Stidmatt

60 years ago, my grandparents grew up in working class families, with limited income in California. The schools were good in practically any neighborhood, and when they graduated from high school they were able to go to college with no college debt as young people from families with limited means.

Now in many parts of the United States, this was not true, but California made investments in their people, and grew one of the largest highly educated work forces the world has ever known. After my parents were born in the 1960s there was the large population of young highly educated people who had no debt in the world was in California, and these individuals were able to take out business loans and take risks.

Now, California had been the home to significant military installations since it was first colonized by the United States. There was a naval research station in the San Francisco Bay area for many decades before my grandparents were even born, but it was only in the post-1945 economic boom and massive increase in education investment that Silicon Valley started to grow. California had a good business climate, a massive population of young highly educated workers who were able to take on substantial risks, and with this political and economic climate, combined with the Bay Area successfully protesting the demolition of their infrastructure during the American Streetcar scandal which absolute decimated Los Angeles, the Bay Area had the infrastructure, educated population, and easy business climate which allowed it to grow.

In my office I have raspberry pis, a System76 laptop, an Apple M1 Mac Mini, and a desktop, and I have a desktop at work which runs AMD. The processors of all of these computers have one thing in common. They were all designed in Silicon Valley.

Northern California in the post-war era had the perfect situation to expand opportunity to everybody willing to invest in themselves, and today it has the 7th highest median household income in the United States.

Not to say everything is perfect in California today, the era of massive investment in higher education is over. It is far more difficult for someone out of college to get an initial job compared to when Silicon Valley was expanding. Housing prices have skyrocketed along with the rest of the country for a myriad of factors, and California is a destination for homeless people due to good weather and being less horrible than many other states towards its homeless population. More obviously needs to be done nationwide to help those who have not had access to the opportunity this country has, and this is a national issue. But when you look at almost every quality of life metric aside from cost of living, California does better than almost every other state. This is a direct consequence of the investments the state made in the middle of the 20th century.

The expansion of higher education expanded opportunity to families who had never had such opportunity before, and this massively improved the state.

As any observer of the United States knows, this situation did not last.

In the 1960s we saw laws passed which forbid discrimination in most aspects of American life. This is obviously a very good thing, and as a consequence opportunity opened up to minorities where opportunity did not exist before. We saw a massive increase in educational attainment by people of all races. This is a remarkable achievement of public policy and investment.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf

However, over the last decade, the amount of public funds being invested in public education has declined, and this has moved the cost of tuition from the public to the individual. This is where student loans become a really big problem. The cause of stagnating public assistance to educate America comes from several sources, one is declining state revenues. Most states have a regressive tax system, and when the middle class doesn’t increase its income, those states end up with declining revenues. Another issue is the rising costs of health care, as health care becomes more expensive, state governments burden a lot of that cost because of employee benefits which almost always include health insurance, and increasing costs to government health care programs. With stagnating wages for the middle class, combined with very low tax rates for the top 1% of households, state budgets have taken a serious hit. One of the places where they felt they could cut spending without increasing taxes on millionaires was on higher education, , so that is what almost every state government did.

The consequence of this becomes very serious when you take into account intergenerational wealth. White families have significantly higher income than Black families on average. Brookings Institute and this means that middle class families (who are mostly white) were able to take on the burden of higher costs of college due to having savings. For low income families, who are more likely to be people of color, they tend to have little to no assets which means that they are not able to cover the costs of higher tuition. If young adults from such families cannot qualify for student loans (for which there can be many reasons, not everyone gets approved), and they do not qualify for low income college aid for whatever reason, they are unable to go to college. Without a blanket coverage of the costs of college, there are Americans who are going to be buried in student loans. Having student loans makes it less likely that someone will be able to Buy a house, historically one of two main ways American families have accumulated wealth, along with IRAs. You are less likely to save fore retirement, and this creates a real problem. People from families which do not have much wealth will be more likely to take on student loans (because their families are unable to cover them) or if that person is discriminated for their family for whatever reason (maybe their family is homophobic or ableist for instance) and they don’t receive aid to go to college, those individuals are going to have a much more difficult time to succeed than straight, able bodied white people from families which have money.

