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5 Ways Biden Can Fix His Failing Presidency
🕑 Added 2022-06-25 11:01:01 +0000 UTCWith just a stroke of his pen, President Joe Biden could secure a landslide win for Democrats in the 2022 midterms, and coast to a second victory against Trump in 2024 - and it wouldn’t rely on cooperating with far-right conservatives like Joe Manchin.
Right now, Biden is facing garbage approval ratings for Democrats across the board, and inevitable catastrophic losses in the Congressional midterms, that will lead to Republicans easily able to terrorize the poor, outlaw the lgbtq+ community, criminalize abortions, and disenfranchize people of color entirely.
At this point, Biden has nothing to lose - and as we’ve seen during the Trump Presidency, America’s corporatocratic Congressional gridlock and inability to either pass legislation or effectively challenge the executive branch, can’t stop the President from making enormous progress through the use of Executive Orders. Trump used executive orders to harm marginalized groups, grant massive concessions to corporations and billionaires, and undermine workers’ wages, safety, and collective bargaining rights.
What if Biden did the same thing, but in the opposite direction? Here are five executive actions that could change the future of America and the Democratic Party for the better without being blocked by Congress.
Cancel student debt. Joe Biden could cancel 100% of federal student loan debt on the way to the bathroom in the morning and it would be legal, constitutional, and binding. No matter what think tanks funded by banking conglomerates insist, the power for the executive branch to cancel or alter student loan debt terms is unambiguously established in the Higher Education Act - and that’s not just a theory, Biden has already canceled portions of student loan debt without Congressional approval.
Canceling student loan debt would change the futures of an entire generation with no prospects of owning a home or starting a family on the basis of unpayable debt that keeps growing and growing. Debt that they signed up for as literal children. Then again, with politicians like Nancy Pelosi insisting that “maybe not everyone would like that”,
it may be that catering to billionaire housing developers is still more important than saving the entire middle class from an apocalyptic future.
Raise the minimum wage. It has been 15 years since any legislation has been passed raising the minimum wage, and King Joe Manchin has decreed that it won’t pass in this congress. But so what? There is simply no legal precedent preventing Joe Biden from passing an executive order raising the federal minimum wage - he already passed one specifically for federal employees bumping them to $15 an hour, although with inflation and increases in productivity, the actual minimum wage should be closer to $24 an hour.
Companies have proven without a shadow of a doubt that they can afford a massive increase in wages - posting record breaking profits over the last two years as the middle class collapses in America. The only thing stopping Joe Biden from saving them, is Joe Biden.
Medicare for All We’ll admit, this one is trickier to do via executive action, and would require the government to directly nationalize healthcare under the War Powers act, for which there is a precedent under President Jimmy Carter. Again, this one of those imaginary barriers that’s designed to keep the executive branch from having too much power, but is blatantly ignored when Republicans are in office, and is a perfect example of Democrats insisting that a dog can’t play basketball as they get dunked on over and over again.
guess it’s really up to them if it’s more important to set standards that only they will follow instead of saving the entire country from inevitable bankruptcy via medical debt and the most predatory healthcare system on earth.
End The War on Drugs Through Decriminalization Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs in 1971 - of course we know now as we did then that it wasn’t a war on drugs, it was a war on people of color and the poor, and led to the highest incarceration rates in the world on the basis of criminalizing non-violent drug offenders who, at worst are self-medicating for mental health and desperately need help, not punishment.
Not to mention that this criminalization also leads to the mass execution of the mentally ill by police who have absolutely no idea how to handle people suffering from drug addiction and mental health crises. With just an executive order, Biden could pardon all non violent drug offenders, deschedule cannabis and thhttps://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/Sowell_TrickleDown_FINAL.pdf
ereby eliminate strict sentencing and policing, and allow for actual research into how drugs can help people, through things like psychedelic therapy.
End The Economic Assault on the Middle Class by the Ultra-Wealthy Ever since America fell for the absurd premise of trickle-down economics: that funneling every penny of wealth generated by the middle and working class to the billionaire class was somehow good for the economy, the American economic system has effectively collapsed, producing a highly efficient machine of exploitation.
Reversing this trend is complicated, but has to start with closing loopholes created by Reagan, Bush, and Trump - particularly the 2017 Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which cut taxes on the ultra-wealthy so much that now they pay a lower overall tax rate than the middle class. During the 1950s and 60s, in the period of the Great Prosperity, top marginal tax rates on the rich were over 90% and we saw the strongest economic growth in history. Today, nearly all of that growth is focused on a small handful of individuals as America’s actual workforce is crushed under the weight of extreme inflation, low wages, and absolutely no possibility of home ownership or retirement.
In all of these cases, Biden could massively change the course of American politics and economics to make the American middle class thrive, and restore the U.S. government to be by the people and for the people, rather than wholly owned and operated by the most exploitative and disgusting group of human beings we’ve ever seen in power. Then again, Republicans might get mad about it so why even bother making things better, right?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
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