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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It isn’t about having a bad taste from the past. Policy like this would further disenfranchise vulnerable populations present day. A barrier for entry like this is going to disproportionately impact lower income folks. Hard to study for a test like this when you’re busting your ass at 3 part time jobs trying to make ends meet. That’s not even to mention the inequality that exists within the education system between higher and lower income areas to begin with. “Our system failed you, so now you’re not qualified to vote. Cheers!”

    Three guesses as to who this policy would affect more: white people or people of color?





  • Saying a month is “plenty” of time to plan and run any kind of election on a national level is so ridiculously out-of-touch I read it back like five times thinking maybe it was sarcastic. Off the top of my head there’s booking polling places, securing & training staff, voting machines, ballots that need to make their way through the entire supply chain starting all the way back at pre-production. Mail in ballots alone usually go out like a month ahead of time to compensate for issues with the mail.

    At this point in time, there’s a higher probability of Superman flying around the world backwards to rewind time and correct the gunman’s aim to actually hit Trump at that rally than there is of the Democrats being able to successfully pull off a second primary in a month. And that’s not even to touch the “coming out stronger” piece of it, which again, no chance in hell that happens with the kind of chaos a second primary would cause.






  • I don’t know, I think it depends on a million different factors. I’m around your age and struggled badly financially out of college. I spent more than a year completely unemployed and when I finally got a seasonal retail job, it was a big fucking deal. Took about 6 years busting my ass climbing the ladder in that department store moving cross-country (costing several thousand dollars) before I started making $50k. In the meantime, my $40k principle had grown 25% during the unemployment deferment and my interest started to snowball because despite years and thousands of dollars in payments, my monthly payment didn’t even cover the interest.

    So yeah, while I no longer make a low wage, it was really fucking difficult to claw out of that hole (office jobs treat you with a ridiculous level of skepticism if you’ve been working full-time in retail.) It took the better part of a decade and meeting a partner whose second income helped defray the cost of living before I was actually able to see my amount owed go down. I honestly feel very lucky that things shook out the way they have because I can easily imagine it ending differently and certainly there are many for those it has.


  • Thankfully, Biden’s new IDR plan (“SAVE”) waives any additional accrued interest for the month after you’ve made your minimum payment (even if it’s $0.) This fixes the pretty massive flaw in the IDR plans that were allowing loans to grow out of control, despite payments made on them. As if people barely scraping by will not be unduly burdened by an even more massive debt if they ever manage to claw their way out of the low wage hole. Personally, after a long stretch of unemployment and low-wage jobs, I had like 5 years of payments under my belt and my loan had grown by 25%. Lol… Still hurts to think about even though I’m doing much better these days.

    FYI, idk if anything will actually come of it, but Biden is now trying to do a more targeted loan forgiveness and one of the groups he is targeting are those who owe more than their initial loans. So, I guess we’ll see what happens.