This is a form of extreme corruption in post-Reagan America. When fewer people are able to graduate from college without debt, fewer businesses will be created. Fewer businesses being created means less demand for labor, which means lower wages, which increases the relative power of those who have significant resources. People of color in particular will have a harder time getting on the property ladder, significantly harming them financially in a way which cannot be easily rectified. It harms our economy because it means fewer people qualify for small business loans, and it obviously increases inequality. Those who already have resources will be able to horde more resources, and there will be less opportunity. With lower taxes because of the reduction in government investment in our human capital, those who already have significant resources will be able to horde more wealth which will further increase inequality, which is bad for society. This closing of opportunity for millions who are not from privilege increases the power of those who are already wealthy, and that is corrupt.

The solution is simple. President Biden needs to excuse student loans up to $50,000, and use the bully pulpit so that we can abolish the filibuster and make other big structural changes to our economy which will significantly improve American society in so many ways.

He has the authority to do this, and he should do this for the economy and the social health of the United States. It will reduce corruption in America, make a positive impact on equality, and make us a stronger healthier society.

Mr. President, if you want to be more than a footnote in an American history textbook and do something which will significantly help millions of Americans, it’s time to pardon student loans.

America needs to get more people vaccinated, and we need to make sure that our public spaces are safe. We can do both by requiring people to prove they are vaccinated when they enter a public space, and require a vaccination in order to fly or take a train.

The way to do this is through a vaccine verification system. We need a national vaccination verification system run by the federal government which stores information on who is vaccinated, and what vaccine people get. We already have systems related to taxes, Medicare, OASI, the draft, customs, and more. Each of these has information on every American, or at least a large percentage of Americans. There is no reason we can’t have this system as well.

You want to ensure that someone cannot randomly check on whether their neighbor is vaccinated (for privacy reasons) but you also need to make sure that anyone can verify that someone entering their store is vaccinated before they are allowed to enter. The way to do this is that you tie vaccination records to the IDs which people already carry with them. The individual can choose which IDs they want to use to verify they are vaccinated or not. I personally would choose my driver’s license, Nexus, Passport, and Passport Card, the four IDs I have which would guarantee that I can always be verified as vaccinated. This system would be extremely difficult to hack, and it would be impossible to feed it incorrect information. You would not be able to simply make a fake vaccine card anymore which might fool someone.

Is this an infringement of privacy? Well, I can already check to see if any citizen is registered to vote, and whether they voted in the last election. I can learn who owns any parcel of land in the country with the right systems. This would be setup simply to keep Americans safe, and it would help shorten the epidemic by essentially forcing Americans to get vaccinated if they want to participate in society.

How would one verify that someone is on the database? Well, it would be very simple. You could simply scan the ID just like we do at the airport, or you could type in the numbers into the database, and it will tell you whether the ID is in the system or not.

This is how you increase the number of people getting vaccinated.

This is how you save American lives.

There is a clear path for the Republicans to retake government over the last 4 years, which would be devastating to minorities, LGBT people, and women’s rights. Without too much ado, let’s get on with it.

In order for the Republicans to win reelection, President Biden needs to continue to abstain from discussing the filibuster, not do anything by executive order which he promised when he was running for office, and generally govern from the center-right by simply changing as little as possible. With the exception of the stimulus, this is the path we are on right now. His reversal on student loans is not going to be the first time he breaks a promise on a popular position he took in order to get the Presidency. This is in the best interest of the Republican Party. This will demotivate Biden’s core base.

Congress must continue to be deadlocked because of the filibuster. Nothing gets through congress. Most Democrats in Congress will continue to not hold Sinema and Manchin responsible for their actions.

