Lowering Expectations
Not much going on — my dog Betty had her fifth (!) adoptiversary, complete with a pupcake and candles. Since case counts are going up, even things like going into the grocery store (masked) have been traded for late-night Target curbside pickup runs.
I’m really not going to talk much about the election, except for one bit…
I wrote a piece for Protean Magazine about the election results. The more I sit with it, the more it feels personally important to me (whether it’s good or actually important, I leave to other people to decide). There are plenty of messy threads to follow in the election story, and more will emerge as the dust settles, but I wanted to focus on one aspect: political geography, and the dangers posed by carving up the world into “rural” and “urban” and “suburban.” Spoiler: the answer isn’t where you live, it’s the “haves” and the “have nots.”
Lowering Expectations
There’s one thing I wanted to write about, though — and that’s how we’re already lowering expectations after the election. One example is student debt.
“Forgive student debt” was a major discussion point during the Democratic primary. It makes basic sense: over 44 million Americans have student loan debt totalling in the trillions, which both harms those with debt and harms the economy. Forgiving the debt is a major windfall for a massive portion of the electorate, as well as the economy — and potentially heads off future economic downturns or crashes related to skyrocketing student loan debt. For all those reasons, it’s also smart politically.
Surprisingly, some form of that survived past the election. Chuck Schumer floated the idea of forgiving $50,000 in student debt via Executive Order — which wouldn’t eliminate the problem, but would certainly be a major step in the right direction. The criticism started immediately, with conservative critics claiming that forgiving student debt would create a massive political backlash from those that didn’t benefit from the debt forgiveness.
Cue today: Biden “affirmed his support” for debt forgiveness, but now instead of total forgiveness — or even $50,000 dollars of forgiveness — it’s means-tested forgiveness for up to $10,000 in private (not federal) student loans. Private loans make up a fraction of student loan debt, in part because private lenders were subject to widespread crackdowns in the Obama administration — less than 8% of outstanding student loans, or $131 billion, are through private lenders.
In short, an achievable, popular demand that wouldn’t have required Congressional approval has been watered down to near irrelevance. Again, for emphasis: forgiveness would not require Congressional approval.
Unfortunately, this is a taste of what we can expect — especially when there are policy proposals that do require approval from a Republican Senate. What’s going to happen when a relief package, or the PRO Act, or something of similar scale and importance hits Congress? What’s going to be given up then?
I hope I’m wrong, and I’ll be happy to own it if I am. But it does seem like Biden is keeping one campaign promise: a return to “normal.” It’s the Obama presidency all over again, complete with bargaining against themselves.
Reading
I do have some more writing coming up in the Spring. On that front, I’m reading Amity and Prosperity, a book about fracking in Southwestern Pennsylvania. It’s a good read, and one I highly recommend.
I should also plug Kim Kelly’s bomb-throwing opinion piece in today’s Strikewave, which is a sort of primal scream (her description, not mine) for better leadership that a lot of labor activists can relate to — give it a read.
Finally, if you haven’t seen it before, check out Strikewave’s OSHA dashboard, maintained by Kevin Reuning. It’s newly updated and shows that over a million workers have been exposed to COVID-19 related safety hazards at work.
In solidarity,
Connor