No. of Recommendations: 10
Biden lies take the form of using others to make inaccurate statements to deflect them from himself. The stop Russia hoax could not be a more obvious lie.Russian efforts to stir up domestic dissent amid the 2016 election were identified by the FBI in roughly mid 2016. In my opinion, Obama declined to publicly respond for fear it would be perceived as helping Clinton so he limited his actions to private back-channel communications to Putin which had no effect. Investigations after 2016 confirmed much of the social media trolling was originated by a firm called Internet Research Agency which was formed in 2013, operated out of St. Petersburg, Russia and was owned / controlled by Yevgeny Progozhin, one-time ally of Putin until they had a parting of the ways and Putin shot his plane out of the sky after a bizarre failed coup attempt. Sixteen people working for IRA or associated with it were indicted by the DOJ under the Trump Administration in February 2018 for the coordinated Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election. If Russian interference was a hoax, why did the TRUMP Administration DOJ indict sixteen people?
Biden's actions on immigration clearly are in contrast to enforcing the laws of the land.Biden's actions (or lack thereof) regarding immigration are a reflection of the current laws governing immigration and the lack of appropriate funding of both border patrol and immigration court resources to handle the volume of cases created by economic strife in nearby countries. He has even tried using executive orders in areas where the letter of the law was vague to address specific issues only to have the orders rejected by courts. Democrats worked with a Republican from one of the most conservative states to devise fixes that had not been considered in 20+ years of prior political wrangling only to have the proposal axed by Trump to preserve immigration strife as a negative issue. The epitome of cynicism
Biden stepped on the scale in Ukraine requesting the firing of a government official or he would hold back funds.This alleged incident occurred in March 2016 in the final year of the Obama Administration. Both American and European officials were pushing the Ukrainian government to remove prosecutor Viktor Shokin because he was not prosecuting ANYONE in the Ukrainian governemnt for corruption amid rampant corruption. And for those not clear on recent Ukrainian political history, current Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was not President at this time. Biden didn't devise a plan to withold funding to pressure the prosecutor to drop an investigation into Burismo that employed Hunter Biden. He communicated a ploy devised and approved by President Obama and coordinated it with similar communication from European counries and the IMF to trigger Shokin's removal. No investigation of Burisma was underway.
In contrast, Trump explicitly witheld aid the US Congress voted to give Ukraine for defense in order to pressure Zelenskyy to publicly state that Huner Biden was under investigation ("you don't have to find anything, just announce that he's under investigation and we'll handle the rest") in order for Trump to use it domestically to tar Joe Biden, who was already appearing as the top Democratic candidate likely to face Trump in 2020.
Biden, no one died in the military on my watch.Here is what Biden said in the transcript:
And the military – you know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn’t do anything about that. When he was president, we still found ourselves in a position where you had a notion that we were this safe country. The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any – this – this decade – doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.Literally, the US military has enlisted personnel dying SOMEWHERE every month, certainly every year, even when we are not at war, due to training accidents. Biden's statement above parsed a single word at a time is literally not true. We have TROOPS that DIE across the WORLD. However, what Biden intended to say but mangled is that the US has no troops explicitly deployed in an declared war anywhere in the world for the first time since 2001 after launching the war in Afghanistan. A botched statement? Absolutely. A lie? Absolutely not.
Supreme court and government funding law has clearly directed Biden stop his shenanigans with forgiving student loan debt. Yet he announces new program at least once a month vie executive orders.This concern is legitimate but it doesn't involve lying. The Department of Education controls the administration of student loan programs and evaluation of institutions whose students obtain student loans. Efforts to write down or write off student debts are partially due to investigations over the last ten to twenty years into "diploma mill" operations (DeVry tech school, University of Phoenix, and yes, Trump University) whose operations reflected a pattern of loading up students with loans who entered "curriculums" that didn't remotely resemble college level material or had virtually no track record of helping "graduates" obtain meaningful jobs. In the cases of DeVry and University of Phoenix, loans for these bogus "degree" programs added up to hundreds of millions dollars. The Federal Trade Commission began investigating these operations and sued them for fraud and decisions started coming out between 2019 and 2022. After these operations lost these fraud cases, the Department of Education used discretion in its operation of student loan programs to discharge debts racked up for tuition at these schools.
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/education-d...These write-offs were COMPLETELY legitimate. Efforts to EXTEND write-offs to students at "normal" colleges who wound up $80,000 in debt after obtaining a degree in basket weaving science justify more scrutiny. One can argue students at more "mainline" schools should have been smarter and should have known taking out $80,000 in loans to get a degree that typically lands a job that pays $20,000 per year is NOT a good financial decision. That's a legitimate concern and a legitimate argument for not widening the program to these borrowers. On the other hand, what has become apparent over the last 15-20 years is that mainstream colleges to some extent have been equally manipulative with their "customers." Tuition rates have risen far faster than inflation yet salaries after graduation have barely kept up with inflation except in a few sexy tech fields.
This is where the discretion of Dept of Ed comes into play along with pandemic relief. Many of the ex-college students with $80,000 in loans were working in jobs well below the target they had when they racked up the bills. These were the very jobs -- menial service jobs -- first decimated during shutdowns in 2020 and were slow to come back in 2021 as vaccinations returned things to normal. The DoE initially provided interest-free deferrals of payments for those who lost their job. At some point, it became clear that many borrowers were taking such a cash flow hit due to the pandemic that they were being set back YEARS financially by the pandemic. At that point, the idea of forgiving the loans entirely was pushed, subject to some criteria.
THIS IS THE POINT OF CONTENTION. And I for one understand that contention. Is this a giveaway to idiots who should have been smarter about taking out loans? Maybe. Is it sending a message to future borrowers they don't need to be more careful because the government will bail them out? Maybe. But from an economic standpoint, the wisdom of such a program is more gray and less black and white. If you are operating an economy that experienced a square wave DROP in activity that is immediately imposing cash flow problems for millions of apartment renters and their landlords, what avenues are available for reducing that shock? What avenues are most effective at getting the dollars to the points in the economy where they will be spent and trigger the iterative "add-back" into economic activity with a minimm of waste and fraud? And while considering all those avenues, if you are aware of a longer pattern of colleges over-selling the value of their degree and collecting inflated tuition rates in an exploitive fashion, maybe some of that damage can be unwound by writing off some of those loans. If you want to argue such a plan looks or is politically opportunistic, what about the Paycheck Protection Program, which was initiated in 2020 during the Trump Administration that dropped roughly $938 BILLION dollars into "small businesses" to help them retain employees to avoid more of a cashflow contraction in the economy. Per wikipedia,
The program was criticized for its exorbitant cost, costing approximately $169k - $258k per job saved, and that the majority of benefits flowed to small-business owners, their creditors and their suppliers rather than to workers.[4] It is estimataed that only 25% of the funding allocated went to jobs that would have been lost.I don't see any politician or state Attorney General objecting to loan forgiveness also pushing to investigate the hundreds of thousands of small business owners who pocketed PPP money while still laying off employees or not being eligible for it in the first place.
WTH