Next year is an absolutely critical election, and the Republicans are going to do better than most people think they will assuming nothing changes from the status quo. Facing a Democratic Party which is unable to do anything even when they have power, and a President who refuses to do anything he has the legal authority to do out of a belief in “Unity”, the Republicans will run with the platform they ran on in 2004. Security to protect your family, protect the family unit, family, family, family. Plus how they are compassionate conservatives who have seen the light.

All the Republicans have to do is keep all of their seats next year with relatively moderate but still anti-abortion candidates, combined with no serious effort from the New Democrats to fulfill any of their long term structural change related promises and the Senate will remain with 50 Republicans, 46 Democrats, 2 independents, along with Sinema and Manchin who caucus with Democrats but vote with Republicans through their opposition to the filibuster. It is not unlike how Senator Tim Sheldon behaved in Washington State for most of the 2010s.

Right now the Republicans need to do everything they can to stonewall the Democrats to prevent them from making any progress, as they have done for the past 50 years whenever they have had the chance. This will demotivate Democratic leaning voters, reducing their turnout next  year. Republicans nominate anti-abortion candidates in the states where they are retiring who appear reasonable so they can keep those seats. The most difficult seat to keep will be Pennsylvania, where they won’t have an incumbent, and the second hardest seat to keep will be Wisconsin. They must keep both of these seats to keep Sinema and Manchin relevant, which is in their best interest, to prevent the nuclear option for the Filibuster. If they flip Georgia that would obviously be ideal for the Republicans… but that will be difficult because Warnock is an excellent Senator and there is now obviously very strong organizing behind him. The Republicans need to lose fewer than two seats to stay in effective control of the Senate and continue the gridlock we are currently suffering from.

The House map could go either way. It is going to be a far more competitive map because Democrats have the governorships in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. This is going to help the Democrats potentially keep the majority in the House, but we can only do this if we motivate voters. Not having to fight against such structurally disproportionate maps is certainly going to give the Democrats a relative advantage compared to the 2018 elections, but simply having more fair maps is not enough to win an election.

In order to do well in an election you need at least three things:

• A map which isn’t heavily gerrymandered against you
• Motivated voters
• A well organized campaign

It’s really not that hard, but I am concerned that unless if we see a reversal by President Biden on a number of broken promises, namely student loans, Democrats won’t have the motivated voters, which will mean that too many Democrats will stay home next year. Republicans are getting barraged with messaging from Faux News that Biden is a radical leftist, so they are most certainly going to be motivated. Democrats need to ensure their base is as motivated to get out and vote next year. Given their cowardice on student loans, and the filibuster, I do not see that happening over the next 18 months.

Republicans have all three.

If we do not change course soon, the 2022 election will go to the Republican Party.

If Republicans win the 2022 elections, Biden will truly be unable to pass any legislation besides the annual budget, and presidents do not become notable for annual budgets.

In 2024 Republicans want a candidate who will both not motivate Democrats to get out and vote, but also right wing enough that more conservative Republicans will turn out. A candidate who has spent the last two years attempting to appear palatable to the average American will do well. If Biden does not do something beyond the bare minimum (which is ending the pandemic), then Democratic voters will not turn out in the numbers we need them to.

Anyone the Republicans nominate will get significant positive press from Faux News which will increase their popularity among the Republican base. The candidate needs to appear moderate enough that he doesn’t inflame the Democratic base, but extreme enough that the zealots in the Republican Party will feel like he has their back.

That man is Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney did lose against Obama in 2012, and that makes sense. Obama was extremely popular, he moved America’s Overton Window to the left on issues like education, LGBT rights, racial relations, and many other issues. He passed the Affordable Care Act, and defended it  to the American people to the point where most Americans support it today. He signed executive orders like the DREAM ACT, and even though congress blocked many of his proposals, those who understand politics understood he did what he could. When it comes to the Student loan crisis, and the severity with which the filibuster has paralyzed our government, the Democratic Party at the federal level is in disarray. It is paralyzed on global warming at every level, unable to decide how to make a difference, wanting the legislation to be everybody’s vision of “perfect” hence failing at every level of government. It fails to keep its members in line when they are elected but will happily give every person as part of their caucus money to keep them in office because they have this belief that no matter how much Joe Manchin, Kirsten Sinema, and Tim Sheldon vote with Republicans, “the Republican is always worse”. Republicans literally removed Liz Cheney from committee seats because she criticized a former Republican President. This weakens the Democratic Party, demotivates the base, and gives the Republicans a real political advantage.

