Which Would You Prefer-- Free State Colleges Again... Or Joe Biden Again?

The big early news in the 2020 presidential primary not going to be coming from Iowa-- 88% white, 50% rural-- and New Hampshire-- 92% white and 37% rural. I have nothing against those states but I was (mostly) happy to read that California will have an impact from now on as well-- California: 39.6% white, 38.1% Latino, 13% Asian, 6% Black and 4.2% rural. "When Iowa Democrats hold their February 2020 presidential caucuses," reported Reid Epstein for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, "millions of Californians will already have their primary ballots. The nation’s most-populous state has moved its primary to March 3, 2020, so it can have more influence in picking presidential nominees. The move from a June primary in 2016 will press hopefuls to consider a West Coast perspective on issues such as immigration and the environment, empower the state’s growing Latino and Asian populations and drastically increase the amount of money candidates must raise to mount a competitive campaign." Hmmm... I don't like the implications of that last phrase. (As Epstein points out, "With a population of 40 million, California is considered too large for a campaign to build a field operation. A week of statewide TV advertising costs about $6 million, making it prohibitively expensive for most campaigns."

The geography for primaries will likely mean the voters critical to winning the presidential nomination will be considerably different from the electorate that carried the party to sweeping victories in the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats flipped 40 House Republican seats and regained the chamber’s majority.

...While 2018 congressional candidates focused on health care and targeted educated suburban voters, candidates in 2020 must appeal to a far more diverse group in the nation’s cities.

“There will be a need to discuss issues of racial inequality,” said Matt Barreto, the co-founder Latino Decisions, a polling firm. “People are disgusted with the way that they are being talked about in such hostile racial language... It has to do with being respected and being wanted in the Democratic community.”

...California, Texas and seven other states have set March 3 contests and more-- including Georgia, where black voters make up more than half the Democratic electorate-- could move to that date as well, said Josh Putnam, a University of North Carolina-Wilmington lecturer who tracks the presidential nominating calendar.

Also upending the traditional focus on Iowa and New Hampshire is a heavier emphasis on early voting, a process that has become more popular with each election. Millions of California voters will receive their ballots 29 days before its primary, on the same day as the Iowa caucuses. Vermont’s early voting will begin Jan. 18, two weeks before Iowans choose a candidate.

...Joan Kato, who served as delegate director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016, said the first four states, with their small populations, will test candidates’ ability to interact with voters rather than serve as a gauge of who can reach the most people through advertising.

“It makes an unfair playing field,” Ms. Kato said. “Should our presidency be decided by the amount of money somebody can fundraise?”

...It also isn’t a given that California’s increased influence will pull the party’s nominee to the left. Mrs. Clinton won the state twice, even though she was seen as less liberal than Mr. Obama in 2008 and Mr. Sanders in 2016. Both times Mrs. Clinton was better known than her opponent.

“This idea that California is a super-liberal bastion is wrong,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way. “You’ve got to think about California ideologically the way you have to think about the whole country.”

There's definitely going to be a centrist running, someone from the corporate wing of the party, possibly a Biden/Gillibrand ticket, which would be running since he's not just a gaffe-machine, but a #MeToo nightmare, the only issue she's distinguished herself on.

Going back to Biden's corporate identity isn't something he'll accept gracefully in public, but it's indisputable for people who examine his long, sordid record. Which is exactly what David Sirota did in 2015 for the International Business Times-- and on one particular issue: Joe Biden Backed Bills To Make It Harder For Americans To Reduce Their Student Debt. Biden has always been on the side of the creditors, never the borrowers. "Americans," wrote Sirota, "now face more than $1.2 trillion in total outstanding debt from their government and private student loans. The bill [to roll back Bush's and Biden's awful bankruptcy bill] is a crucial component of the party’s pro-middle-class economic message heading into 2016. Yet one of the lawmakers most responsible for limiting the legal options of... students is the man who some Democrats hope will be their party's standard-bearer in 2016: Vice President Joe Biden."

As a senator from Delaware-- a corporate tax haven where the financial industry is one of the state’s largest employers-- Biden was one of the key proponents of the 2005 legislation that is now bearing down on students like Ryan. That bill effectively prevents the $150 billion worth of private student debt from being discharged, rescheduled or renegotiated as other debt can be in bankruptcy court.

Biden's efforts in 2005 were no anomaly. Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion of the struggling middle class-- a man who famously commutes on Amtrak and mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers-- the Delaware lawmaker has played a consistent and pivotal role in the financial industry's four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to shield themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s.

Biden's political fortunes rose in tandem with the financial industry's. At 29, he won the first of seven elections to the U.S. Senate, rising to chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, which vets bankruptcy legislation. On that committee, Biden helped lenders make it more difficult for Americans to reduce debt through bankruptcy-- a trend that experts say encouraged banks to loan more freely with less fear that courts could erase their customers’ repayment obligations. At the same time, with more debtors barred from bankruptcy protections, the average American’s debt load went up by two-thirds over the last 40 years. Today, there is more than $10,000 of personal debt for every person in the country, as compared to roughly $6,000 in the early 1970s.

