my life.
Trump got us “free cash” and virus test kits. Bush got us “free cash”.
Obama got us crappy healthcare. Which he stole from Republcain Mitt Romney cause Obamacare is literally Republicans dream healthcare system.
Nobody remembers the starting circumstances of the Democratic presidents brought in to clean up Republican messes.
From my interactions with co-workers, it can be that simple. And also the trans trans trans are coming to steal your kids and wife. Diabolical
yeah in particular obama was just getting the economy going at the end of his term by slowly raising interest rates and it was trump that railed for lower interest rates to overheat the economy just before covid and is the main reason rates had to be raised at break neck pace under biden. Democrats are burdened with stabilizing the situations that republicans have intentionally destabilized. Like right now they will only allow 2 month budget extensions keeping us on the edge of shutdown constantly. That is no way to run a government.
Fuck Lieberman for ruining Obamacare. It could have been so much more
The Democrats always have a scapegoat to explain why they just couldn't get [insert leftist goal] done.
It's always a lie, or rather, it's not the truth. The Democrats are neoliberals, and there will always be that one bad democrat who prevented [insert leftist goal], because they don't want to, but benefit from their voters believing they do.
Let me know if they need gas money or anything
I would argue that the insulin thing was not tiny at all. Biden has been a good President.
But Biden can’t do that on his own. He needs Congress, which won’t allow that. The Senate may have a blue majority, but many of those Democrats are too conservative to pass meaningful legislation to address the issues you’re pointing at.
The U.S. won’t do anything meaningful until the Democrats have an overwhelming advantage and won’t need to compromise with domestic terrorist sympathizers and Christian nationalists… and of course the Liebermans, Sinemas, Testers, and Manchins of the Senate
The IRA is a big structural change that puts us on a path where we might actually escape global armageddon. It doesn't get us there, but it puts us on the path and buys us just a little bit of time. And its entire philosophical approach builds constituencies massively, which means the longer it exists, the more it will go into a virtuous cycle. So long as Trump doesn't get in next cycle and dismantle it from within, it will be incredibly sticky.
It's almost certainly the most important bill passed in any of our lifetimes. Not just climate-wise, but legislation-wise. It's very technical and kind of boring, which makes it not as exciting, but it's still absolutely huge.
I don't give a fuck if people hate Biden for whatever reasons they have. But at least this one piece of major progress, somehow passed through an uncontrolled congress, must not be denied. If we deny it, that's probably it for our civilization. If we let the achievement be ignored, climate policy will probably be over and the ecosystem will be allowed to die. Any other issue is petty next to total collapse of the global climate and if passing this bill was ALL he could achieve -- even ignoring some of the other stuff like filling departments with the most diverse crowd ever in American history -- it would still have been a good term for a president. Better-liked presidents have achieved less.
Very little 'big structural changes' can happen without Congressional support, and Biden at this point has an actively hostile Congress.
I can understand why people blame him anyway, but that doesn't actually make much sense.
But he won't stop a war between 2 countries that he isn't in charge of so I can't see myself voting for him /s
That's the media fueling their usual bull. Bernie put up a vote on the issue and 72 out of 100 said 'Yes' to allowing Israel to keep their genocide going. It's crazy
I don't love him. I think he's taking half measures mostly as an attempt to maintain an economic status quo while pushing for a little bit of social justice (as a treat). It's a move in a positive direction... but mostly because it's the best way to be in opposition of the other side.
I'll still vote for him, because that's the only two choices we're given for the presidential election. I'll still push for better, and vote more for who I think will actually make a difference at lower levels (state/local races), but I literally can't vote for who I "love" because it just won't make any difference.
Love doesn't enter into the equation, sadly.
Leading this with - I will vote, and I will vote for democrats if it’s what’s needed.
But the reason I view the (objectively good) things that he’s doing with a grain of salt is that it feels like he’s only doing them because of an impending election.
Why - when the democrats had control of all 3 branches of government in 2020 and 2021 did they not do anything that mattered?
They could have unpacked the courts by expanding them. They could have ensured abortion rights. They could have fixed the voting rights act (or implemented something that addresses gerrymandering, racial or otherwise). They could have overturned Medicare Part D. They could have fixed the compromises made when the ACA was written. They could have fixed the Citizens United decision. They could have amended the TCJA so that the tax cuts for the wealthy sunset alongside with the tax cuts for the poor (or even flipped it, so the tax cuts for the poor are made permanent, and the tax cuts for the wealthy sunset, unlike how it was written)!
They could have done so very, very much. But instead they wrung their hands about Manchin and Sinema, claiming that’s why they were a ‘do-nothing’ congress, and waited to lose the house so they could claim gridlock and return to merely being an alternative to republicans.