Mitt Romney leading the ticket will talk about how he is going to bring America together against the radical Joe Biden, Faux News will back him up, Joe Biden will have a hard time fighting the image of himself as a radical, and unless if he gives Democrats something to vote FOR, he will lose either the primary or the General election.

Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney because he is a popular and historically notable President.

Joe Biden is not Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney can then bring the Republican Party back to where it was before Trump, and by passing extreme laws without sounding extreme it will force the New Democratic Party to determine how they lost yet again. He will roll back civil rights for LGBT people and continue the 50 year drift of the Republican Party to the right. A religious zealot like Romney who will rile the base against a political coward like Joe Biden who is uninspiring is exactly what the Republican Party needs to win again,

We must prevent President Romney. Biden needs to enact as much of the Democratic Party Platform as he can and start whipping votes to end the filibuster.

I doubt he will.

Dear Millennials,

You are going to be the last to receive vaccinations for every future pandemic.

You are going to be forced to work in unsafe work environments during a pandemic. We don’t care if you become disabled or die.

You are never going to get a public option for health insurance, because we are private insurance’s bitches. They fund our campaigns. We are angry that Obama pushed for this, and we punished him for it by eliminating the 50 state strategy. That way you blame the Republicans, even though both the Speaker and Vice President were in our ranks that year, and they continue to be. This is how we continue to dominate the party.

You will never receive paid sick leave.

You are going to have to spend the first ten years of your life paying off student loans instead of investing for your retirement, unlike any other generation in American history.

Government programs to help you get a job out of college are going to continue to be non-existent.

You will continue to pay higher taxes than your grandparents.

There is no realistic way for you to receive OASI when you retire, but you need to pay 12.8% of your income for a program you will never receive. You thought we were going to use MMT to fund Social Security? HA! If we were to do that we would have used MMT to pay for your education. Stop being so naive.

We don’t care about police brutality, which disproportionately impacts black male Millenials.

We don’t give a damn about the murders of indigenous women.

We incarcerate immigrant children for crimes they did not commit.

We will not pass the DREAM ACT, which the vast majority of you support.

You are NEVER going to get affordable preschool.

Young women are going to need to leave the workforce in order to pay for childcare. It is the American way. No two earner households for you!

Economic policies are going to force you to leave where your parents and grandparents live, because we will NEVER invest in rural broadband. This will mean you will be forced to be a single income household because we don’t have a serious early childhood education policy.

We support zoning laws which increase the cost of housing so you will never be able to afford to buy or build a house.

We support visas with all but one member of NATO, and passport checks with Canada.

As soon as the chance appears, we will deregulate the banks, just like we did in the 1990s. You will blame the Republicans. We will vote with them.

We will continue to vote for legislation like the PATRIOT ACT and defend it, even though there is no evidence that it has ever stopped a single attack. This is a promise we will continue to keep.

We support the Filibuster, because we can hide behind it and blame the Republicans for our actions.

We will never hold Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema accountable for their actions which undermine our democracy.

We oppose ranked voting, because then you will hold us accountable for all the issues where we agree with Republicans.

The Electoral College is here to stay. Stop talking about it. It is so much easier to be a coward when a Republican is in the White House.

We will give carbon taxes lip service, and then vote against them every. Single. Time.

Please vote for us, because we are not Republicans.

Why won’t you vote for us?

Sincerely,

The New Democrat Caucus.

People who have little knowledge of economics, politics, or climate science often try to lump climate policies into two buckets, “market solutions” and “non-market solutions”. This is a weird way to look at the issue in my opinion. First of all, we have to understand, what is a market? A market is where two or more people meet to exchange goods or services. Any time where two or more people choose to exchange items, a market has been made. If two children are trading Pokemon cards and they trade a Pikachu for a Charizard, they have just formed a market, and they have determined that the Pikachu card is equally valuable as the Charizard card.