That increase-- and its attendant interest payments-- have generated huge profits for a financial industry that delivered more than $1.9 million of campaign contributions to Biden over his career, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Student debt, which grew as Biden climbed the Senate ladder and helped lenders tighten bankruptcy laws, spiked from $24 billion issued annually in 1990-91 to $110 billion in 2012-13, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

According to the Institute for College Access and Success, as of 2012, roughly one-fifth of recent graduates’ student debt was from private loans that “are typically more costly” than government loans.

Consequently, every major Democratic presidential candidate has introduced his or her own plan to reduce college debt. Biden himself has spotlighted the issue as he has publicly pondered a White House bid. Earlier this month he attended an event to discuss student debt at community colleges, telling students at Miami-Dade College: “I doubt there were many of you who could sit down and write a check for $6,000 in tuition without worrying about it.” His comments amplified his rhetoric from the 2012 election, when he decried the fact that "two-thirds of all the students who attend college take out loans to pay for school." He said that the accumulated debt means that when the typical student graduates, "you get a diploma and you get stapled to it a $25,000 bill."

But advocates for stronger protections for debtors argue that Biden was a driving force in creating the laws that made the problem worse.

“Joe Biden bears a large amount of responsibility for passage of the bankruptcy bill,” Ed Boltz, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, said in an interview with IBT.

That legislation created a crisis, said Northeastern University law professor Daniel Austin. Federal Reserve data show that about 1.1 million people face student debt loans of $100,000 or more, and roughly 167,000 face student loans of $200,000 or more.

“It is perverse and obscene,” Austin told IBT. “We are creating a generation of indentured people. It is mind-boggling that we would do this to a whole generation of young people. I can’t understand any other modern society doing this.”

Is there a better idea that a visionless, stays quo warrior from another era, like Biden? You bet. First watch this video of Richard Wolff interviewing Stephanie Kelton, Bernie's chief economic advisor, just about one year ago:



Now let's take a look at what Bernie is proposing. He's boiled it down to 6 steps at a time where a highly competitive global economy demands the best-educated workforce in the world. "It is insane and counter-productive," he wrote, "to the best interests of our country and our future, that hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, and that millions of others leave school with a mountain of debt that burdens them for decades. That shortsighted path to the future must end."

• MAKE TUITION FREE AT PUBLIC COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.

This is not a radical idea. Germany eliminated tuition because they believed that charging students $1,300 per year was discouraging Germans from going to college. Chile will do the same. Finland, Norway, Sweden and many other countries around the world also offer free college to all of their citizens. If other countries can take this action, so can the United States of America.

In fact, it’s what many of our colleges and universities used to do. The University of California system offered free tuition at its schools until the 1980s. In 1965, average tuition at a four-year public university was just $243 and many of the best colleges-- including the City University of New York-- did not charge any tuition at all. The Sanders plan would make tuition free at public colleges and universities throughout the country.

• STOP THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FROM MAKING A PROFIT ON STUDENT LOANS.

Over the next decade, it has been estimated that the federal government will make a profit of over $110 billion on student loan programs. This is morally wrong and it is bad economics. Sen. Sanders will fight to prevent the federal government from profiteering on the backs of college students and use this money instead to significantly lower student loan interest rates.

• SUBSTANTIALLY CUT STUDENT LOAN INTEREST RATES.

Under the Sanders plan, the formula for setting student loan interest rates would go back to where it was in 2006. If this plan were in effect today, interest rates on undergraduate loans would drop from 4.29% to just 2.37%.

• ALLOW AMERICANS TO REFINANCE STUDENT LOANS AT TODAY’S LOW INTEREST RATES.

It makes no sense that you can get an auto loan today with an interest rate of 2.5%, but millions of college graduates are forced to pay interest rates of 5-7% or more for decades. Under the Sanders plan, Americans would be able to refinance their student loans at today’s low interest rates.

• ALLOW STUDENTS TO USE NEED-BASED FINANCIAL AID AND WORK STUDY PROGRAMS TO MAKE COLLEGE DEBT FREE.

The Sanders plan would require public colleges and universities to meet 100% of the financial needs of the lowest-income students. Low-income students would be able to use federal, state and college financial aid to cover room and board, books and living expenses. And Sanders would more than triple the federal work study program to build valuable career experience that will help them after they graduate.

• FULLY PAID FOR BY IMPOSING A TAX ON WALL STREET SPECULATORS.

The cost of this $75 billion a year plan is fully paid for by imposing a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy seven years ago. More than 1,000 economists have endorsed a tax on Wall Street speculation and today some 40 countries throughout the world have imposed a similar tax including Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, and China. If the taxpayers of this country could bailout Wall Street in 2008, we can make public colleges and universities tuition free and debt free throughout the country.