Daily Archives: 18 May 2021

“Student-Loan Debt Is a Burden on the Young”

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A number of letter writers The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters column expressed their concerns about student debt. One comment, though, jumped in my direction.

It is time for the federal government to get out of the student-loan business.

The writer is well along; that’s a critical half of the problem.

The other critical half, is to not borrow in the first place. If a person can’t afford to go to college on his own nickel or on scholarships, he should go to a trade school or a community college that teaches trades.

Then get a job. The trades are more than honorable jobs, they’re their own Critical Items in our economy: nothing gets built—including the Progressive-Democrats’ turtles all the way down infrastructure—without them. And, the trades provide a nice income as well as actual work experience and time in the real world during which the person can arrive at a more informed decision about what he wants to do with his life and/or what he wants to get out of college.

And in the latter case, he can be accumulating a sum of his own money with which to cover his college costs.

“Polling Error”

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An “expert panel” claims it has figured out the polling errors the industry has made over the last several election cycles—all the way back to the Eisenhower election cycles, in fact.

Pollsters oversampled one party or the other.

NSS.

The “experts” missed the real problem, though, or they chose not to mention it (which elision, if that’s what they’re doing, would be consistent with polling behavior).

Regardless of the cause of their oversampling (and this panel suggested a number of them), the pollsters—in every poll—knew they were oversampling one party or the other by the time they’d closed each poll and begun going over their data. The pollsters then made the decision to make no effort to correct for that oversampling, or to say in their published results that they were oversampling and had no reliable method of correcting for that.

They chose, instead, to masquerade their results as valid without caveat of any sort.

That’s the dishonesty of the pollsters.

And this: the number of polls examined may be too small to indicate whether the apparent bias toward Democrats/Progressive-Democrats is valid, but the appearance should be investigated in its own right.