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I mean even by recent administrations its nowhere near what you could call a "failed administration" Bush term 2 went off the rails hard and fast in almost any way it could have.
Biden hasn't had a lot of success's but for the things he can control he hasn't outright failed on anything yet. He may not have lowered student debt but he's put off interest and payments to save the economy. Inflation was always going to be an issue in the post covid rebound alongside the stimulus that was needed. He didn't get his big legislative win but being hamstrung by one senator that is heavily invested in being pro global warming and another who decided to sell out instantly isn't something that he could have prevented from happening.
He has kept the lights on so far and hasn't humiliated the nation while also standing firm against china and russia. Getting the jan 6 commission going with some sort of GOP involvement was really unexpected but continues to churn up new stories about trump into the media. Any success for him going forward is reliant on him forcing the GOP to either support trump or not support trump and neither is good prospects for gaining seats.
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On February 12 2022 01:06 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 00:32 LegalLord wrote:On February 11 2022 20:02 Velr wrote:On February 11 2022 19:41 Taelshin wrote:
Because inflation/gas is very important and its clearly a rudderless ship Veir? The whole world has these issue atm, as powerful as the US President is, he is not above "the world". "It's unfair to expect the president to actually do something about important problems with the country like an alarming inflationary spiral! It's not his fault or his responsibility to deal with problems of the economy!" There's not much of an answer to be given if the standard is that we're supposed to be happy that Biden isn't Trump. I'll freely give you that he isn't, in terms of the sheer magnitude of preventable scandals under the presidency. But when you take a look at policy successes and the situation of the average citizen, you see a pretty damn failed administration. Whether or not that matters depends on whether or not you're looking to give Biden infinitely more leeway for failure than any president would have received pre-2016. Please don't generalize it to "important problems". The reference was specifically in terms of inflation and gas prices. Those two things. I don't think the president has the ability to unilaterally control inflation and gas prices, especially when those things are related to the gradual ending of a pandemic (would you rather have him create a new pandemic, just so gas prices can go down?). What could he do to fix inflation or gas prices? (Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I don't think many people here are saying that Biden is perfect, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "a pretty damn failed administration"? And are you talking about Biden's presidency/cabinet, in particular, or are you including the legislative branch that Biden has essentially no control over? Because there are some good and some bad things that have happened that Biden can be thanked/blamed for, and other good/bad things that have happened that Congress - not Biden - ought to be thanked/blamed for. Inflation and the economy are a very important problem, and he hasn't done well on those. The "rudderless ship" aspect is pretty important too - it sure as hell doesn't feel like there's anyone in charge of the government; Congress is mostly wrapped up in litigating Jan 6th and in playing stupid games over filibusters and Biden himself shows no signs of being in command. Policy-wise, Biden gets credit for one "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, following up on the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, and managing the executive branch bureaucracy in a somewhat more competent manner than Trump. Public outreach wise, he gets a big fat fail because he is horrible at it and so are his handlers. Not the worst if everything was otherwise going well, but wholly inadequate given the state of the country as it is now.
Why is "bipartisan" in quotes? Isn't it bipartisan? And you left out several other positive things besides infrastructure, such as finally having the balls to pull us out of Afghanistan, the recovery of our economy, job creation, and executive orders to counter Trump's anti-environmental EOs (although not enough imo). Also, in terms of continuing the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, I agree with you, but there's a very different mindset when comparing a president who was pushing against scientists, medical experts, and the seriousness of our pandemic, to a president who is aligned with public health. It's probably one of the reasons why our country's image is slowly being restored in the eyes of other countries, when we had an even worse-than-normal reputation under Trump. I think there's more Biden could do unilaterally, absolutely, but I think his presidency so far has been a net-positive.
Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
(Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I want to call out this interpretation of what I wrote up as highly disingenuous. It's a hard problem, but given its broad and significant impact on the entire economy at large, this is not some problem to gleefully dismiss as "it's hard to solve - Biden is off the hook because he doesn't have a lot of options to address it!" Fuck no; he has to make the hard choices and address it because that's literally the president's job.
No one is gleefully dismissing anything, and I don't think my interpretation is highly disingenuous when you wrote these phrases: "Options to fix it? Well there's not a lot"; "never going to happen"; "Not going to help at this point". It sounds like you made a list of ideal hypotheticals but then realized that they couldn't really work in practice, within our specific context. Also, Biden has made plenty of hard choices already. Afghanistan? Pushing for vaccine mandates? Some people may not like the choices he's making, but it's silly to say he's basically invisible.
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On February 11 2022 19:25 Velr wrote:
Why are people actually disappointed with Biden? I mean yeah, he is too old (obviously) and all the right wing media is fuming (as allways when not in power) but else? Did people just have totally unrealistic expectation? Do they actually blame him for inflation/gas prices?
1) Biden should be screaming about law makers trading stock and saying it should be illegal. Trump was extremely good at defining national conversations by jumping into the ring regarding pretty much every modern political question. Biden does nothing. He is not a leader.