But even the core of that justification is dumb. They could have supported candidates prior to 2020 that weren’t just republicans running on the democrat ballot.
The issue I think people have with Biden is not that he himself is a bad guy (although he did contribute majorly to the prison-industrial system in the U.S., and championed preventing student loan discharge through bankruptcy when he was a senator).
It’s that he’s the figurehead of a political party that is more interested in gaming the system than they are in leading the people it is supposed to represent. The only real difference between democrats and republicans in that regard is that republicans deliver on their (often wildly unpopular) policies, and their base respects them for it, even if it means they will die homeless in a polluted gutter.
The Democratic Party, and by extension, Joe Biden, do not lead, and thusly do not earn respect. Their moves are only the smallest incremental moves, and that does not work at a time when the world and society is redefining itself several times within each generation.
Man. Sorry. My soapbox is tall today.
I totally get that and I do not like the situation, but when the choice is with or without lube im not going to forego the lube in protest of the situation.
I’m there, too. It’s just such a gross compromise.
The crux of the issue is probably structural. If you only get two choices and both are chasing the same sources of money in a system that heavily favors a very small set of investors, then, well… any effort to get votes by distinguishing themselves is ultimately performative.
In the end, we all wind up getting served shit sandwiches, but one party tells us they don’t want to feed them to us, and the other party has convinced their voters that shit sandwiches are delicious, or at least more offensive to ‘them’ than they are to ‘us.’
Its just getting worse to. Citizens united really bufu'd our system massively. Republicans may have been usually the worse option but there were individuals who it made sense to vote for. But decade by decade that just disapeared. By 2000 or so (citizens united) it was such that could never vote for one and since then its become literally life and death. Its become a bit like modern media. Something not being totally crappy or massively screwed up is reason to praise.
If this works, making overdraft fees $3 is fucking huge.
Some points, directly from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
• Among households that frequently incurred overdraft/NSF fees, 81% reported difficulty paying a bill at least once in the past year.
• Among consumers in households charged an overdraft fee in the past year, 43% were surprised by their most recent account overdraft, 35% thought it was possible, and only 22% expected it. Consumers who overdraft infrequently are more likely to be surprised by a fee
• While just 10% of households with over $175,000 in income were charged an overdraft or an NSF fee in the previous year, the share is three times higher (34%) among households making less than $65,000.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-issues-report-showing-many-americans-are-surprised-by-overdraft-fees/
Awesome analysis… but I’m not gonna read all that nor is your average voter Biden is speaking to.
I’m not a financial expert and the problem with legislation like this is obtuse and still not designed to actually prevent the overall problem, but to make it stinging less.
Things like this are what I call “one time mail in rebate partial discount” legislation - because it’s not only impossible to distill into anything simple for voters to understand, but it only marginally affects the problem rather than solving it…
Like - because the US doesn’t have high-speed trains, instead of building any… now we’re going to let Amtrak instead just build 200 miles of more 35 mile an hour driving garbage trains between 2 major cities in one state that already supports Biden and pretend that “we’re solving transportation in the US.”
The real answer should be something much simpler like “we eliminated overdrafting” - Meaning banks cannot overdraft you anymore or charge you for it.
How about instead of the bank monetizing people fucking up when they’ve run out of money we instead just make it so banks are required to not overdraft people thereby not charging you money for taking out what is effectively a micro-loan with a relatively enormous moment-of-transaction interest charge?
I don’t think it’s a bad thing Biden did something, but pretending that these things are “huge wins” you can slap on a bumper sticker like the passing of Social Security or the civil rights act or whatever is fucking delusional.
Perhaps if you aren't interested in reading analysis by others you might want to consider why your response is a multi paragraph answer justifying why a good news headline is actually bad and confirms your priors that Biden and Democrats are bad. I think this comment is a pretty perfect example of bad faith arguments.
It's weird to have parasocial relationships with politicians, it's how fascists get elected. Always hold them accountable.
Seems to me they get elected when more normal folk fight amongst themselves while their small but rabid following is 100% behind them.
This is actually a good example: the very concept of overdraft fees is obviously a tax on poverty that should be made illegal as soon as possible.
Instead, Biden (who's been known to lie a lot even by politician standards) wants to lower them. In a year. If he's re-elected.
Even his aspirational campaign promises are a compromise between the obvious only just course of action and retaining the status quo that enriches his owner donors.
Well there has already been things like this that are done in his current term like no surprise billing and capping student loan amounts to the initial principle. I like that he keeps putting out new things rather than waiting for after the election. We have had to much of this, oh its an election year so lets hold off on things which then take time to get going. At least if he does get re-elected it can go into place quickly rather than starting at square one.
Lead poisoning is real