The Daily Kos has the article Elizabeth Warren’s Student Loan Proposal: Yet Another Progressive Political Loser.
In what is just the most recent example of The Big Lie at work (that the Govt’s finances are just like your personal finances and that deficit spending is inherently inflationary), Senator Warren has provided a perfect example of the kind of terrible political choices that Dems must make when they accept the Right Wing framing on deficits. Both Cons and Dems agree on the ridiculous proposition that deficits are actually harmful to the economy and nation. The Cons want to cut spending to reduce the “harmful” deficit and Dems want to increase taxes to reduce the “harmful” deficit.
This is the part of Elizabeth Warren’s plan that I keep trying to correct. Before I had seen the above article, I saw a Facebook Post from the Daily Kos.
This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is proposing a plan to raise funds so people can refinance student loans at more affordable rates by closing tax loopholes to the wealthiest Americans.
I responded to that post with the comment:
She doesn’t need a plan to raise funds. Our government makes its own funds, like when it needs trillions to bail out the banks without raising taxes. Closing tax loopholes is a laudable goal. If it makes strategic sense to link the two goals, only then is it a good idea to pretend that the two are related.
When I saw the “Political Loser” article, I thought “Yah!! someone else recognizes the problem.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Republicans started to point out that you could give student loan relief without compensating for it somewhere else in the budget? That may be the only way that the Republicans can get away from the false choice accusation of either supporting students or supporting billionaires. I’d believe that this is a very sly tactic that Warren has thought up if it weren’t for the fact that she seems to believe in this false choice in other remarks she frequently makes. Or is the level of her slyness just much deeper than I can imagine?