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Bidenomics Isn’t Working For Working People
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Politics
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Didn’t the Republicans manufacture a debt ceiling crisis and demand the above aid cuts under threat of sending us into default? Am I remembering correctly?
Apparently now it was Biden the whole time?
It’s always baffling to me how easily the republicans can do bad things and then just say “the Democrats did it.” I’m always reminded of when Mitch McConnell filibustered his own bill because the Democrats got behind it.
Remember the tax cuts passed under Trump? Businesses got it forever. Guess whose tax cuts are about to expire, and guess who is going to get blamed for “raising taxes“ afterwards? 
Yes, it was ultimately Republicans who forced the politicization of the debt ceiling, but Biden really did not put up much of a fight. You have to ask yourself if the GOP really would've plunged the world into economic armageddon just for a handful of aid concessions. I think it was complete bluff, and Biden probably knew that but the reality is he's pro-austerity. He can't say it outright since it's unpopular, but he's still quite conservative and believer in the economic/corporate status quo. It might be deliberate, or it might be that he's literally just not imsginative enough to see outside his own bubble.
It tracks when you look at his stalling on student debt relief too; people like AOC were recommending he use the Higher Education act from the very beginning, precisely because it was more legally resilient, instead he chose a path that we more or less knew would result in failure in the courts.
But he pursued that route because, as he explicitly said, he didn't want Americans getting used to debt relief as the norm. More or less indicating that he saw this as a temporary political tool to bump his poll numbers, rather than trying to confront the broken debt system that will inevitably create a repeat of the situation we're in now.
i don't see how you can make this argument when he's presided over the largest expansion in social spending since the Great Society and has approved something in the ballpark of 4 or 5 trillion dollars in new spending between stimulus bills and his political priorities. a serious debate in the Democratic caucus was over whether to spend "just" 1.75 trillion or go for 2.2 trillion in spending. if this is austerity the word has absolutely no meaning at this point.
The amount of money spent isn't necessarily some kind of virtue. I could pin three dollars of climate funding to a trillion dollars of military spending and call it a "historic climate bill" but it won't make it so. And that's essentially what a lot of these big pieces of legislation have been, tons of pork wrapped up with a nice name and enough social spending to say you spent on climate or infrastructure or whatever even if it's not a fraction of what needs to happen.
I can make the claim that Biden is pro-austerity because Democrats had the option to raise the debt ceiling back when they controlled the House. They could've done it whenever they wanted and avoided any possibility of the GOP using it to gamble (something they knew very well would happen). Instead they took no action on something that would've been very simple, because it was an easy excuse.
It's the constant squandering of opportunities that gives away the game to me, Biden is just playing the same old shell game Democrats always do -- professing their love of progressive policy on one hand, and then hamstringing unions, stalling on promises and taking unnecessarily unstable legal routes to try and accomplish things so that those efforts get killed in the courts.
Biden is, at heart, a conservative. He's not a MAGA lunatic who thinks we should put trans people in camps, and that is good as far as that goes, but his entire career has been spent at the far right of the democratic party. I should clarify, that when I say he is pro-austerity I meant he's pro-austerity for the American working class, he has no problem giving large handouts to corporations. He fights for the status quo because that's what keeps the corporate money flowing in Washington.
"Stalling on promises" You mean trying to do shit but have Republicans do everything possible to stop the law and if it passes they do everything they can to not comply???
I think THAT is what you mean.
No, I mean like Obama explicitly promising to use his super majority to pass abortion protections and instead, when the time comes, simply saying it's not a priority and passing a republican-crafted forced insurance bill. I mean like forgoing the opportunity to raise the debt ceiling when you have control of the house and then capitulating to a cartoonishly obvious bluff of threatening to decimate the economy. I'm talking about having people recommend a legally sound route to forgiving student debt, and instead wasting time going down a route that people are already telling you will be struck down in the courts.
Establishment democrats and establishment republicans work together to stop progress. That's what being bipartisan means in this political context. The democrats ability to constantly tie their own hands is a trick worthy of the circus.
Obama had a super majority for 72 days and even then that required independents to caucus with them. Independents who are the reason the health care talks stalled. This isn't Obama's fault it's Liebermans. No matter how many times you repost this bull in this thread it still won't be true. Stop doing the GOPs work and convincing people to not vote for the only side that is doing anything to stem the tide on every issue you are bringing up b
I'm not telling people to not vote democrat in the general, I'm saying that if you keep electing people like Biden in the primaries then there will be no meaningful long term progress away from the corporatocracy we are stuck in. Ever. Not "a little slow progress" not "generational change" not "good instead of perfect" we will continue to backslide because yes, the GOP is pulling backwards with all their might, but the establishment democrats are sitting on the cart with corporate money shoved in their mouth and calling it progress.
Things are not getting better because we are not putting better people in office, they have been getting worse, we are losing rights at an unprecedented speed and if people like Biden cannot effectively fight that they need to get out of the way, urgently.
Biden has declared his climate funding "once in a generation". Yet we're nowhere close to addressing climate change and we easily spend many times that amount yearly on things like military and corporate welfare without blinking an eye, so what does that tell you about his motivations and sense of urgency? That's him telling you he thinks what he's done is good enough for a generation and can go back to waiting on wall street.
Yes. They would rather Biden look bad than America look good.