2) Biden should use every tool he has to make marijuana effectively legal and for all people in prison for weed to be released. This should have been a day 1 action.
3) Student debt pause should be extended until 2025
4) All universities who have tuition increases which exceed inflation should have their federal funding, from all organizations (DOD, DOE, everything) suspended
These are all things he doesn't need anything other than a pen and a voice to accomplish and he hasn't done them. He is a complete failure.
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I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. Apparently we're victims of right wing propaganda, lol.
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On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about.
That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things.
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On February 12 2022 01:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 01:06 LegalLord wrote:On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 00:32 LegalLord wrote:On February 11 2022 20:02 Velr wrote:On February 11 2022 19:41 Taelshin wrote:
Because inflation/gas is very important and its clearly a rudderless ship Veir? The whole world has these issue atm, as powerful as the US President is, he is not above "the world". "It's unfair to expect the president to actually do something about important problems with the country like an alarming inflationary spiral! It's not his fault or his responsibility to deal with problems of the economy!" There's not much of an answer to be given if the standard is that we're supposed to be happy that Biden isn't Trump. I'll freely give you that he isn't, in terms of the sheer magnitude of preventable scandals under the presidency. But when you take a look at policy successes and the situation of the average citizen, you see a pretty damn failed administration. Whether or not that matters depends on whether or not you're looking to give Biden infinitely more leeway for failure than any president would have received pre-2016. Please don't generalize it to "important problems". The reference was specifically in terms of inflation and gas prices. Those two things. I don't think the president has the ability to unilaterally control inflation and gas prices, especially when those things are related to the gradual ending of a pandemic (would you rather have him create a new pandemic, just so gas prices can go down?). What could he do to fix inflation or gas prices? (Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I don't think many people here are saying that Biden is perfect, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "a pretty damn failed administration"? And are you talking about Biden's presidency/cabinet, in particular, or are you including the legislative branch that Biden has essentially no control over? Because there are some good and some bad things that have happened that Biden can be thanked/blamed for, and other good/bad things that have happened that Congress - not Biden - ought to be thanked/blamed for. Inflation and the economy are a very important problem, and he hasn't done well on those. The "rudderless ship" aspect is pretty important too - it sure as hell doesn't feel like there's anyone in charge of the government; Congress is mostly wrapped up in litigating Jan 6th and in playing stupid games over filibusters and Biden himself shows no signs of being in command. Policy-wise, Biden gets credit for one "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, following up on the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, and managing the executive branch bureaucracy in a somewhat more competent manner than Trump. Public outreach wise, he gets a big fat fail because he is horrible at it and so are his handlers. Not the worst if everything was otherwise going well, but wholly inadequate given the state of the country as it is now. Why is "bipartisan" in quotes? Isn't it bipartisan? And you left out several other positive things besides infrastructure, such as finally having the balls to pull us out of Afghanistan, the recovery of our economy, job creation, and executive orders to counter Trump's anti-environmental EOs (although not enough imo). Also, in terms of continuing the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, I agree with you, but there's a very different mindset when comparing a president who was pushing against scientists, medical experts, and the seriousness of our pandemic, to a president who is aligned with public health. It's probably one of the reasons why our country's image is slowly being restored in the eyes of other countries, when we had an even worse-than-normal reputation under Trump. I think there's more Biden could do unilaterally, absolutely, but I think his presidency so far has been a net-positive. Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
(Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I want to call out this interpretation of what I wrote up as highly disingenuous. It's a hard problem, but given its broad and significant impact on the entire economy at large, this is not some problem to gleefully dismiss as "it's hard to solve - Biden is off the hook because he doesn't have a lot of options to address it!" Fuck no; he has to make the hard choices and address it because that's literally the president's job. No one is gleefully dismissing anything, and I don't think my interpretation is highly disingenuous when you wrote these phrases: "Options to fix it? Well there's not a lot"; "never going to happen"; "Not going to help at this point". It sounds like you made a list of ideal hypotheticals but then realized that they couldn't really work in practice, within our specific context. Also, Biden has made plenty of hard choices already. Afghanistan? Pushing for vaccine mandates? Some people may not like the choices he's making, but it's silly to say he's basically invisible.
In case it wasn't clear, Biden should be doing one of three things about the energy/gasoline/inflationary crisis right now:
1. Pushing for a rapid rise in interest rates in the most orderly fashion that you could possibly introduce the biggest credit crunch we've seen since at least 2008.
2. Begging every commodity supplier the world over that is supply constrained due to US foreign policy to maximize output, and making significant concessions to do so.
3. Somehow coming up with a better plan than the options I suggested. I don't know that there is one, but maybe a large branch of advisors could come up with something that didn't come to mind in the 5 minutes it took me to write that post.
