Scattershots – 3jun21 (updated 8jun21)

Why promote a minimalist government – “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”  Thomas Sowell

George Rebane

Anyone notice how student debt is propagandized as an act of nature that afflicts students who were innocent of getting into financial straits?  Even FN is bamboozled by the Dems and the almost hysterical reporting in the lamestream on this issue.  Those poor students played no part in voluntarily signing up for those loans.  No siree, they were struck down as if by a dreaded disease, blindsided into a terrible state of affairs, sorta like getting Covid or having your house devastated by Katrina.  And now the national response to those fiscally innocents wailing about their wallets has to be another vote buying dip into the public purse to forgive their debts.  And, oh yes, Trump is guilty for not having done it last year.  And here's the solution sent by a reader.

Biden’s spending spree is definitely designed to swing the nation’s double dummies into believing that he is the one who is reviving an already revived and ready-to-roar economy.  Again, the purpose is to buy some near-term votes for the 2022 election with a handful of good quarterly bumps to the GDP.  What the lightly reads neither understand nor pay attention to is what this massive near-term spending portends.  Even liberal economists agree that these initial spurts will guarantee that the rest of the 20s will be mired in ‘a future of secular stagnation’.  The next 8 to 10 years will then see GPD growth under 2%, hearkening back to the Jimmy Carter years.  The anti-American Dems are all for that because it will mean that the US will not have the money to properly fund its military against China and Russia, and to complete securing our southern border against all who will cross it illegally to a waiting basket of welfare benefits not available to American citizens.  The policy is designed to keep America divided with an increasing cohort of Democrat voters who will guarantee that we will become a socialist-bound one-party state, you know, sorta like California. (more here)

[8jun21 update]  The Dems and their constituents – both lightly read and dismally educated – are in terminal denial that America’s Left has put the country on the road to Marxism.  This strong belief is repeated continuously on their lamestream media, even though evidence ignored pours in daily.  The latest can be seen in their grassroots being convinced to pine for new and stronger measures of censorship to established for national media.   In the 8jun21 Union (here), local leftwinger Linda Schuyler Horning (“Fox News was established to launch its assault on American democracy.”) calls for re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine and formation of a new federal Truth Commission to specify and filter what you and I can consume from the news and entertainment media.  In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz writes, “What emerges from Dangerous Ideas is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd.” (more here)  As I said, the evidence abounds for our current march to authoritarian Marxism, and maybe worse.

Comments

[Scott O]

re the forgiveness of student debt.
I have found that large swaths of humans can be talked into the belief of almost anything - no matter how illogical, illegal or even cruel.
Conjurers of this trick know the best place to start is to rope off an easily identifiable group with some sort of common grievance, tell them they are not responsible for their woes and then proceed to dangle money in front of them. Having the major news outlets and public entertainment crowd to assist is always a plus.
Gee - my wife and I have this mortgage thing hanging around our necks. Think how much we could boost the economy if we were freed from this awful millstone placed on us by the greedy banksters!!

[Gregory]

student debt...there are plot complications.

I watched a really bad documentary yesterday... "Saving Capitalism", about Robert Reich's ideas. Bad ideas at that. Early in the movie he was sitting with some women talking about their financial lives and it wasn't too pretty. One, a mom with a college aged kid shared that they knew a college graduate with a Masters Degree (a Masters!) that couldn't get a job.

If RR asked what the masters was in, it didn't make the cut but it was the question I was shouting at the screen. The time warp to '17 didn't convey the vibrations I was sending. But there's the rub. Come on down, come to college, any degree you can earn will be as good as any other. You can afford it, the money will be loaned to you by the government (an Obama era change for the worse) and an admissions salesman called a counselor will show you numbers dancing on a computer screen showing how the increased earnings will leave plenty of money for living on after paying down the student debt they are signing for. Gimme da pen, dude...

It's an old scam, a big con, and we shouldn't hold a kid at 18 to signing away his life in the deal. Many if not most are lied to.

Colleges should be the ones holding the bag. But in the meantime, there should be ways to discharge bad debts... we don't have debtor's prisons anymore for a reason.

[The Estonian Fox]

Student debt:
The government should be out of the lending business, or out of the guaranteeing-to-the-lender business, for college educations.

Colleges should be the guarantor of, say, 50% of the students' loans. They need to have some potential for loss in the game. Chances are colleges would start re-evaluating many of their 'majors'. It's likely that the number or sizes of student loans would plummet if they did this.

Thomas Sowell always rails against the fact that third parties pay no price for being wrong. He also posits that you cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible. But what does he know?

Or maybe require a semester of engineering courses for those freshmen unsure of their future. That way, they'd be on the hook for only one semester of unpaid loans, rather than the full eight semesters.

