The biggest winners from CNN’s five hours of Democratic presidential town halls were Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who delivered the most consistently substantive and engaging performance, and the Boston Marathon bomber, whose right to vote has now somehow become a boilerplate issue in the race. On Monday night, CNN hosted five town halls featuring the following candidates, in order of how I had ranked them going into the night: California Senator Kamala Harris, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, Warren, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The night began with Klobuchar, whose overall performance was a lot like her answer on impeachment: sensible, well-stated, but not attention-getting. But Klobuchar’s lane, as a tough center-left pragmatist, will be much better suited to the debate stage. In this format, her best weapons remained in the holster. I believe the same is true of Harris and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, all three of whom will have a much better opportunity to display their razor-sharp prowess on a debate stage, especially with such ripe targets as Seth Moulton and Other Seth Moulton, as well as the other Seth Moultons to come. But the town hall format was a gift to Warren, who opened with a barn-burner of an answer on impeachment, and spent the rest of her hour combining her focus on detailed policies with a winning storytelling style. One of Warren’s better overlooked moments was an answer she gave to an “aspiring police officer” named Jackson Dwyer, who said, “You have often been a vocal critic of police and the criminal justice system, both the state and the federal levels,” and asked “how can you assure me that you will support legislation that keeps law enforcement safe?” Warren went into a lengthy and familiar deconstruction of the criminal justice system, and suggested policies to remedy it. But then, she returned to the loaded premise, that somehow, Democratic values are incompatible with police officer safety, and turned it on its head. “You talk about safety for our police officers and you are right,” Warren said. “This is a very serious issue. One of the main ways that we could help make our police safer is to get serious about gun safety in this country.” “You mentioned Sergeant Gannon’s tragic death in Massachusetts,” she continued. “I wrote an op-ed with his parents about asking for our leaders across this country to step up and pass some sensible gun safety laws.” Warren listed policies like universal background checks and an assault weapons ban “to take weapons of war off our city streets,” and concluded by saying “We need as a country to step up, to be more responsible, to be willing to push back against the NRA and to put some sensible gun safety laws in place.” There were missteps that I’ll get into separately, but they were continuations of issues that are already baked in for Warren. Overall, her performance was the best of the night, and provided the best showcase of any of the candidates. Next came Bernie Sanders, who didn’t move the needle much in either direction, but did provide the night’s other big winner. Sanders was asked two different versions of that infamous 1988 Kitty Dukakis question, first by a young woman who asked “Do you think that those convicted of sexual assault should have the opportunity to vote for politicians that could have a direct impact on women’s rights?” Sanders answered clearly and directly — avoiding the detachment that sank Dukakis on this answer — and stood by the principle that voting is a right “even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away” at that right, “you’re running down a slippery slope.” Then, moderator Chris Cuomo twisted the knife by asking if his position is that “the Boston Marathon bomber should vote, not after he pays his debt to society, but while he’s in jail.” Sanders took a swipe at the premise of the question, and answered, “This is a democracy, we’ve got to expand that democracy, and I believe every single person does have the right to vote.” That answer didn’t hurt Sanders, and may have even appealed to voters who appreciated the authenticity and consistency of his answer, but it was a substantively terrible answer that relied on a logical fallacy that would, by extension, give prisoners the right to carry firearms, among other things. A constitutional voting rights amendment and a due process law would have been a much more reasonable answer. But it did have the effect of mainstreaming a premise that nearly got Martha MacCallum booed off the stage at Sanders’ Fox News town hall. While Warren and Klobuchar were spared, the Boston Marathon bomber became part of the rotation for the rest of the night. It also provided Kamala Harris, who was next on the docket, with her weakest moment. When asked by moderator Anderson Cooper about Sanders’ answer, Harris seemed unprepared, and initially dodged the bomber aspect by speaking about restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time. But on follow-up, she was left to reply, “I think we should have that conversation.” Harris had a particularly strong moment early on, though, when she cannily made news by laying out essentially the same position on impeachment that Klobuchar had given, but adding that “I believe Congress should take the steps towards impeachment.” Next up