The inflationary crisis is the big issue of our time, and Biden's approach is mostly to drag his feet on it. To be fair he's not alone in that - this was a globally coordinated move that left much of the world up shit creek without a paddle - but as president it is his responsibility to solve it. Dismissing the most important issue as "no good solution - Biden is off the hook" is pretty disingenuous, or at the very least deeply short-sighted.
As for the other points - I suppose we could debate the little things about Biden's admin and how well he did / didn't do those. But this is the one that really matters, so let's focus on the big one.
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On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things.
I view failure in the context of not doing what you can do. People have an obligation to do the best they can, not just meet some minimum threshold. Since Biden could do the things I listed while also doing everything he has done, he has failed to live up to his potential. Grossly so.
How many hours of work do you think it would take him to do the things I listed? Him not doing those things is him choosing not to do them.
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On February 12 2022 02:08 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 01:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 01:06 LegalLord wrote:On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 00:32 LegalLord wrote:On February 11 2022 20:02 Velr wrote:On February 11 2022 19:41 Taelshin wrote:
Because inflation/gas is very important and its clearly a rudderless ship Veir? The whole world has these issue atm, as powerful as the US President is, he is not above "the world". "It's unfair to expect the president to actually do something about important problems with the country like an alarming inflationary spiral! It's not his fault or his responsibility to deal with problems of the economy!" There's not much of an answer to be given if the standard is that we're supposed to be happy that Biden isn't Trump. I'll freely give you that he isn't, in terms of the sheer magnitude of preventable scandals under the presidency. But when you take a look at policy successes and the situation of the average citizen, you see a pretty damn failed administration. Whether or not that matters depends on whether or not you're looking to give Biden infinitely more leeway for failure than any president would have received pre-2016. Please don't generalize it to "important problems". The reference was specifically in terms of inflation and gas prices. Those two things. I don't think the president has the ability to unilaterally control inflation and gas prices, especially when those things are related to the gradual ending of a pandemic (would you rather have him create a new pandemic, just so gas prices can go down?). What could he do to fix inflation or gas prices? (Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I don't think many people here are saying that Biden is perfect, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "a pretty damn failed administration"? And are you talking about Biden's presidency/cabinet, in particular, or are you including the legislative branch that Biden has essentially no control over? Because there are some good and some bad things that have happened that Biden can be thanked/blamed for, and other good/bad things that have happened that Congress - not Biden - ought to be thanked/blamed for. Inflation and the economy are a very important problem, and he hasn't done well on those. The "rudderless ship" aspect is pretty important too - it sure as hell doesn't feel like there's anyone in charge of the government; Congress is mostly wrapped up in litigating Jan 6th and in playing stupid games over filibusters and Biden himself shows no signs of being in command. Policy-wise, Biden gets credit for one "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, following up on the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, and managing the executive branch bureaucracy in a somewhat more competent manner than Trump. Public outreach wise, he gets a big fat fail because he is horrible at it and so are his handlers. Not the worst if everything was otherwise going well, but wholly inadequate given the state of the country as it is now. Why is "bipartisan" in quotes? Isn't it bipartisan? And you left out several other positive things besides infrastructure, such as finally having the balls to pull us out of Afghanistan, the recovery of our economy, job creation, and executive orders to counter Trump's anti-environmental EOs (although not enough imo). Also, in terms of continuing the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, I agree with you, but there's a very different mindset when comparing a president who was pushing against scientists, medical experts, and the seriousness of our pandemic, to a president who is aligned with public health. It's probably one of the reasons why our country's image is slowly being restored in the eyes of other countries, when we had an even worse-than-normal reputation under Trump. I think there's more Biden could do unilaterally, absolutely, but I think his presidency so far has been a net-positive. On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
(Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I want to call out this interpretation of what I wrote up as highly disingenuous. It's a hard problem, but given its broad and significant impact on the entire economy at large, this is not some problem to gleefully dismiss as "it's hard to solve - Biden is off the hook because he doesn't have a lot of options to address it!" Fuck no; he has to make the hard choices and address it because that's literally the president's job. No one is gleefully dismissing anything, and I don't think my interpretation is highly disingenuous when you wrote these phrases: "Options to fix it? Well there's not a lot"; "never going to happen"; "Not going to help at this point". It sounds like you made a list of ideal hypotheticals but then realized that they couldn't really work in practice, within our specific context. Also, Biden has made plenty of hard choices already. Afghanistan? Pushing for vaccine mandates? Some people may not like the choices he's making, but it's silly to say he's basically invisible. In case it wasn't clear, Biden should be doing one of three things about the energy/gasoline/inflationary crisis right now: 1. Pushing for a rapid rise in interest rates in the most orderly fashion that you could possibly introduce the biggest credit crunch we've seen since at least 2008. 2. Begging every commodity supplier the world over that is supply constrained due to US foreign policy to maximize output, and making significant concessions to do so. 3. Somehow coming up with a better plan than the options I suggested. I don't know that there is one, but maybe a large branch of advisors could come up with something that didn't come to mind in the 5 minutes it took me to write that post. The inflationary crisis is the big issue of our time, and Biden's approach is mostly to drag his feet on it. To be fair he's not alone in that - this was a globally coordinated move that left much of the world up shit creek without a paddle - but as president it is his responsibility to solve it. Dismissing the most important issue as "no good solution - Biden is off the hook" is pretty disingenuous, or at the very least deeply short-sighted. As for the other points - I suppose we could debate the little things about Biden's admin and how well he did / didn't do those. But this is the one that really matters, so let's focus on the big one.
