Then again, the world isn't always as neatly predictable as it is for you looking in retrospect for every possible way to fulfill your preconceived notions about who's "good" and who's "bad."

Also, interesting that you bring up BBB. You know very well that if they had started out with a more cautious bill, like the one we eventually got. You and every 'progressive' knowitall from twitter to TikTok to instagram to snapchat to The Nation would have been ranting about how they were undercutting themselves by "pre-negotiating" away everything they should have demanded from the start. We saw how that went with Obamacare and progressives are still complaining that they should have demanded more to start with so that they could be forced back to something better.

>
>was as legally tight as possible then, no?
>
>This is giving me BBB vibes. Where the admin initially
>pleasantly surprises folks with what they are driving for,
>then the shit is trimmed back.
>
>Of course with BBB, we got to see the ins and outs of pure
>incompetence and corruption party-wide.
>
>So you almost end up with the worst of both worlds,
>politically. Again, this is a very trimmed down version of
>that.

Worst of both worlds, maybe because people like you are personally invested in confirming your article of faith that the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans. No matter what they do, you will find a way to claim it was a mistake.



>BBB aside, with all the time they spent deliberating this
>you'd think they'd have this air tight out of the gate.


I think you're misunderstanding what happened here. Nobody thinks that the federal government could possibly have the authority to forgive *private* student loans. What happened here was that, entirely separate from any action from the white house, staffers in the Department of Education initially presumed that such borrowers would be able to transfer those debts to federal accounts to then be forgiven. You're right: those low- and mid-level staffers hadn't fully thought through the tax implications of this, and so they had to clarify their guidance on the website. This wasn't a change in the "bill" (there is no bill), this wasn't something outlined in any executive order. This was a technical subtlety that applies to a small fraction of the loan debt for an estimated 800,000 people, a tiny fraction of the people eligible for loan forgiveness. And many of those people already have more than $10k of government-held debt as well, so it makes essentially no difference at all for them.

Yes, this is a story that's been blown way out of proportion by a media (and media watchers like yourself) who are more obsessed with which party is "winning" and which party is "losing" than in what actually happens for those borrowers, the vast majority of whom will see absolutely no practical difference over this minor technical change.

>I know your boy got his marching orders/tweet echo chamber
>notes to say "this is only 10% of borrowers!" but that still
>leaves a lot of folks frustrated/betrayed/etc.
>
>A lot of people are going to respond like Legs.


A lot of people respond in all sorts of uninformed ways. It doesn't change the objective reality of what this executive action does for the borrowers.


>>Note: you've been trying to push the silly idea that the
>>Democratic party is more interested in fundraising than in
>>delivering results. If that were the case, they would have
>>stuck to their guns, claimed to be defenders of the people,
>>let the SC chop the whole thing down, and then run on that
>>through 2024 and beyond. Instead, they're taking a
>significant
>>political hit to keep this 'progressive' idea afloat.
>
>This is an unforced political hit, but you cheerleaders won't
>see it that way.


Don't you complain day after day after day that people won't stop talking about politics like it's a sport? I've also seen you complain many times about how Democrats were supposedly more interested in looking good losing than in actually winning. This is what psychologists call "projection."

Why are you so obsessed with "unforced political hits"? If you're wondering whether the Biden administration would like to be talking about this one month before the midterm election, then no, they wouldn't. Congrats on your masterful powers of political game theory.


>One of your problems (in addition to being an arrogant
>asshole) is that you think you know where folks are going to
>land on an issue because you put people in a box. Like when
>you were convinced I was a Bernie Bro for a loonnng time.

You absolutely were a Bernie Bro for a very loonnng time, and you really still are in a lot of ways. I don't know or care whether you ever supported the guy (you did say about a thousand times, though, that there should be "real primaries," which was a code phrase back then for "progressive activists should be given more weight than Democratic voters"). The same naive sense that there are no truly difficult problems in politics, just insufficiently dedicated leaders, infects your political thinking just as much as it does Bernie's or any one of his Bro's.


>I've always thought student loan forgiveness was a political
>risk- and it doesn't do shit do address the actual problem.
>That said, I gave the Biden admin praise on how they did this
>initially...seemed like they hit the sweetspot.

And they still hit that sweetspot. Again, practically speaking, this change affects very few people, and it affects most of them minimally.

>They could have avoided this blowback by making it air tight
>upfront. They had plenty of time for that.

Honestly, speaking in my vaunted role as an arrogant asshole, you really haven't thought this through at all. Nothing that the white house ever explicitly promised has changed by one iota. Now, they are simply clarifying these extremely minor technical points before these trials hit a judge. You're talking like they cut the program by 30% or something. Because fundraising, or whatever.

>And if you don't think they are going to raise money off of
>this, I don't know what to say...

You post up a fundraising email where they say a single word about an "unforced political hit" and I'll pay off your student loans myself before Joe can even get around to it.