Hacker News Reader

Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Bernie and Warren are currently in a race to see who can unrealistically promise the most things to shore up the youth vote. I'm getting tired of unrealistic proposals that are akin to political grifting. These would never pass congress, even if Democrats controlled both chambers with super majorities. We can't get anything done in Washington because neither party puts forward anything realistic that can actually pass. It's tiresome. No one is willing to compromise and everyone puts up nonstarters.

View on HN

The Affordable Care Act was absolutely a compromise. It's not difficult to imagine a compromise being reached on a pledge like this in a similar fashion. It's primary season after all, candidates are laying out their philosophy as much as they're laying out actual legislation.

Right now you can’t pay down employee’s student loans without it being considered taxed income. Even if the money goes from the employer to the loan servicer. It’s ridiculous. This does not need to result in a cancellation of all debt to result in progress.

So what you're saying is... there's a compromise to be made?

... It's not a compromise if you're negotiating with yourself.

Why should not that not be considered taxable income?

If it wasn't taxable income, you'd incentive students taking unnecessary loans senior year so they could get tax free income the subsequent one. Which accomplishes nothing but reduced government revenue and additional government money going to loan servicers.

How are this and ACA even remotely similar? This proposal doesn't even address the cause of high costs of education. So, we pay it all off and then wait for the next bubble. That's like implementing TARP in 2008/2009 to buy up bad banking assets and doing nothing else to prevent it from happening again.

I didn't say they were similar, I said that the ACA is an example of legislation that was passed through compromise.

The ACA was only voted for by one party hardly a compromise, and because of that it had been crippled on the state level where it absolutely needed support. So, still a poor example.

The reason I mentioned it is because the OP said:

> These would never pass congress, even if Democrats controlled both chambers with super majorities.

The ACA wasn’t a compromise between parties , it was a compromise between the conservative and progressive wings of the Democratic Party - Senator Joe Lieberman’s (a former Democrat who had run and won as an independent) vote was crucial to passing the act and also to the removal of the public option from the bill.

...and it doesn't really work because it wasn't a compromise between parties...since the GOP controls most state governments, they have stripped out the Medicaid portions. So...it is largely a failure in many regards. If there had been real party to party compromise, the bill might have actually helped cut costs. Instead it was just something to pass quickly to notch as an accomplishment. The Democrats aren't the only ones who have done that...the GOP is equally guilty. It's time to start compromising across party lines, and things like what Warren and Bernie have put forward do the polar opposite.

Medicaid has been expanded in the places where the vast majority of Americans live. Even in some red states.

Issues with the ACA are hardly limited to the Medicaid expansion. And labeling it as “something to pass quickly” does a disservice to the negotiation involved in the bill and how it almost didn’t become law in the end when the democrats lost their 60 seat majority in the middle of final negotiations and passing.

Not sure how anything new gets passed though. Even if warren or Bernie win, it’s unlikely they get 60 senate seats.

The way of dealing with the cost of education is in the article. College is made "free" for students, meaning the government becomes the single payer.

Right, and how does that address costs? It doesn't. It just shifts it to one entity. Unlike with healthcare the economies of scale don't apply as well to education. It just encourages the "bad actors" (ie Universities) to keep hiking up prices. Per capita spending per pupil in the US for primary schooling is close to the top, if not the top, in the world...but outcomes are poor. Not sure how this would be different in higher education.

This also assumes that college is necessary at all, and delays workforce entry.

"Unrealistic" is how most popular, realistic ideas that every other industralized nation has managed to put in to practice are put down.

Single payer healthcare is similar.

I still remember Chilean right wing commentators declaring free tertiary education as unrealistic not that long ago, before it became reality. Once it became reality it was declared "unfair". America will be no different.

Warren's suggestions seem more practical/plausible/informed. Any particular reason you are lumping them with Sanders'?

I think Warren knows when her unrealistic ideas are unrealistic. She has a background in econ, after all. She also knows that she has to negotiate, which means she has to open with an offer the other side won't accept. Her track record in Congress shows she's capable of that; she's gotten major bills passed before.

And I have a hard time thinking of someone more qualified to lead the Dems -- you've got the foot-in-the-grave (Biden, Sanders), the foot-in-the-cradle (Harris, Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Castro), the memes (Yang, Gabbard) and the anaesthetic (Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, Delaney etc). That leaves Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.

> I think Warren knows when her unrealistic ideas are unrealistic

Does she? Because this seems extremely unrealistic:

https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1141705066656751616

Are you sure you linked the right tweet? I thought you were going to be complaining about the wealth tax (which I think is an intentional, rhetorical oversimplification of the real plan) or some social program, but not a minor tax cut that affects less than 2% of the population!

I'm not complaining about anything, I'm giving you an example of her being very unrealistic.

What exactly is unrealistic about that? It’s barely a blip on the radar in any economic sense. Politically it might not be popular right now (???) but that’s irrelevant for evaluating competence.

It's unrealistic precisely because it's unpopular and will not get support. It's the same as Sanders proposal. Offer free stuff in exchange for votes knowing that you won't actually get approval for the free stuff.

The thing is, given a large enough voting bloc, you can vote out everyone that disagrees with you and pass sweeping legislation without needing to compromise. The goal is to force every legislator in Congress to pick a side for the sake of knowing who to vote out.

Why exactly is this unrealistic? I think Trump's tax cut was $1 trillion annually. So a one time $1,5 trillion payments doesn't sound too unrealistic to me.

It can even be done without Congressional approval.

> "the Higher Education Act in 1965 gives the secretary of education the power to write off federally owned student debt unilaterally, under the “compromise and settlement” provision. Doing so would wipe out an enormous financial burden on the working and middle classes overnight. The Department of Education could also purchase the roughly $64 billion in privately held student debt, then use the same authority to write it off."

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/student-loan-debt-forgiveness...

If Sanders won the presidency on this platform, there would be some pressure to support the policies that got him elected.

And what evidence do you have that this is true? Someone can win the Presidency but it doesn't always mean that Congress falls in line. Even with a tremendous wave behind him, Obama barely passed ACA, with no bipartisan support. The people in swing states that voted for it were axed in the next election. People claimed this about Trump too, that people would be pressured to support his platform because he win...where is the evidence? The only person I can think of that this happened with in the past 50 years is perhaps George W Bush's tax cuts in early 2001.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com