@Big Al
Nobody is suggesting we can work with Ted Cruz. But some of the people who voted for Trump after hearing him proclaim he knew they'd been screwed and would get their jobs back; would provide better, cheaper health care for every American; and would not cut Social Security or Medicare while Her showed every indication of contempt for their plight and sat around calculating how many suburban Republican votes she could get for one Democratic worker, just might react to what Trump is doing the way they ultimately reacted to what Obama did.

Polls show these people already oppose any decrease in social security benefits, want the cap on Social Security taxes raised, support the breakup of big banks, think rich people should pay higher taxes, and a plurality of them apparently support some form of universal health care.

After the Nazi attack on the USSR many were shocked that Churchill was sending them desperately needed supplies. He responded that if Hitler invaded hell he would at the very least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

Coalitions are built issue by issue. I don't think we can afford to exclude any potential ally.

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@snoopydawg It's this big club. Obama has achieved a platinum status for his unswerving loyalty to his constituents. (ie, other club members).

Proud Demexit here.

Another much-debated rule is “borrower defense to repayment,” which erases federal loans for students whose colleges used illegal or deceptive tactics to get them to borrow money to attend...Before those changes could take effect July 1, DeVos suspended them last month and said she would convene a committee to reconsider the matter.

Why didn't Obama pass this legislation earlier so that the republicans couldn't have time to overturn it?
He had to know that they could overturn his legislation during a certain time period after he left office.

Didn't he campaign on making student loans more affordable by letting the government make them?
This was during his first campaign.
Wasn't it Biden's bankruptcy bill that made it so that student loans couldn't be discharged by bankruptcy?
Compare the massive amounts of these loans to the trillions that the banks received from the federal reserve after they crashed the global economy.

Imagine if the bailout money was allocated to us instead of the banks. People would have been able to pay their mortgages, pay off their car loans or buy new ones and all the other ways that money could have been used instead of only bailing out the banks. The banks would get an influx of money to help them pay off their bad debt. Or would that not work the same way?

The banks got much more than the $700 billion that people think they got. The federal reserve gave them trillions and many banks were foreign ones. Why was it our government's responsibility to help them?

@exindy First this:

The student loan "crisis" is a symptom of the problem.

The problem is the privatization of the public commons.

The cost of higher education has gotten out of control. The market cannot bear the cost so they turn to loans. (Which gets them into the other cheating market.) As an example, look to the textbook situation. That's a place where the collusion between the educators, the publishing industry and the retail outlets has reached RICO proportions. And absolutely no regulatory oversight.

The overall problem is that our government has been completely and wholly captured by corporations. We cannot solve the symptoms of the problem without defining and solving the underlying causes of it. The education loan system is simply another horrendous problem created by our legislators who are more beholding to corporate influence than to representing the people who elected them.

The student loan "crisis" is a symptom of the problem. The higher education industry in this country has been privatized and profitized to the point where it is causing the failure of the capitalistic model.

It's an example of a variation of Gresham's Law... that if cheating isn't penalized after a while only cheaters who cheat the best remain.

The cost of higher education has gotten out of control. The market cannot bear the cost so they turn to loans. (Which gets them into the other cheating market.) As an example, look to the textbook situation. That's a place where the collusion between the educators, the publishing industry and the retail outlets has reached RICO proportions. And absolutely no regulatory oversight.

And that goes for the "fees", the funneling of money into the sports programs which provides returns to investors, all the baksheesh for developments, housing.

It's a grand racket and results in an extreme exploitation of a desperate consumer who has no alternative.

Which gets me to this grand idea of "free" college. Watta crock. Nothing more than a blind eye to extortion by the investor class and a shift of those exorbitant costs to a taxpayer who is being pulled by all the other markets. Unless that "free" college includes an extreme correction to the profit-oriented education industry we'll just dig even deeper until eventually the whole thing collapses.

Same, same for "Net Neutrality" -- the solution to that is broadband as a public utility.

Same, same for health insurance -- the solution to that is single payer, medicare to all, with a regulatory correction to the profit oriented medical care system.