That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Every economics textbook regardless of its political bias will say this. It’s a really simply concept.

Market based solutions versus non-market based solutions is analogous to physics based engineering and non-physics based engineering. One of them works, one of them is stupid.

From this, we can quickly interpret what the term “carbon market” means. It is a very simple concept, it is the global market where people buy and sell fuel which emits CO2. Pretty simple.

So when we are looking at climate change solutions, at some point that person had to decide to purchase gasoline to fill their car, pay the bill for their natural gas, or pay the electric bill for the electricity which was generated with coal. Unless if that person was going to drill for the oil themselves and process it themselves, and use that oil to fill their car (a process which is going to be burdensome no matter what) they are going to participate in a market in order to get the gasoline to fill their car. At this point, we now know that EVERY effective policy to fight global warming is inherently a “market based” policy because EVERY policy to fight global warming is going to have to engage with how people are buying and selling (always and, never or) fossil fuels. This means the term market based is always accurate, and everyone who claims a policy is not market based is either lying, or the policy is snake oil.

There are only a few questions left when evaluating a policy:

• Breadth (how much of the carbon market is covered)
• Depth (how much will carbon emissions decline)
• Equity (how will this policy impact inequality)

For me, depth is the most important part of the equation, since global warming is inherently inequitable. A policy which has more depth will be inherently more equitable than a policy which does less, no exception. Breadth and depth are deeply intertwined, if you exempt the major polluters in your area, your policy will not work, so you cannot have depth without breadth. Equity is of course going to naturally stem from policies with the most depth and breadth, and by doing this you will maximize equity in the long run. If you have a policy with a double dividend you can choose to use that money to improve equity in the short run as well.

There are really only a few policies we need to look at now, namely:

• Carbon tax
• Cap and Trade
• Deadlines
• Carbon offsets
• Regulations
• Subsidies

Carbon taxes are the best policy of them all, they have the most breadth, and depth. In terms of equity you can choose to use the double dividend from the carbon tax in any way you like, and one possible use is to improve equity through either government spending or slashing regressive taxes. A properly designed carbon tax will have few or no deductions, taxing every ton of carbon dioxide emitted equally. This is the most important feature of a carbon tax, since exemptions to proposed carbon taxes historically have gone to the biggest polluters, which reduces equity,  destroys breadth, and eliminates most if not all depth. A properly designed carbon tax however will have the widest possible breadth in a jurisdiction, ensuring depth is proportional to the tax rate, and the expenditure can be used to improve equity if that is what the people in a region choose to use the proceeds for. The experiences of Canada and Australia have proven that carbon taxes successfully reduce emissions, and create large double dividends which have helped governments cover necessary programs. They work in theory and they work in practice.

Cap and trade has some major problems. The rate plummets during recession, destroying depth, and this is why cap and trade historically has failed to create real reductions in carbon emissions. California has a cap and trade program, as does the European Union. These jurisdictions have not seen any significant difference in their emissions compared to places which don’t have cap and trade at the same, particularly after recessions. Cap and trade has been tried, and everywhere it has been attempted it has failed to reduce emissions. This policy has a major flaw with how the rate can drop suddenly, and because of this it usually does not reduce carbon emissions in the long run. It has nothing in common with carbon taxes, it does not generate a double dividend, and it is not a solution.

I love deadlines, I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Carbon offsets do not reduce carbon emissions. NPR Planet Money

Regulations can be effective at removing or eliminating specific sources of pollution, and have been in the past. The breadth tends to be very narrow and the depth in the target can be large. This is such a large topic that entire books can barely scratch the surface! In short, regulations typically work by reducing the supply of activities which generate carbon emissions, which makes them a supply side policy. There is nothing inherently wrong with supply side policies, and there are some very useful tools for environmental economics in this category which have been extremely successful, such as the Clean Water Act.