I don't know enough about how options 1 and 2 work in practice, or the additional risks/rewards involved in those scenarios, but I appreciate you listing potential solutions 
On February 12 2022 02:09 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. I view failure in the context of not doing what you can do. People have an obligation to do the best they can, not just meet some minimum threshold. Since Biden could do the things I listed while also doing everything he has done, he has failed to live up to his potential. Grossly so. How many hours of work do you think it would take him to do the things I listed? Him not doing those things is him choosing not to do them.
That's fair, and I'm sure even more criticism could be appropriately leveled at Biden, especially if he ran on certain platforms and made campaign promises that he's not following through on. (And I don't know how long it would take for him to actually implement your list.)
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On February 12 2022 02:09 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. I view failure in the context of not doing what you can do. People have an obligation to do the best they can, not just meet some minimum threshold. Since Biden could do the things I listed while also doing everything he has done, he has failed to live up to his potential. Grossly so. How many hours of work do you think it would take him to do the things I listed? Him not doing those things is him choosing not to do them.
Also the minimum standard should be him fulfilling his campaign promise of 10k debt relief for all at least. I think most people would argue for higher, but if you can't meet what you promised then it's a fail automatically.
On February 12 2022 02:08 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 01:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 01:06 LegalLord wrote:On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 00:32 LegalLord wrote:On February 11 2022 20:02 Velr wrote:On February 11 2022 19:41 Taelshin wrote:
Because inflation/gas is very important and its clearly a rudderless ship Veir? The whole world has these issue atm, as powerful as the US President is, he is not above "the world". "It's unfair to expect the president to actually do something about important problems with the country like an alarming inflationary spiral! It's not his fault or his responsibility to deal with problems of the economy!" There's not much of an answer to be given if the standard is that we're supposed to be happy that Biden isn't Trump. I'll freely give you that he isn't, in terms of the sheer magnitude of preventable scandals under the presidency. But when you take a look at policy successes and the situation of the average citizen, you see a pretty damn failed administration. Whether or not that matters depends on whether or not you're looking to give Biden infinitely more leeway for failure than any president would have received pre-2016. Please don't generalize it to "important problems". The reference was specifically in terms of inflation and gas prices. Those two things. I don't think the president has the ability to unilaterally control inflation and gas prices, especially when those things are related to the gradual ending of a pandemic (would you rather have him create a new pandemic, just so gas prices can go down?). What could he do to fix inflation or gas prices? (Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I don't think many people here are saying that Biden is perfect, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "a pretty damn failed administration"? And are you talking about Biden's presidency/cabinet, in particular, or are you including the legislative branch that Biden has essentially no control over? Because there are some good and some bad things that have happened that Biden can be thanked/blamed for, and other good/bad things that have happened that Congress - not Biden - ought to be thanked/blamed for. Inflation and the economy are a very important problem, and he hasn't done well on those. The "rudderless ship" aspect is pretty important too - it sure as hell doesn't feel like there's anyone in charge of the government; Congress is mostly wrapped up in litigating Jan 6th and in playing stupid games over filibusters and Biden himself shows no signs of being in command. Policy-wise, Biden gets credit for one "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, following up on the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, and managing the executive branch bureaucracy in a somewhat more competent manner than Trump. Public outreach wise, he gets a big fat fail because he is horrible at it and so are his handlers. Not the worst if everything was otherwise going well, but wholly inadequate given the state of the country as it is now. Why is "bipartisan" in quotes? Isn't it bipartisan? And you left out several other positive things besides infrastructure, such as finally having the balls to pull us out of Afghanistan, the recovery of our economy, job creation, and executive orders to counter Trump's anti-environmental EOs (although not enough imo). Also, in terms of continuing the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, I agree with you, but there's a very different mindset when comparing a president who was pushing against scientists, medical experts, and the seriousness of our pandemic, to a president who is aligned with public health. It's probably one of the reasons why our country's image is slowly being restored in the eyes of other countries, when we had an even worse-than-normal reputation under Trump. I think there's more Biden could do unilaterally, absolutely, but I think his presidency so far has been a net-positive. On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
(Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I want to call out this interpretation of what I wrote up as highly disingenuous. It's a hard problem, but given its broad and significant impact on the entire economy at large, this is not some problem to gleefully dismiss as "it's hard to solve - Biden is off the hook because he doesn't have a lot of options to address it!" Fuck no; he has to make the hard choices and address it because that's literally the president's job. No one is gleefully dismissing anything, and I don't think my interpretation is highly disingenuous when you wrote these phrases: "Options to fix it? Well there's not a lot"; "never going to happen"; "Not going to help at this point". It sounds like you made a list of ideal hypotheticals but then realized that they couldn't really work in practice, within our specific context. Also, Biden has made plenty of hard choices already. Afghanistan? Pushing for vaccine mandates? Some people may not like the choices he's making, but it's silly to say he's basically invisible. In case it wasn't clear, Biden should be doing one of three things about the energy/gasoline/inflationary crisis right now: 1. Pushing for a rapid rise in interest rates in the most orderly fashion that you could possibly introduce the biggest credit crunch we've seen since at least 2008. 2. Begging every commodity supplier the world over that is supply constrained due to US foreign policy to maximize output, and making significant concessions to do so. 3. Somehow coming up with a better plan than the options I suggested. I don't know that there is one, but maybe a large branch of advisors could come up with something that didn't come to mind in the 5 minutes it took me to write that post. The inflationary crisis is the big issue of our time, and Biden's approach is mostly to drag his feet on it. To be fair he's not alone in that - this was a globally coordinated move that left much of the world up shit creek without a paddle - but as president it is his responsibility to solve it. Dismissing the most important issue as "no good solution - Biden is off the hook" is pretty disingenuous, or at the very least deeply short-sighted. As for the other points - I suppose we could debate the little things about Biden's admin and how well he did / didn't do those. But this is the one that really matters, so let's focus on the big one.
The inflationary crisis is a problem that requires a short term set back to prevent long term disaster so it can't be solved by our political system. China or the US is going to have their economy crash first so that the other can point their finger and blame them. Everyone is just kicking the can down the road and hoping that it doesn't fall apart while they're in charge.
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On February 12 2022 02:08 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 01:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 01:06 LegalLord wrote:On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 00:32 LegalLord wrote:On February 11 2022 20:02 Velr wrote:On February 11 2022 19:41 Taelshin wrote:
Because inflation/gas is very important and its clearly a rudderless ship Veir? The whole world has these issue atm, as powerful as the US President is, he is not above "the world". "It's unfair to expect the president to actually do something about important problems with the country like an alarming inflationary spiral! It's not his fault or his responsibility to deal with problems of the economy!" There's not much of an answer to be given if the standard is that we're supposed to be happy that Biden isn't Trump. I'll freely give you that he isn't, in terms of the sheer magnitude of preventable scandals under the presidency. But when you take a look at policy successes and the situation of the average citizen, you see a pretty damn failed administration. Whether or not that matters depends on whether or not you're looking to give Biden infinitely more leeway for failure than any president would have received pre-2016. Please don't generalize it to "important problems". The reference was specifically in terms of inflation and gas prices. Those two things. I don't think the president has the ability to unilaterally control inflation and gas prices, especially when those things are related to the gradual ending of a pandemic (would you rather have him create a new pandemic, just so gas prices can go down?). What could he do to fix inflation or gas prices? (Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I don't think many people here are saying that Biden is perfect, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "a pretty damn failed administration"? And are you talking about Biden's presidency/cabinet, in particular, or are you including the legislative branch that Biden has essentially no control over? Because there are some good and some bad things that have happened that Biden can be thanked/blamed for, and other good/bad things that have happened that Congress - not Biden - ought to be thanked/blamed for. Inflation and the economy are a very important problem, and he hasn't done well on those. The "rudderless ship" aspect is pretty important too - it sure as hell doesn't feel like there's anyone in charge of the government; Congress is mostly wrapped up in litigating Jan 6th and in playing stupid games over filibusters and Biden himself shows no signs of being in command. Policy-wise, Biden gets credit for one "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, following up on the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, and managing the executive branch bureaucracy in a somewhat more competent manner than Trump. Public outreach wise, he gets a big fat fail because he is horrible at it and so are his handlers. Not the worst if everything was otherwise going well, but wholly inadequate given the state of the country as it is now. Why is "bipartisan" in quotes? Isn't it bipartisan? And you left out several other positive things besides infrastructure, such as finally having the balls to pull us out of Afghanistan, the recovery of our economy, job creation, and executive orders to counter Trump's anti-environmental EOs (although not enough imo). Also, in terms of continuing the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, I agree with you, but there's a very different mindset when comparing a president who was pushing against scientists, medical experts, and the seriousness of our pandemic, to a president who is aligned with public health. It's probably one of the reasons why our country's image is slowly being restored in the eyes of other countries, when we had an even worse-than-normal reputation under Trump. I think there's more Biden could do unilaterally, absolutely, but I think his presidency so far has been a net-positive. On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
(Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I want to call out this interpretation of what I wrote up as highly disingenuous. It's a hard problem, but given its broad and significant impact on the entire economy at large, this is not some problem to gleefully dismiss as "it's hard to solve - Biden is off the hook because he doesn't have a lot of options to address it!" Fuck no; he has to make the hard choices and address it because that's literally the president's job. No one is gleefully dismissing anything, and I don't think my interpretation is highly disingenuous when you wrote these phrases: "Options to fix it? Well there's not a lot"; "never going to happen"; "Not going to help at this point". It sounds like you made a list of ideal hypotheticals but then realized that they couldn't really work in practice, within our specific context. Also, Biden has made plenty of hard choices already. Afghanistan? Pushing for vaccine mandates? Some people may not like the choices he's making, but it's silly to say he's basically invisible. In case it wasn't clear, Biden should be doing one of three things about the energy/gasoline/inflationary crisis right now: 1. Pushing for a rapid rise in interest rates in the most orderly fashion that you could possibly introduce the biggest credit crunch we've seen since at least 2008. 2. Begging every commodity supplier the world over that is supply constrained due to US foreign policy to maximize output, and making significant concessions to do so. 3. Somehow coming up with a better plan than the options I suggested. I don't know that there is one, but maybe a large branch of advisors could come up with something that didn't come to mind in the 5 minutes it took me to write that post. The inflationary crisis is the big issue of our time, and Biden's approach is mostly to drag his feet on it. To be fair he's not alone in that - this was a globally coordinated move that left much of the world up shit creek without a paddle - but as president it is his responsibility to solve it. Dismissing the most important issue as "no good solution - Biden is off the hook" is pretty disingenuous, or at the very least deeply short-sighted.
So he can apply pressure but ultimately the decisions are out of his hands. The fed must decide on interest rates, and suppliers around the world must increase production and solve the logistics problems like held up shipping. I don't know how much his administration is doing behind the scenes on those fronts, and I agree that he certainly appears to be doing nothing, but it still seems like a problem largely outside the powers of the president. As Velr said, the whole world is suffering these issues currently and we are all intertwined.
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On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. Apparently we're victims of right wing propaganda, lol.
I'm with you two. People giving him every excuse in the book just for not being Trump. Maybe I'm just a sucker for expecting him to do something positive starting with student debt relief.
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On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things.
Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick.
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On February 12 2022 03:04 Starlightsun wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 02:08 LegalLord wrote:On February 12 2022 01:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 01:06 LegalLord wrote:On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 00:32 LegalLord wrote:On February 11 2022 20:02 Velr wrote:On February 11 2022 19:41 Taelshin wrote:
Because inflation/gas is very important and its clearly a rudderless ship Veir? The whole world has these issue atm, as powerful as the US President is, he is not above "the world". "It's unfair to expect the president to actually do something about important problems with the country like an alarming inflationary spiral! It's not his fault or his responsibility to deal with problems of the economy!" There's not much of an answer to be given if the standard is that we're supposed to be happy that Biden isn't Trump. I'll freely give you that he isn't, in terms of the sheer magnitude of preventable scandals under the presidency. But when you take a look at policy successes and the situation of the average citizen, you see a pretty damn failed administration. Whether or not that matters depends on whether or not you're looking to give Biden infinitely more leeway for failure than any president would have received pre-2016. Please don't generalize it to "important problems". The reference was specifically in terms of inflation and gas prices. Those two things. I don't think the president has the ability to unilaterally control inflation and gas prices, especially when those things are related to the gradual ending of a pandemic (would you rather have him create a new pandemic, just so gas prices can go down?). What could he do to fix inflation or gas prices? (Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I don't think many people here are saying that Biden is perfect, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "a pretty damn failed administration"? And are you talking about Biden's presidency/cabinet, in particular, or are you including the legislative branch that Biden has essentially no control over? Because there are some good and some bad things that have happened that Biden can be thanked/blamed for, and other good/bad things that have happened that Congress - not Biden - ought to be thanked/blamed for. Inflation and the economy are a very important problem, and he hasn't done well on those. The "rudderless ship" aspect is pretty important too - it sure as hell doesn't feel like there's anyone in charge of the government; Congress is mostly wrapped up in litigating Jan 6th and in playing stupid games over filibusters and Biden himself shows no signs of being in command. Policy-wise, Biden gets credit for one "bipartisan" infrastructure bill, following up on the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, and managing the executive branch bureaucracy in a somewhat more competent manner than Trump. Public outreach wise, he gets a big fat fail because he is horrible at it and so are his handlers. Not the worst if everything was otherwise going well, but wholly inadequate given the state of the country as it is now. Why is "bipartisan" in quotes? Isn't it bipartisan? And you left out several other positive things besides infrastructure, such as finally having the balls to pull us out of Afghanistan, the recovery of our economy, job creation, and executive orders to counter Trump's anti-environmental EOs (although not enough imo). Also, in terms of continuing the vaccine rollout that Trump made possible, I agree with you, but there's a very different mindset when comparing a president who was pushing against scientists, medical experts, and the seriousness of our pandemic, to a president who is aligned with public health. It's probably one of the reasons why our country's image is slowly being restored in the eyes of other countries, when we had an even worse-than-normal reputation under Trump. I think there's more Biden could do unilaterally, absolutely, but I think his presidency so far has been a net-positive. On February 12 2022 00:49 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
