Author Archives: eehines

A Modest Proposal

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The Wall Street Journal editors (I seem to have been picking on them lately…) have a modest proposal regarding student debt and forgiveness.

Congress created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program in 2007. It lets borrowers who work for government or tax-exempt organizations get unpaid debt forgiven after 10 years of payments. Its supposed goal was to help government and nonprofit employers compete with private businesses that can pay more.

The editors correctly note that in the years since its inception, the program has become badly abused and used to reward[] a politically favored group of workers and can make it harder for private businesses to compete. Based on that, the editors recommend the Republican-majority houses of Congress repeal the program altogether.

They’re correct in that, but I’d go a ways farther. Congress should make student loan relief available through our existing bankruptcy laws. Additionally (critically additionally), Congress should take the Federal government out of the student loan business altogether: no more Federal government student loans and no more Federal government guarantees of other lenders’ student loans.

And one more step: require colleges (including junior and community colleges) and universities and trade schools to publish the regionally average salaries and wages for each major the school offers or each trade certification program the trade school offers at the five-years employed mark. Associated with that, those schools should be required to be the ones extending the student loans or be either co-signers or guarantors of other lenders’ loans to their students.

Without the ability to hide behind Other People’s Money in the form of purely third party or Government loans, the abuses likely would screech to a halt.

Why Would They Want To?

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The lede says it all, even if the article is a bit dated now.

The leader of Senate Democrats moved to take the threat of a government shutdown off the table, following a grueling intraparty fight in which lawmakers struggled with how best to resist President Trump’s fast-paced efforts to slim down federal agencies.

Why would the Progressive-Democratic Party object to slimming Federal agencies and making them more efficient?

Oh, wait—this is the Party that insists Government knows better than us poor, benighted and ignorant average Americans, and that the way to make Government more efficient is to grow it in both financial and physical size and give it more control over our lives.

Couple Thoughts re Newsom and Progressive-Democrats

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California’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, is looking to improve his standing among Conservatives. He’s even taken to hosting right-leaning and extreme-right guests (vis., Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, respectively) on his new podcast (which strikes me as nothing more than an attempt to manage his image).

As Newsom prepared to launch his new podcast, the governor told his team one of the themes he wanted to explore was how Republicans have been able to beat Democrats on messaging and win the White House.

What is the Progressive-Democratic Party doing, that it loses elections lately, and what must Party do to win. That seems to be Newsom’s thrust.

Then there’s this:

[Progressive-]Democrats are struggling to unite around a strategy to take on Trump and the GOP, which has complete control of power in Washington.

What is Party doing, that it loses elections to Trump and Trump supporters, and what must Party do to regain power in Washington.

Notice the common theme here. Newsom and Party, separately and together, are not the least bit interested in what’s good for our nation; neither is the least bit interested in looking to us average Americans and finding ways to satisfy our needs and wants.

Party—Newsom serves for the moment as Party’s canonical example of this theme—are interested only in its members holding high office and in holding personal political power.

The Potential Deportation of Khalil

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Mahmoud Khalil is the Columbia University Hamas terrorist- and Palestinian-supporter currently in ICE custody in Louisiana with a view to formally revoking his student visa and green card and deporting him. Matthew Hennesey, in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is mostly correct in his piece regarding Khalil and others of his ilk who come to our nation ostensibly to better their own lot but in actuality to push their hatred of America and try to damage us from within.

However, he had this in his piece’s endgame:

With all that in mind, what’s the big rush [to deport Khalil]? The man’s wife is evidently eight months pregnant.

This is utterly irrelevant. The woman knew what she was doing when she married him, and she married him entirely voluntarily. She also can freely choose to go with her husband, if he winds up being deported. If she (equally freely) chooses to stay, there are a number of American agencies—governmental, non-governmental, charity—that provide support for single perinatal women and single mothers with babies (and older children) to care for.

The Jewish students whom Khalil so broadly and deeply harmed with the pro-terrorist “protests” he helped organize—group actions that prevented them from getting to their classes, overtly threatened them, seized and vandalized buildings with Nazi-oriented graffiti specifically targeted at them—had no choice in the matter. The Jewish students were carefully targeted, and separately as the Columbia management team still is demonstrating, those students have no support facilities.

Circular Pseudo-Logic

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William Galston had this bit of circularity in his Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal:

Economists studying past tariffs have found that their effects endured even after the tariffs were removed. … Further, the Federal Reserve Board is concerned about Americans’ increased inflation expectations, which could trigger a damaging price spiral.
The American people smell a rat. In a recent poll by the Economist/YouGov, 68% said that higher tariffs mean higher prices and that consumers will bear a large share of the burden.
They’re right. Tariffs are import taxes paid in the importing nation.

It couldn’t possibly be that we Americans poll that way because that’s what we’re told by a steady stream of news writers, including a plethora of them who cite “economists” or who cite named economists without also citing those economists’ data.

Instead, these news writers just make their bald, unsubstantiated claims, providing no data at all.

It may well be true that tariffs, by their nature, are inflationary. That certainly seems plausible. However, plausibility isn’t fact, and it would be good to see the evidence—including evidence indicating how inflationary tariffs are, if they are, and under what circumstances.