was Mayor Pete, who correctly noted that the Boston Marathon bomber should not be allowed to vote from prison, because there are lots of rights under the U.S. Constitution that can be limited or taken away for those who are serving prison time. But he also delivered yet another terrible answer about the lack of policy positions on his website, once again attacking the very notion of providing such substantive details. The exchange led to an unfortunate laugh line from Cooper, who noted that “it’s hard to compare where you stand to, let’s say Elizabeth Warren, who’s out here, even from your website… It’s not — I mean you can’t compare policy positions.” By the end of the night, Buttigieg had added a video search feature to the website, but not a policy tab, and his dismissive answer looked even more terrible following appearances by four other candidates who outclassed him on policy. Klobuchar and Harris will have a better opportunity to shine at the debates, but the takeaways from this night are that Warren belongs at the front of the pack, and that Democrats will continue to be asked questions about the rights of the Boston Marathon bomber, and who-knows-what other ridiculous premise the media cooks up. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.<doc-sep>When it comes to big tech, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been the most aggressive candidate in the Democratic primary. She’s detailed policies for breaking up behemoths like Amazon, Google, Facebook that would, among other things, force Amazon to give up control over Whole Foods, and Facebook to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram. A lot of us — including Elizabeth Warren! — are customers of one or more of these companies, benefitting from their simple, integrated services. At Warren’s CNN town hall on Monday night, an audience member asked her why an Amazon user should still support her policy. Her answer was at once simple and compelling: Big tech is crushing competition. The problem, Warren argued, was in the dual nature of modern tech companies. They are at once a platform, which Warren defines as “the place where people come to buy and sell goods,” and an information aggregator, collecting vast amounts of data on what people who use their platforms want. All that information allows them to put their own products on the platform, micro-targeted to appeal to the most consumers, and crowd out any competitors. This may sound a bit abstract, but Warren explained it clearly by using a hypothetical brand called “Pet Pillows” selling their doggie goods on Amazon: Every time you go to buy something, they get your information and they aggregate it with the other information they had about you. Every time you come to sell something, they get information. And then they see that, whoa, over there it looks like Pet Pillows is starting to make a big profit. Huh, says Amazon. I know what we’ll do. Let’s jump in front of Pet Pillows and do “Amazon pet pillows” and move Pet Pillows from the front page back to page 16. And the consequence is that Amazon, because of its superior information, can come in and knock out all of the [competition] ... Here’s what we know: As a consequence of this ... the area around these giants are referred to by venture capitalists, investors, as the “dead zone” — because it means you try to start up a business, you just run the risk that Amazon steps in front of you or Google steps in front of you or they buy you out before you have a chance to get started. So the core vision in her “break up big tech” reform, she explains, is to prevent Amazon (and Google and Facebook) from this kind of anti-competitive behavior. This time, she used baseball rather than Pet Pillows as the analogy: Look, here’s how I see it. You can run the platform — that is, you can be the umpire in the baseball game and you can run an honest platform. Or you can be a player, that is, you can have a business or you can have a team in the game. But you don’t get to be the umpire and have a team in the game. If we break off the platform from the parts that are competing, what you’ll see in America is a platform that works really well. It’s a very profitable business. But you’ll see a lot more competition where little businesses have a chance to get going where when you’ve got a good idea you can build that good idea into something, where there’s really a chance for everybody to get in and compete. So that’s the reason I want to see the two of them broken apart. This answer, at least to my mind, is part of what sets Warren apart among the Democratic candidates — and one reason she’s faring relatively well in the polling so far. There are certainly questions about Warren’s candidacy; she faced two electability questions on Monday night and didn’t have a great answer to at least one of them. But Warren is taking on a huge 21st-century question — the power of big tech — at a level of policy detail other Democrats aren’t really matching. And when challenged on this policy, she gave an answer responsive to the audience member’s concern — one that was crystal clear on a topic that often feels abstract and reasonably compelling to boot.