[Scott O]

Gregory - "It's an old scam, a big con, and we shouldn't hold a kid at 18 to signing away his life in the deal. Many if not most are lied to."
Scams and cons are crimes - if you can't prove it in court then it looks like it wasn't so much a con as it was just an idiot kid.
If you are 18 and you sign a deal, then of course you should be held to it. If we're going to tell the kid he can get his degree and then walk away from his loan the minute he gets the diploma, who is going to ever want to advance another penny on a student loan?
If society wants to protect idiots, then society should educate them in high school about going into debt and how hard it might be to ever pay it back.
If a young man goes into a trade instead of college and then sets himself up in a shop, it might cost hundreds of thousands. He can declare bankruptcy if it doesn't work out, but he loses the business and all of his equipment. The college kid will always have the degree no matter what, so he should always have the debt.
Again - the answer is smarter kids, but the govt doesn't seem to want that.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 1135am - Yes Greg, you correctly point out the fly in the academic ointment. As we have said here many times, all college degrees are not created equal, no matter what today's new equity policies demand. And freshmen with ersatz high school diplomas can understand none of this, and are therefore the marks that the scam artists in admissions offices perceive. If after the 2008 meltdown we didn't tolerate banks making billions in subprime loans to finance home buying by unqualified people, why would we tolerate universities today making subprime loans to finance worthless degrees?

[Gregory]

The universities don't make the 'subprime loans'... the feds do.

The feds do because of politics. The final takeover of financing was part of Obamanomics. Yayyy!

Their folks, virtually all Democrats, run the colleges. Most of them, anyway.

We tolerate it because of inertia... and the degrees aren't 'worthless'. A BA in Disgruntled Studies is perfect for being a government functionary making sure CRT is rolled out to Main Street, USA.

[Gregory]

scotty 155pm

It isn't a crime until the gooberment says it's a crime.

Right now, the higher education scam is running with the full knowledge and approval of the gov't. It will end when the newest set of the fleeced start voting in either Bernie Bros who think it should all be free, or free market types who would be happy to spread the pain to the Marxist professor class.

[George Rebane]

Gregory 220pm - Yes, the feds supply the money for the student loans which are sold with impunity to students by university charlatans with no skin in the game. And you're right, such degrees that get their holders jobs in govt bureaus aren't worthless, they are actually a collateral damage inflicted on the entire nation - i.e. less than worthless.

[Gregory]

fox 152pm

the small liberal arts college at the top of this list does require everyone to take engineering. Also chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer 'science' and now biology.

Twenty years ago Sowell put it at the tippy top of the list of affordable colleges that pay off. Since them, their prices have skyrocketed and they've lurched left. Oh, well.

[Gregory]

ooops the list

https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors

[Scott O]

Gregory - "It isn't a crime until the gooberment says it's a crime."
Well, of course.
But the last time I checked, a party using lies or false info while inducing someone to join into a loan or any sort of financial agreement IS a crime. The DAs prosecute such crimes daily.
But I think the issue isn't that anyone actually committed a crime, they just are slick operators sweet-talking the rubes into a bad deal. Happens all the time and not just in the college loan business.
My solution stands.
Stop handing out H.S. diplomas to kids who can't even read and you will be amazed how many societal problems go away.
Reward bad behavior and surprise! You'll just get more of it.
Of course the student loan deal is deplorable, but please show me evidence of some one actually being lied to vs some one simply waving a bunch of statistics in front of the kid about how college degrees are 'associated' with higher earnings.
They are, you know.
Letting an adult skate on a contract because they are greedy and/or stupid and you will end up with some one going through life making one disastrous decision after another with society running after them mopping up the mess for the rest of their life.
If stupid no longer hurts - you get more stupid.
Is that how humans evolved? Don't think so.

[Gregory]

scotty 413pm

The fake education starts early... 1st graders not taught reading, writing and 'rithmetic by known best practices that are denigrated by Teacher's colleges as just rote.

Teachers not knowing any different 'cause they also attended bad K-12 schools and, once in college could barely find their ass with both hands.

2nd graders that can't read to expected grade level standards, or do arithmetic to grade level standards.

3rd graders, and so on and so on.

In high school, the die is cast. Wasted years are long gone.

[Scott O]

Gregory 4:58 - you're right but that's still no reason to hand a HS diploma to someone who has never been educated. I'm sorry they never had a chance in the govt school but handing them a diploma and shoving them out the door brings a world of misery to them and our society.
As pointed out earlier - the govt seems to have no interest in actually educating children.
And we all know why.

[Gregory]

"And we all know why"

I doubt we all agree. From talking to a lot of k-12 teachers, I know virtually all of them want good education for all kids.

They just don't have a clue what a good education *is*... they think it's turning out kids that, with hard work and a little luck, will get passing grades at a school like CSU Chico and become an elementary school teacher!

[Gregory]

There would be very angry kids and parents if the high school diploma fountain ever gets turned towards reality.

[Scott O]

Gregory - "They just don't have a clue what a good education *is*..."
And they have teaching credentials? Swell.
Anyway, I said the 'govt' not everyone who works for the govt.
Our daughter was horrified clear back in '95 as to the wretched state of actual teaching in a govt school classroom. She admitted later she never told us what they were trying to teach her at Sac State as she was afraid I would show up and raise hell.
Happy ending - she now has 2 boys to teach at home and with groups of other home schoolers.