Subsidies can be effective at fighting climate change. Not all subsidies are created equal, since the cost effectiveness of subsidies regarding how much they impact climate change is highly varied. Reducing the price of electric vehicles (for example) does reduce demand on gasoline powered vehicles, and that does make an impact on global warming. Whether it is as cost effective as a carbon tax is something which is studied intensely. One good example of a subsidy which works is to subsidizing carbon sequestration technology which takes carbon out of the air which is a good technique to fight climate change.

All of these are ultimately market based solutions. Regulations are supply side economics, carbon taxes are using tax wedges, subsidies are using subsidy wedges, and cap and trade and carbon offsets generally do nothing in the long run. Deadlines are a joke.

It’s really just that simple.

Pretty much every policy you can name fits easily into one of these 6 categories. They all are either market based solutions, or they are not solutions. The policies I have lobbied for have been carbon taxes and subsidies, which are essentially the same type of policy, since tax wedges and subsidy wedges are essentially the same thing, just mirror images of each other.

Those are all 6 policies which are frequently talked about to fight climate change, how each of them work, and why I choose to fight for the policies which I work on.

Nothing

I live in Washington State, and in Washington we have two types of state-sponsored programs to save for college. One of them is the GET Program which is like a traditional pension, and one is the Dream Ahead which is a 529 plan.

So which one should you pick?

Well, when considering any long run investment plan what you should care about more than anything else is the probable long run growth. Anyone who has ever played Settlers of Catan (or really any board game involving dice) understands a certain level of probability. If I were to roll a single unweighted six sided die, the distribution curve of  that die roll is going to be completely even, where you are just as likely to roll any integer between 1 and 6 inclusive. This is a perfectly random situation. Now, if I were to roll two dice simultaneously, even though each die is totally random, the sum of those two dice is no longer a perfectly equal distribution. If I roll 100x2d6 (roll two six sided dice 100 times) then I will find that the most commonly rolled number is 7. This is a perfect example of how order can emerge from perfect chaos, where 1d6 is perfect chaos, but by rolling 2d6 does not have perfectly chaotic results.

The economy works the same way. As you keep rolling the same dice enough times, even if you cannot predict every result with 100% accuracy, you can still predict the overall trend in a way which allows you to make an educated decision from the chaos. The 529 plan and any IRA plan use this mathematical fact to provide long-term stability and growth.

The other option is the GET program. The GET Program has the benefits pegged to the current cost of tuition at the University of Washington. For people my age (born in the early 1990s) the GET program was a good deal, because tuition grew significantly when I was in high school. The problem nowadays is that so much tuition is paid for by students nowadays that is about as expensive as getting a grant to a private college in many situations. Tuition is never going to go up as much as it did when I was in high school ever again. This is a good thing. The problem however is that if you go for the GET Program, yes, you have an absolute guarantee that they will cover the cost of tuition, but you are paying  the full cost of tuition today and there is absolutely no guarantee your money will ever gain interest. Hopefully it won’t, because the cost of tuition will stagnate or drop if the legislature does what is good for our state. The GET program is ” guaranteed to keep pace with tuition and state-mandated fees at Washington’s highest priced public university” but this does not mean it is guaranteed to grow. If the legislature do their job to grow our human capital, credits bought in the GET Program will lose value.

At an 8% interest rate, $100 invested in the stock market today will be worth around $370 when a child turns 18. Adjusted for inflation (2% APY) that money is worth $262 in today’s money

When you are buying into the GET program you are gambling that tuition will grow by more than 260% over the next 18 years after inflation. That is the only situation where the GET program is worth it.

When you are buying into a 529 plan you are predicting that tuition is not going to increase as much as the stock market over the next 18 years.

If we look at historical data which is available at the Department of Education‘s website, we find that tuition grew by 165% from 2000 to 2018. We also find that over the last 20 years, the inflation of tuition (after general cost of living) has only exceeded 4% twice over the last 20 years.

