The Mirror Universe View

 

Just to get this out of my system: it's sad that we creep along in the country from continuing resolution to continuing resolution. We should be able to just get some kind of a budget going. That we just hover on the edge of a government shutdown every couple months is appalling and no damn way to run a country. And I feel the same way the most recent one--hey, no government shutdown, but it only gets us to MARCH. These people have calendars, right? They can count how many days they will even be in Washington to vote, right? 

It would be great to manage a deal on immigration reform, too. There's clearly more to the issue than what I sometimes think of as "the barrier method" (the border wall, a decade-old condom in a ripped wrapper). It would be great to get beyond the stupid GOP rhetoric about an "open border" that simply isn't. 

And Forgive Us Our Debts

 

In another BFD kind of day, President Biden announced the forgiveness of student loan debt up to $10K for borrowers with incomes up to $125,000 ($250,00 if filing jointly) and up to $20K for Pell Grant recipients. This is going to help so many people--

The White House said that 43 million student loan borrowers will benefit and that as many as 20 million borrowers will have their full remaining student loan balances wiped out.

That will be very significant for those households. Due to debt obligations, people have put off on home-ownership, starting their families, and more. Adjustments to the payments owed will also give people whose debt has not thoroughly been retired welcome breathing space. It may not be what they hoped for, but it is a change in the right direction.

Of course, people have to complain. I'm not going to focus on the more left-based criticism that the debt forgiveness should have gone further because I'm in agreement with it--I am a Gen X kid whose working class to middle class family was able to manage my education, and I acknowledge my privilege. My degree was invaluable to me, though, and I encourage people to get a good education because the broader your horizons, the better your damn time here on this earth. I got a BA in English Lit., which is one of the most humanities of the humanities degrees. It means I am proficient in my mother tongue and can discuss works people have been reading for pleasure for a long time. 

I Wish This Woman Well, But

 

Chuck Todd put Meghan McCain on his panel this morning and said "it's good to have a McCain back on Meet the Press" because we live in a constant state of right-wing propaganda pic.twitter.com/Qs75M6T3b7

— Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC (@MattNegrin) September 26, 2021

I have defended Meghan McCain at certain junctures because taking potshots at her figure (voluptuous, or zaftig, so, you know, I am in her corner about that) or her youth back when she was younger is just missing the point. The thing that sucks about Meghan McCain is giving credence to someone for having opinions as if those opinions matter more because they are importance-adjacent, not because they are informed. This grown woman child is now speaking as a Republican with no elected office with two exact bona fides: Senator John McCain (deceased)'s daughter and Ben Domenech (alive, propagandist)'s wife. Her expertise in politics is being a person the media pays attention to. She hasn't the least fucks whether what she says is right, and it is not.

Crazy Inverted Yield Curve!

I am not an economist and I don't try to play one on the blog, but yesterday's stock market results in response to a dip on the bond market are worrisome to me, not because I especially know what that means for the economy (former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen says it might not even mean a recession, and she would know a whole lot more than I do), but because I have a read on how the current president deals with things he doesn't know how to handle, and it's not great:

I don't think this problem is going to be fixed by yelling on Twitter--but the man can't help himself. 

What I see is that Trump didn't learn from the last crash and deregulated the financial industry, taking off brakes that were put in place to prevent Bad Things from happening again, and his "trade war" scheme hasn't really been an all-around success for the economy. (He has, between the lines, almost admitted that the US consumer actually pays the tariffs on imported goods with his recent delay of the next round as a "Christmas present.") His goal to shrink the trade deficit has not worked. 

And as for ways we chip our way out of a recession, he's already got us in massive deficit spending. Also, he has deepened the polarization in Congress with antogonism. If things go bad, I simply don't see him as the guy to help make anything better.

He's Not Even That Successful A Businessman

One of the important things the recent tax record revelation should remind us of is this--Trump is not actually a particularly successful businessman. He talks a good game, but he built his business on the back of a wealthy father--who not just left him a fortune, but used his fortune to prop him up when he needed it. But the reality is, Trump has a bad attention span, and has tried and failed at all kinds of things. His is not an actual success story, but rather a story about how privilege saves the ass of the protected and mediocre.

It's a propped-up success story, some part self-promotion, and some part OPM. Like loans from Deutsche Bank. We've made a lot of noise over the degree to which he could be baited with a Tweet, but it is also true he could be blackmailed with his outstanding notes. This is a leveraged individual, and his independence is held liable because he is personally extended. There is nothing equivalent to his various forms of financial dirt in Clinton's history. His level of systemic financial abuse seems to me quite rare--his pattern of non-payment and renegotiation suggest he should have been able to be profitable--but the tale of the tape kind of implies he behaves abusively in the courts and seeks assorted name-leases because he is cash poor and debt-ridden.

And you know what? I don't think running the hell for president to highlight these failures actually has helped him any. Making him basically the King of Bad Decisions. I hope that idea sticks a little. Because knowing is more than half the battle.