[Don Bessee]

G @704 Thats the point, if there were a reality check for the low information voters a lot will turn on the teachers unions and the rest will just cry racists for all that grades, on time homework ,standards and all that white privilege.

;-)

[George Rebane]

"And we all know why" kids don't get a good education in public schools. In this discussion it's important to differentiate between what well-meaning but unskilled teachers want for their students, and what is intended by the progressive elites who structure and fund the educational systems across the land. They have very different agendas.

[Gregory]

GR 857pm

No George, even the political trolls in the bowels of Ed think what they are doing is for the good.

[Bill Tozer]

Kill the children’s dreams...for their own good. Who’s good?

BLM Leader Who Quit Group: Teachers Unions Have Co-Opted BLM, Are ‘Killing’ Kids’ ‘Hopes And Dreams’

https://www.dailywire.com/news/blm-leader-who-quit-group-teachers-unions-have-co-opted-blm-are-killing-kids-hopes-and-dreams

[George Rebane]

Gregory 1035am - No Greg, not even I believe that the elites "in the bowels of Ed" are so stupid as to think that the educational stratagems they design, implement, and enforce in our public schools will actually produce productive cadres of graduates that will maintain America as a (the?) world hegemon. But I do wish you the joy of your kinder thoughts.

[Gregory]

gr 1112am

There's nothing 'kinder' about my thoughts of the Jo Boalers and Phil Daros of the world... they would probably be doing less damage had they actually come to the table with the evil ulterior motives some ascribe.

[Scott O]

George and Gregory - re the various reasons/causes/motives of the myriad of people involved in our nation's govt school system:
It starts with our dear leader, goes through the secretary of ed, the various nabobs within the dept of ed, down to the state, county, city, and school district level. There are numerous unions, NGOs, foundations and so forth as well the hundreds of people involved in the education and training of the current and future teachers in said govt schools.
We have the inescapable fact that the total amount of money (correcting for inflation) spent in toto at all levels has gone up and yet our nation's kids (on the whole) are less educated than ever.

I would be hard pressed as to the certainty of the aims, motives etc of all of these thousands of humans. Certainly rank stupidity and/or complete indifference is to blame in a large percent. I'm not sure how much is actually evil although a goodly amount of motive is ulterior and not concerned in the least with any actual education of pupils. In the case of the unions and their hand maidens in politics - teachers pay the dues, not the pupils. Follow the money.
The main force to be reckoned with is the desire by the controlling ethos in today's govt educational system to mold generations of children into helpless wards of the state. Certainly future leaders of proper left wing thought can come up through the public system but most of the proper elite will be expected to come from the many high cost private schools and academies.
Some would ascribe this as an 'evil' but those who push this sort of system (and speaking honestly) would tell you it is for the best.
Truly educated and free thinking and free acting people tend to not always like to go along with the central plan that is judged 'best' by those who would deign to be our betters. They do not see it as evil at all. The result IS evil in the end but of course those who desire a centrally planned world always will explain that they will "do it correctly" this time.
In the olden days, power was just a matter of brute strength and violence. We (editorial we) have now become more sophisticated in our ways of trying to end up on top of whatever heap we aspire to.
Keeping the proles in line needn't involve the crude ways of old. We have tax payers now to 'democratically' finance the whole scheme.

[Gregory]

Scotty 424pm

It does NOT start at the White House. It starts at each school district and the 50 states departments of Miseducation. And, as a blanket keeping everything cozy, the teachers unions actually have a finger in every pot keeping the waters muddied. Local control generally means union control.

The federal department of ed is a toothless monster that spends money and issues platitudes...

[Scott O]

Gregory - that was merely a positional statement. Let's face it - the only thing that starts with Biden is nap time.
I only meant it in terms of the chain of command. The POTUS does get to pick a lot of people in charge of policy as well as the Scy of Ed.
To be frank - it starts with the parents.
They don't have to send their kids to govt schools in the first place.

[Don Bessee]

How long until the chi coms and the teachers unions have totally rewritten history with the masters of the universe as co-conspirators -

Bing, the search engine owned by Microsoft, is not displaying image results for a search for "Tank man," even when searching from the United States. The apparent censorship comes on the anniversary of China's violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

"There are no results for tank man," the Bing website reads after searching for the term. "Tank man" relates to the infamous image of a single protester standing in front of a line of Chinese tanks during the crackdown.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man

;-)

[Scott O]

Don 6:36 - the sad thing is what kids would even be looking up 'tank man'?
I wonder if any govt school in the US is telling kids about how evil the govt of China is and how they are the modern day equivalent of the NAZIs or the Soviets in the 30s?
Nah - it's just how evil all white males are and how the kids should just make up their answers to math questions and when to worship thugs like George Floyd.

[Don Bessee]

The socialist dems are sure not going to give up the new power easily -

US 'Ruling class used the threat of disease to consolidate its power'; used censorship, riots: Ben Domenech

'Human actions and decisions made the real-life costs of the pandemic far higher than they otherwise might have been', Domenech says

https://www.foxnews.com/media/us-ruling-class-used-threat-of-disease-consolidate-power-ben-domenech

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/newsom-wont-lift-californias-state-emergency-june-15

;-)