(Edit: I just saw that you wrote another post, stating that Biden can't do a lot to address these things.) I want to call out this interpretation of what I wrote up as highly disingenuous. It's a hard problem, but given its broad and significant impact on the entire economy at large, this is not some problem to gleefully dismiss as "it's hard to solve - Biden is off the hook because he doesn't have a lot of options to address it!" Fuck no; he has to make the hard choices and address it because that's literally the president's job. No one is gleefully dismissing anything, and I don't think my interpretation is highly disingenuous when you wrote these phrases: "Options to fix it? Well there's not a lot"; "never going to happen"; "Not going to help at this point". It sounds like you made a list of ideal hypotheticals but then realized that they couldn't really work in practice, within our specific context. Also, Biden has made plenty of hard choices already. Afghanistan? Pushing for vaccine mandates? Some people may not like the choices he's making, but it's silly to say he's basically invisible. In case it wasn't clear, Biden should be doing one of three things about the energy/gasoline/inflationary crisis right now: 1. Pushing for a rapid rise in interest rates in the most orderly fashion that you could possibly introduce the biggest credit crunch we've seen since at least 2008. 2. Begging every commodity supplier the world over that is supply constrained due to US foreign policy to maximize output, and making significant concessions to do so. 3. Somehow coming up with a better plan than the options I suggested. I don't know that there is one, but maybe a large branch of advisors could come up with something that didn't come to mind in the 5 minutes it took me to write that post. The inflationary crisis is the big issue of our time, and Biden's approach is mostly to drag his feet on it. To be fair he's not alone in that - this was a globally coordinated move that left much of the world up shit creek without a paddle - but as president it is his responsibility to solve it. Dismissing the most important issue as "no good solution - Biden is off the hook" is pretty disingenuous, or at the very least deeply short-sighted. So he can apply pressure but ultimately the decisions are out of his hands. The fed must decide on interest rates, and suppliers around the world must increase production and solve the logistics problems like held up shipping. I don't know how much his administration is doing behind the scenes on those fronts, and I agree that he certainly appears to be doing nothing, but it still seems like a problem largely outside the powers of the president. As Velr said, the whole world is suffering these issues currently and we are all intertwined.
The Fed's independence in decision-making is largely notional. They won't take orders from the president but if it's Biden's policy to push for that rate raise - it won't be long before it actually happens. The Fed's opposition to Trump's debt fiesta was short-lived at best; they certainly won't oppose Biden too hard. And if the interest rates do go up significantly, the supply problem will be resolved. Not by increase in production, but by decrease in demand. That worked in the 70s energy crisis, it would work now.
The real problem, and why the Fed has been gaslighting about transitory inflation rather than doing its job and tightening monetary policy when it started to look like it was getting out of control, is that increasing interest rates makes all forms of debt more expensive, and we (as in, the US and all of its major allies) are locked in a pretty horrendous debt trap such that a credit crunch would have the potential to be apocalyptic. We never really solved the problems of 2008; we just buried the bad debt in more debt such as to make the crash not happen, but the structural weaknesses are all still there. This actually almost played out in late 2018 in a now almost forgotten event - the Fed bumped up interest rates to around 2% and the financial markets deteriorated so badly as to force an immediate backtrack.
As bad as that sounds, the problem isn't going to go away. We can either bite the bullet now and take a huge hit, do it later and take a worse one, or never do it and be stuck in a perpetual Japan trap. The latter with some inflation gaslighting is probably the hope, but it is also possible to misfire and just get runaway inflation instead.
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On February 12 2022 03:30 Nick_54 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick.
That's a very weird cherry-picking of scenarios, but I would absolutely consider the progress we've made with covid, as well as with the economy and job growth, as well as finally leaving Afghanistan, as pros, yes. I share your disappointment in his lack of addressing student loan debt and education in general.
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On February 12 2022 04:15 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 03:30 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick. That's a very weird cherry-picking of scenarios, but I would absolutely consider the progress we've made with covid, as well as with the economy and job growth, as well as finally leaving Afghanistan, as pros, yes. I share your disappointment in his lack of addressing student loan debt and education in general.
Covid deaths are as over 3,000 day how is that progress to you?
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On February 12 2022 04:20 Nick_54 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 04:15 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 03:30 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick. That's a very weird cherry-picking of scenarios, but I would absolutely consider the progress we've made with covid, as well as with the economy and job growth, as well as finally leaving Afghanistan, as pros, yes. I share your disappointment in his lack of addressing student loan debt and education in general. Covid deaths are as over 3,000 day how is that progress to you?
I think it is worth pointing out that a difference in the virus itself makes it an unfair comparison. If we were still dealing with Beta covid, we'd be having orgies in closets with no concern of infection. Covid mutated and got a lot worse.
