Category Archives: regulation

Student Debt

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President Joe Biden (D) is at it again. Now he’s extending for yet another time, and by diktat, not by Congressional action, the “moratorium” on student debt repayment requirements. As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors noted, this is debt cancellation on the installment plan.

Never mind that our economy—according to no less an authority than Biden, anyway—is fully capable of return[ing] to more normal routines. In what amounts to a deep insult to grown American citizens who still have student debt outstanding, Biden is excluding them from that return to normal. Apparently, Biden does not think this particular group of Americans is capable of much of anything.

I have a better idea. It begins with ending the debt moratoria, which only hurts those debtors, the lenders who lent to them, and us taxpayers, whose tax remittals will go—eventually—to those lenders in partial mitigation.

My idea continues with garnishing the wages and welfare payments of those without wages, of those debtors who claim to be unable to pay, even if those garnished payments are less than the payments the student loan contracts specified.

My idea finishes with limiting the root cause (to coin a phrase) of a student need to borrow in the first place: the over-high cost of going to college. One branch of this path is to get rid of the stigma of not being a college graduate. The trades are far more important than graduating with degrees in women’s studies, this or that race studies, or basket-weaving froo-froo. The trades are every bit as important as degrees in architecture or engineering: nothing gets built, no matter how creatively or usefully drawn up or engineered, without tradesmen—plumbers, electricians, carpenters, heavy equipment operators—to do the actual work. That needs to be emphasized.

Another branch is for the Federal government to stop sending taxpayer money to colleges and universities. What started out as a good idea, enlisting these institutions in basic research, has become badly abused in hiring “diversity” mavens, pushing identity separations, expansions of those froo-froo studies. The Federal monies have become excuses to hire excessive administrative overhead and to raise tuition to absorb the Federal influx. Cut it out.

A third branch is to require two things of colleges and universities: one is to publish, for each major the school offers, including “independent studies,” the average salaries of its graduates five years after graduation. The other is to require the college/university whose student applies for a loan(s) to be the lender of the majority of the borrowed amount or to guarantee the entire loan(s) provided by any other lender.

Insufficient

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People’s Republic of China government securities regulators are offering a change to PRC securities laws that would remove a requirement that

audit inspections of overseas-listed Chinese companies be done mainly by Chinese regulators.

Another part of the PRC regulators’ offer:

Under the draft rules, the burden of protecting state secrets now falls to private companies as well. They have to report to the financial watchdog and other authorities before cooperating with overseas regulators.

Far from being a serious offer, this is insulting.

PRC regulators of companies possessing PRC state secrets—or held to possess them by the PRC government—will have too easy a time using the secrets excuse to delay, obfuscate, or outright censor any effort at an audit.

Audits not being done “mainly” by PRC regulators are not the same as agreeing to let host nation auditors—American auditors in our case—have full, complete, open access to PRC company books immediately on request, including no-notice requests.

Anything less is too much interference with the audits of companies listed on our exchanges, whether foreign companies are PRC-domiciled or elsewhere.

The SEC must not take this move by the PRC seriously.

All Lives Don’t Matter

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Certainly not in Colorado.

[Governor Jaried, (D)] Polis signed HB 22-1279, the “Reproductive Health Equity Act,” which the governor said “codifies a person’s fundamental right to make reproductive health-care decisions free from government interference.”

And this:

A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent or derivative rights under the laws of this state[.]

Baby’s lives don’t matter; the State and anyone residing in it are free to murder unborn babies, and those babies don’t even get a voice to speak for them in court. This pretty much says it all regarding Colorado’s Polis (D) and the State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled legislature.

But not quite. There’s this, too, in this…law:

The law prohibits state and local public entities from denying, restricting, interfering with, or discriminating against a person’s right to…have an abortion. It also bars public entities from restricting abortion due to the individual’s “potential, actual, or perceived impact on the pregnancy, the pregnancy’s outcomes, or the pregnant individual’s health.”

The persons being called upon to execute the abortion, whether private or public, are barred from refusing to do so due to that person’s religious beliefs. This Progressive-Democrat move also is a naked assault on religion and on simple conscience.

Progressive-Democrats’ Continued Assault on our 2nd Amendment

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Especially cynically, President Joe Biden (D) is using the tragedy of the Sacramento, CA, shooting—other people’s blood—to press his assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Where in our Constitution is the Federal government given the authority to limit the weapons us American citizens are allowed to have and to carry? Here, for Biden’s edification, is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In order to have a population that is armed and that understands its arms and so can muster at need to defend our nation, every American has the right to keep and bear Arms, entirely unfettered by Government. Nowhere in that Amendment is there any authority of Government to dictate to us citizens the kind of Arms each of us can keep and carry.

Beyond that, the Supreme Court has already ruled, in District of Columbia v Heller and in McDonald v City of Chicago that the Amendment means precisely what it says: the right to have and to carry firearms is an individual right, with the addition (incorporation) that State governments also cannot (not may not) infringe on this right.

Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability? Based on what actual theory of law, gun rights, or other? Biden continues to offer no rationale other than his desired gun grab for his abuse. Gun manufacturers have no more control over the uses to which purchasers put their product than have car manufacturers, knife manufacturers, baseball bat manufacturers, hammer manufacturers, or pillows.

That last isn’t me being facetious or sarcastic. Suffocation is the third most common technique for murder.

Biden doesn’t care about any of that. He just wants our firearms; he just wants us disarmed.

Yet Another Start

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The House has passed—by 414-5—a bill that markedly improves Americans’ 401(k) retirement plans that are offered by most employers. If also passed by the Senate and signed into law by the President (or passed anew over a President’s veto) the bill would

  • raise the age at which retirees must start taking money out of their Plans, over the next decade, to 75
  • allow older workers to make bigger contributions: the current “catch up” contributions of $6,500/yr for those older than 50 would rise to $10,000/yr for people ages 62, 63, and 64
  • the extra $1,000 people 50 and older can contribute annually to an IRA would become indexed to inflation

These are important moves. However, there are no reasons in logic or economics for those age or contribution limits. Folks should be able to contribute as much as they want to their retirement plans, whenever they want, at any age, and regardless of income.

They should be able to delay making withdrawals for as long as they wish—and not be required to continue making withdrawals once they start. Retirement withdrawals should be in the amounts and at the times the retiree deems useful, not when Government dictates them.

The benefits of such finishing touches are readily apparent. The more we’re allowed to save during our working years for our retirement, the less dependent we’ll be on increasingly fragile government retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare when we do retire.

The more retirees have for their own retirement resources, the less stress retirees will impose on those government programs, which can only reduce their fragility.