The legality of Biden’s ability to singlehandedly cancel debt is not generally agreed upon even within the Democratic Party, and the Supreme Court leans conservative. Work has been done on it though.

I’m not sure where “complete shit” comes from. The vaccine goal was exceeded, and by the time he took office the whole issue was so politicized that people who were masking up and people who weren’t were unlikely to change regardless of what the CDC said.

I do think the CDC does a poor job of breaking things down if you want more detail, but it’s in the unenviable position of trying to tell hundreds of millions of people what to do in a way that they’ll listen to, and have it be realistic for them to follow. So, I’d love for it to have extolled the virtues of N95 masks more, or emphasized long COVID more, but I’m not sure the average position would have the willingness and the means to search for a specific mask type rather than just a mask. And I’m not sure most people would grasp the concept of post-viral syndrome accurately.

Yeah sending N95s and COVID tests to people when they did is too little, too late. On the other hand, this is getting things set up logistically to handle whatever the expected number of orders was from a populace of hundreds of millions of people, following on from an administration whose tactics included burying its head in the sand, telling states they were on their own, then seizing supplies from states to be redistributed by an unqualified team on the basis of political favor. Along with appointing someone to lead the post office with clear conflict of interest.

I haven’t followed what’s been going on in the aftermath of January 6 much other than to know that they obviously haven’t gone after Trump or other high-level persons potentially culpable. However I think some of this is also because it could become a very dark path at the point that the political parties are investigating each other and putting each other in prison. And doing anything like that could set off the Republican base, because they don’t see what’s so wrong about it. Yeah, it’s not justice, but Trump has a significant amount of leverage by dint of his support among people who feel persecuted and victimized that could turn very ugly.

I’m not saying everything is ideal. I think you can only rock the boat so much. If Biden’s DOJ went after Trump now, that would become the headlines and the country would immediately polarize against itself. If he also ordered the reclassification Marijuana (or made a strong recommendation - forget how that works), Congress passed healthcare reform and canceled student loan debt, Fox News would probably be screaming about how socialist elites are destroying America, resistance would crystallize from otherwise apathetic voters who are alarmed at the rate of change, and the GOP would obstruct everything. Not to mention none of the reps would actually read or understand anything they were passing except in the very broadest sense, because I’m sure they can’t even at the normal pace of government (Quick check: ACA statutes at large were 906 pages).

As it is, Biden and the Dems have perhaps the political fortune (if the geopolitical misfortune) of an external adversary in the form of Russia threatening the world. As well as the Omicron surge resulting in a decline of cases. So at least now our attention is focused outward instead of pointing fingers inward because of political divisions that are patently obvious in everyday life (whether someone is wearing a mask or not, or paying any attention to COVID).

Wrt military, there’s that saying “democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others” (paraphrasing here). There are probably smaller countries that have less corrupt military-industrial complexes, but the other two countries that the US would immediately be compared with (China, Russia) militarily would likely not fare well in the comparison. The spending might be more efficient (thinking of China here) but the scale they operate at is nowhere near the same.

And it sounds like, in general, the analysis of Russia’s military performance in Ukraine is surprisingly poor compared to what people expected, with them not even achieving air superiority in a country without much of an air force.

Also our military expenditure is…3.7% of GDP? And NATO is pushing for member countries to spend 2% of GDP on military rather than relying as much on the U.S. And looking at government spending, it’s something like 15-16% military, 25% social security, 28% health/Medicare (skimming bar charts here). In absolute terms it’s a lot, but in proportion to the benefit it nets, it’s far and away more than 2x the influence of any other country.

I also looked up China- 1.7%, and Russia- 4.3%.

And our health system is absolutely needlessly convoluted. Hundreds of dollars for insurance, doctors spending half their time on paperwork for insurance, and the overhead to pay insurance to staff and have doctors to nitpick submitted claims for reasons to reject them, as well as policies to automatically reject claims and force things to go through an appeal process. Not to mention how it forces hospitals to inflate their nominal costs for procedures because the insurance will only reimburse a % amount and they need to meet costs, but then hospitals are forced to charge patients the inflated amount lest the insurance hold them liable for fraud.

So, yeah, if I were prioritizing, I would probably put our health system first too. It’s also a more practical choice as individual patient information may hide behind HIPAA, but you don’t have to deal with things being classified or obfuscated for national security reasons (at least ostensibly).