<doc-sep>Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.) (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Robert had a good post here yesterday on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s ridiculous plan to zero out the student-loan debt for around 34 million Americans, cancel some amount of debt for around ten million additional people, take the price of tuition and fees to zero for two- and four-year public colleges, and significantly expand federal funding available to cover non-tuition expenses. Advertisement I’d add to his points that what matters here is lifetime income. A 20-something college graduate with $40,000 in student debt who is earning, say, $60,000 per year, would have her debt completely eliminated under Seantor Warren’s plan. You probably don’t think of a person earning $60K as rich, and you shouldn’t. But this person’s salary will grow over time, and over her lifetime she will earn several million dollars. It’s that latter amount that matters when thinking about student debt, not a person’s annual salary at the beginning of her career. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to cancel student debt held by people in this circumstance. It is the case that some people — though not nearly as many as Warren implies — are struggling under the weight of their federal student loans. But we already have a safety net in place to deal with those loan situations. For example, income-based repayment plans adjust monthly student loan payments based on family composition and income, and allow for outstanding balances to be forgiven under some circumstances after a couple decades. Why aren’t these programs adequate? Robert mentioned that the “student-loan debt crisis” is overblown, but it bears repeating. From my latest Bloomberg column: Debt forgiveness on the scale she proposes presumes a student debt crisis where one does not exist. A 2014 Brookings Institution paper by higher-education experts Beth Akers and Matthew M. Chingos finds that the monthly payment burden of borrowers has not increased over the past two decades, with the median borrower spending around 4 percent of monthly income on student loan payments. Akers and Chingos conclude: “Americans who borrowed to finance their educations are no worse off today than they were a generation ago.” The senator’s plan to make public college free is also misguided. We need to stop sending the signal to our youth that a four-year college degree is the best choice for everyone, and we need to focus resources on creating and advancing new educational models (that aren’t the traditional four-year bachelor’s degree) to make sure workers can command high wages and compete in the modern economy. To top it off, Senator Warren would pay for this with her deeply misguided “Ultra-Millionaire” — her name, not mine; and I’m not making that up — wealth tax. Check out my column for my full argument. Your comments are very welcome.<doc-sep>
Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s plan to cancel existing student loan debt for millions of Americans is facing questions whether it’s fair to use taxpayers’ money to pay off someone else’s agreed commitments and if the people who paid off their student debts would be penalized for meticulous financial planning. The leading 2020 presidential candidate unveiled her plan on Monday, going further than most of other Democratic candidates when it comes to education policies, pledging to cancel almost all student loan debt for 42 million Americans. Under Warren’s plan, each person’s student debt would get a relief of $50,000 if household income is up to $100,000. Higher incomes would also be entitled to massive debt reductions, while only those households with earnings of over $250,000 would get no student debt reduction. BRITT MCHENRY: ELIZABETH WARREN TOOK A STAB AT FIXING A LOOMING CRISIS, BUT SHE HIT FAR FROM THE MARK “For example, a person with household income of $130,000 gets $40,000 in cancellation [of student debt], while a person with household income of $160,000 gets $30,000 in cancellation,” Warren in a blog post. But many went on to social media raise their questions about the plan that in their view penalizes those who didn’t go to overpriced schools and honored their commitments by diligently paying their debts. “Do I get a refund for having chosen a cheaper public university so I wouldn't be riddled with a ton of debt?” wrote Josh Jordan. “Seriously this is stupid - everyone knows what they're borrowing when they go through the process and I want no part in paying off everyone else's student loans.” “You better retro that and pay back all of us who diligently paid our loans back in full if you pull this bull----,” wrote a Twitter user. ELIZABETH WARREN DOUBLES DOWN ON TRUMP IMPEACHMENT PUSH, SAYS IT'S ‘BIGGER THAN POLITICS’ “NO! I signed on the dotted line, I will pay it off. I still owe over 40K and I refuse to let you rob me of fulfilling my obligation,” wrote another user. "But I don't wanna pay for other people's college or their college debts," conservative author Kurt Schlichter summed up the proposal. According to the details provided by Warren, her student debt cancelation plan has a one-off price tag of $640 billion to the government. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP She claims that the cost of the policy, in addition to her proposed universal free college, would be “be “more than covered by my Ultra-Millionaire Tax -- a 2% annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth.” The Associated Press contributed to this report.