Don't get me wrong. Biden did a terrible job at handling covid. Free N95 masks should have been a day1 priority for Biden. But the virus becoming a worse virus is not Biden's fault.
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On February 12 2022 04:22 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 04:20 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 04:15 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 03:30 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick. That's a very weird cherry-picking of scenarios, but I would absolutely consider the progress we've made with covid, as well as with the economy and job growth, as well as finally leaving Afghanistan, as pros, yes. I share your disappointment in his lack of addressing student loan debt and education in general. Covid deaths are as over 3,000 day how is that progress to you? I think it is worth pointing out that a difference in the virus itself makes it an unfair comparison. If we were still dealing with Beta covid, we'd be having orgies in closets with no concern of infection. Covid mutated and got a lot worse. Don't get me wrong. Biden did a terrible job at handling covid. Free N95 masks should have been a day1 priority for Biden. But the virus becoming a worse virus is not Biden's fault.
Yes N95 and testing kits should've been distributed from day 1 just like the student loan debt forgiveness that was promised. All could have been done by the executive branch without congress grinding things to a halt.
Edit: Is omicron really more deadly than beta covid, I realize delta was the most deadly strain. Not trying to be a smartass, just haven't seen any research on this one.
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On February 12 2022 04:22 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 04:20 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 04:15 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 03:30 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick. That's a very weird cherry-picking of scenarios, but I would absolutely consider the progress we've made with covid, as well as with the economy and job growth, as well as finally leaving Afghanistan, as pros, yes. I share your disappointment in his lack of addressing student loan debt and education in general. Covid deaths are as over 3,000 day how is that progress to you? I think it is worth pointing out that a difference in the virus itself makes it an unfair comparison. If we were still dealing with Beta covid, we'd be having orgies in closets with no concern of infection. Covid mutated and got a lot worse. Don't get me wrong. Biden did a terrible job at handling covid. Free N95 masks should have been a day1 priority for Biden. But the virus becoming a worse virus is not Biden's fault.
Do you think the proposition "the virus emerging is not Trump's fault" should be given credit in assessing whether trump is to blame for the deaths that occurred during his presidency? Personally I don't see a reasoned distinction to be made (in terms of the president’s degree of fault) between the deaths that occurred during trumps presidency and those that have occurred during bidens presidency. After all, the president lacks the power to order lockdowns.
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On February 12 2022 04:39 Doc.Rivers wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2022 04:22 Mohdoo wrote:On February 12 2022 04:20 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 04:15 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 03:30 Nick_54 wrote:On February 12 2022 02:05 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On February 12 2022 02:00 mierin wrote:
I'm honestly starting to think I'm part of this crazy minority who agrees with you Mohdoo. "But he's not Trump" or "he votes for judges" is really all most people care about. That's not the entire rationale for people who think Biden is doing an okay job. Couldn't one make the opposite argument by saying "The only things that anti-Biden people focus on are the things he's neglected, like marijuana and education?" That would be just as incorrect. Like, I think both of those - marijuana and education - are really important topics too (and him neglecting them are absolutely cons in a "pros and cons" list) but so is beating our pandemic, our economy, our infrastructure, and our global affairs. He's done some good things, and he's definitely neglected some other things. Is the 3k+ deaths yesterday and the 40 year record inflation and the Afghanistan debacle what you consider pros for beating the pandemic, the economy, and global affairs? They aren't for me. I'll give him a win for the infrastructure bill. I guess I must be missing the good things or maybe the fact that he didn't follow through on the promised student loan debt relief that he has the power to do through executive order makes me sick. That's a very weird cherry-picking of scenarios, but I would absolutely consider the progress we've made with covid, as well as with the economy and job growth, as well as finally leaving Afghanistan, as pros, yes. I share your disappointment in his lack of addressing student loan debt and education in general. Covid deaths are as over 3,000 day how is that progress to you? I think it is worth pointing out that a difference in the virus itself makes it an unfair comparison. If we were still dealing with Beta covid, we'd be having orgies in closets with no concern of infection. Covid mutated and got a lot worse. Don't get me wrong. Biden did a terrible job at handling covid. Free N95 masks should have been a day1 priority for Biden. But the virus becoming a worse virus is not Biden's fault. Do you think the proposition "the virus emerging is not Trump's fault" should be given credit in assessing whether trump is to blame for the deaths that occurred during his presidency? Personally I don't see a reasoned distinction to be made (in terms of the president’s degree of fault) between the deaths that occurred during trumps presidency and those that have occurred during bidens presidency. After all, the president lacks the power to order lockdowns.
Biden and Trump are both at fault for not providing testing and masks extremely early on. Trump is amazingly at fault for making covid concern political. Him and his administration seeking to minimize concern of covid is well documented. Biden is a failure and Trump took it a step further by doing much worse than nothing
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EPT
