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Biden/Schumer/Pelosi Accountability Thread

I remember watching a bowl game once sponsored by some unheard of university out in California. Looked it up and saw that it was specifically tailored to GI bills and just straight up predatory. Some crazy cost with a 6 year graduation rate in the 30% range. I would love to see free public college, some form of loan forgiveness to a certain level, and then refusal of the government to back/grant loans based off of some combination of factors, and one being graduation rates.
 
Not surprising 2020-2021 has been pretty great for already well off Boomers aside from the election being stolen from them. Their portfolios supersized, the government is about to cut them a 3rd check, and a huge portion of the population has sacrificed most of their social well being to keep those Boomers alive so they can continue to make/take more money!
 
issuing a correction to a previous post

you can die and discharge your student debt, though you still have to apply for it to go away
 
Govt can garnish your wages or your welfare (VA, disability, etc.) from inability to pay student debt back. Why does it have this interest? Why should it want to do such things? We'd never let any private interest do anything remotely like that.
 
Anyway I know this is where we hold our dems accountable (except for ChrisL) but the question must be asked...is our Dems learning?

Schumer: “What happened in 2009 and ’10 is, we tried to work with the Republicans, the package ended up being much too small, and the recession lasted for five years. People got sour; we lost the election.”
 
Why is there interest on a federal student loans to begin with, like its not actually real considering the government prints money.
 
Set up a system to make public education free and then maybe we can talk about some sort of student loan forgiveness or discharge procedures for people who cannot make their payments. Just forgiving this debt and being in the same situation in 10 years is a waste of everybody's time.

My oldest had good grades but really struggled this year with motivation with the whole lockdown. It's been a struggle to get her to graduate but we're gonna get there. I am sure we could get her into a 4 year college but when she goes back to school when she's ready she's going to community college.

So no I am not eager to indiscriminately finance everybody else's college educations including people that are making more money than I am.
 
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After a time the interest is so high it makes sense for most people to just live with a student loan payment until they die rather than try and restructure the loan in any way and pay it off. It's essentially the reverse of a public benefit at that point.
 
If early 2000s online poker, late 2000s online gambling, and now GME/AMC/Wallstreetbets/Robinhood has taught us, its that college age people are very responsible when they are asked to make financial decisions and signing on to 10s of thousands of dollars worth of money that needs to be paid back with interest is certainly something that is well understood with deep thought behind it.
 
The FAFSA paperwork we give 17-19 year olds entering college is utterly inscrutable, not to mention the actual financial decisions that are required
 
The most important thing they might be able to do in a couple of years is to get rid of the Trump SALT (State and Local Taxes not Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty) limit. People who live in those states/district got a tax increase from Trump's "tax cut".

We should do the opposite of this. SALT deduction is a tax cut for rich people. It should go away.
 
We should do the opposite of this. SALT deduction is a tax cut for rich people. It should go away.

It's really not in states like CA, NY, NJ and a few others. Real estate taxes and state taxes for lots of non-rich people go over the cut line. If you want put a top end, that could make sense, but there are lots of middle class people who are paying more taxes that they could never have planned on paying.

Point of reference, if a couple in CA had $100K in income, they pay over $8000 in CA taxes not including real estate or other taxes.
 
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It's really not in states like CA, NY, NJ and a few others. Real estate taxes and state taxes for lots of non-rich people go over the cut line. If you want put a top end, that could make sense, but there are lots of middle class people who are paying more taxes that they could never have planned on paying.

Point of reference, if a couple in CA had $100K in income, they pay over $8000 in CA taxes not including real estate or other taxes.

If you get rid of the SALT cap, 56% of the money goes to the top 1%, and 26% of the cut goes to the next 4%. Just 4% goes to the bottom 80% of the income distribution. It's a ridiculously regressive tax cut.
 
This chart is a perfect encapsulation of the difference in priorities between the left and right. Check the distributional differences between the GOP Tax Cuts and the Dem Rescue plan:

figure_v1_0.png


Under the TCJA, the average first-year tax cut for a low-income household (making $25,000 or less) was $60, or 0.4 percent of their after-tax income. The average tax cut for the highest-income 0.1 percent of households (making $3.4 million or more) was $193,000, or 2.7 percent of after-tax income.

By contrast, in the Senate bill a household making $25,000 or less would receive an average tax cut of $2,800 this year, boosting their after-tax income by 20 percent. But average taxes would not change at all for a household making $3.5 million. A low-income household with children would get an average tax cut of nearly $7,700, raising their after-tax income by more than 35 percent.

The difference for middle-income households also is striking. The TCJA cut their 2018 taxes by an average of about $930, or 1.6 percent of their after-tax income. The Senate version of the ARP would cut their taxes this year by an average of $3,350 or 5.5 percent of their after-tax income
 
If you get rid of the SALT cap, 56% of the money goes to the top 1%, and 26% of the cut goes to the next 4%. Just 4% goes to the bottom 80% of the income distribution. It's a ridiculously regressive tax cut.

Those number are very deceptive. One person having $10,000,0000 income balances out 100 making $100,000. In fact, that number is low in that the higher earner pays a higher percentage as well. I think they pay 13% vs. 8.3%. One $10M earner pays $1,300,000 vs. $100K=$8300. That's over 150 times and thus skews the percentages dramatically.

As I said earlier, I would have no problem having a cap, but it does hurt lots of middle class people.

There was one simple reason Trump included this- to punish blue states who didn't vote for him.
 
This chart is a perfect encapsulation of the difference in priorities between the left and right. Check the distributional differences between the GOP Tax Cuts and the Dem Rescue plan:

figure_v1_0.png


So...maybe it's not exactly the same having Dems in power as compared to Pubs...?
 
If you get rid of the SALT cap, 56% of the money goes to the top 1%, and 26% of the cut goes to the next 4%. Just 4% goes to the bottom 80% of the income distribution. It's a ridiculously regressive tax cut.

So put the cap where the 80 percent are.
 
Thanks, that's the conclusion I arrived at as well. I'll be interested to read how transformational this is for those it will help; reducing child poverty should be made a permanent part of our tax strategy.

Maybe we're just an edge case, but that extra $300 per month wouldn't do so much to defray the >$2k per month child care costs here anyway, even if we did qualify for it, which we wouldn't.

I remember like 10 years ago arguing with LK about how household income of $200k isn't middle class and should be considered wealthy and shouldn't qualify for tax breaks and blah blah and him saying that it's a comfortable living but nowhere near paying for private school like Wake, etc. Now here I am in a similar position and it'll be tough for a few years, especially if we have a second kid, to stomach paying what will amount to another mortgage to raise a kid in DC. But I don't think that's what this child care allowance is meant to address anyway, so I'm not saying it's a bad thing or bad policy design or anything. Just doesn't really address the cost of child care for my income bracket and the place we live.

I don't remember the specifics, but I definitely would stand by a claim that 200k for a family with 2 or 3 kids is comfortably middle class.

So many other factors such as consumer/student loan debt to consider.
 
I don't remember the specifics, but I definitely would stand by a claim that 200k for a family with 2 or 3 kids is comfortably middle class.

So many other factors such as consumer/student loan debt to consider.

Move to bumfuck. You could live like a freakin' Bezos on 200k a year.
 
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