For the GET program to be worth it, college tuition will have to grow over 1.5 times faster over the next 18 years than over the last 18 years. If you don’t expect the tuition’s inflation rate to suddenly and imminently increase by over 150%, than you should invest in the 529 plan.

Saving into a plan which has no way to predict how much you might make, which could give you a return of 0% over the future sounds like gambling to me.

Tuition inflation might have been extreme over the last 20 years…

But it still was slower than the growth of the Stock Market.

The mathematics is clear.

Don’t buy into the GET Program.

Save in a 529 plan.

Back when President Obama was President, he was not able to successfully appoint many of his court appointees because the Republicans in congress blocked every single one of his appointees. This has fundamentally changed the Federal bench. We will continue to deal with the impact of this for many years to come.

Now most people blamed Mitch McConnell for this, and there is validity to this because he was the Senate Majority Leader and he successfully kept his party in line when they controlled the Senate for the last two years of Presidency.

Right now we are seeing a significant reduction in President Biden’s ability to pass legislation through congress. We have a majority in both the Senate and the House. The majority in the Senate is because the Vice President breaks ties. We obviously have the Presidency, and it is very clear he is a truly Democratic President after President Biden’s speech earlier this week.

With all of this, we should be seeing some significant legislation pass through congress given how we saw victories for two elections in a row. Democrats won more votes than Republicans in the Senate in 2016, and 2018. Democrats still lost the popular vote in 2020, but this is probably because neither California nor New York have Senate races in that year. The Senate is a very unique institution.

However, the Senate of course has the filibuster which I have written about before. Because of this it effectively takes 60% of the votes in order to pass legislation. This is almost wholly unique among national legislatures to effectively require 60% of the body to agree in order to do almost anything.

Now there is a movement to remove this peculiar requirement, which is to use the nuclear option which is simply to remove the rule so the Senate can pass a bill with a simple majority of the vote. The nuclear option will make the Senate normal again, so that it will take a simple majority of the Senate in order to pass legislation. This will fully disarm Mitch McConnell so all we have to worry about is getting all 50 Democrats on board with a bill and it will pass. This prevents bills from passing through the Senate, making our government dysfunctional.

It means majority rule. Simple as that.

But unfortunately… even though it takes only 50 votes to amend Senate rules, we have two Senators who are standing in the way of this necessary reform to make our government work for Americans. One of  these senators is Joe Manchin and the other is Kyrsten Sinema. While back during Obama’s last two years we had a Republican congress, it would have only taken any one of over 50 Republicans in the senate to oppose anything the president proposed because of the filibuster. Today we don’t have to worry about them because they are in the minority, but unfortunately we have two Senators who stand in the way of everything America needs to prosper, not just to get out of this pandemic but also to build necessary infrastructure which will allow us to prosper for the next century.

The big difference is it isn’t an entire political party standing in the way now but two rogue Senators who obviously oppose the democratic party platform because they prevent us from doing anything significant beyond the budget which is already done for the year. The other major difference is we have a solid majority in the House and Speaker Pelosi is working hard on passing many great bills right now, which is fantastic. I’ll be honest, I was not expecting the house to be this much better than it was in 2009. I am glad I was wrong. This makes what Manchin doing significantly worse than McConnell. Even if McConnell had not blocked everything in the Senate, we couldn’t pass anything major in 2015 because we did not control the House. President Obama was blocked not just by McConnell but also by every Republican in the House of Representatives. This year is fundamentally different. President Biden has a solid backing in the house and 48 Senators support him. However, Manchin and Sinema have made our majority in the house dysfunctional from their antics, and two individuals are holding the entire American government hostage. But their doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason why they are doing this. Unlike McConnell there is no clear political gain, no clear motive. Unlike McConnell they don’t have the clear backing of both a major political party and a major “news” network. My only logical conclusion is they are just obstinate, miserable, and enjoy causing people pain. People like that do not deserve to be in congress.

Joe Manchin is the most powerful man in America today, and he is causing significant damage to America from his opposition to human rights legislation and economic legislation. We must do everything we can to make him irrelevant as fast as possible so America can function again.