Tag Archives: political economy

Student Loan Responsibility

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Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller wrote about student loan burdens in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, using New York University as a worst-case illustration. Their subheadline made a good summary of their thesis.

By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt….

A female graduate sold her eggs to cover some of her NYU costs even as she borrowed to cover more; she’s still selling her eggs to cover expenses and try to pay on her student loan debt as she remains essentially unemployed five months after graduation. In another example, a single mother of three had a $40,000/year income when her son started school in 2018. The mother still has her own $34,000 in loans from her own bachelor’s degree and she’s borrowing another $140,000 in Parent Plus loans to help her son pursue his degree.

And this:

An NYU master’s in publishing leaves recent graduates with median debt nearly triple that of the school with the next highest loan burden for which the Education Department released data. At NYU, the graduates borrowed a median $116,000 and earned a median $42,000 two years out.

And this:

NYU’s 2015 and 2016 public-health graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median $106,000 for the degree, the Journal’s analysis of Education Department data found; half earned roughly $61,000 or less two years after graduation.

And this deflection from NYU spokesman John Beckman:

Not everyone seeking an advanced degree is going into a lucrative field, and universities have no control over how our society values particular professions.

NYU is especially bad in this arena, but only by a matter of degree. The problem itself is both widespread and very serious.

The overall situation is one more argument for getting government all the way out of the student loan business, whether making the loans or guaranteeing them. That and the alternatives below are perfectly straightforward to implement, if exceedingly difficult to effect politically. But that just requires us sovereign citizens to put our foot down and fire the politicians who won’t go along and elect those who will.

After getting government out of the way, do these things:

  • make the schools publish the average and median 5-yr-after-graduation salaries for each of its majors
  • make the schools publish the per centages of their graduates finding employment in their major areas of study within one year of graduation
  • make the schools be the ones extending loans to their students or serve as co-borrower on any private financial institution student loans
  • let graduates discharge their loans through bankruptcy—stop disguising the risks from the lenders (and borrowers), and stop inuring the lenders from those risks.

One more Critical Item; although this is a change in mindset for all of us, not only school managers and politicians. Recognize for whom college is most appropriate. There’s a crying need for a whole lot of tradesmen, and good livings to be made there—and nothing an architect draws up or an engineer designs gets built without tradesmen. Doctors and lawyers have no place to ply their trades, other than in their homes, without tradesmen. Those homes don’t get built without tradesmen. And neither do the roads/bridges, power grids, communications grids, and on and on that connect those homes to those offices and office buildings—or mines and farms to anywhere—without those tradesmen.

Another Reason

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…to get Government—at the Federal and at the State level—out of the way of a free market for health care and for health care coverage, which must include price transparency if there’s to be true price and quality of product/service competition. This illustration is in Boston.

An Emergency Room visit to Massachusetts General Hospital for a particular problem covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts would cost the patient and his employer together nearly $950. In fairness to BCBSoM, some other providers of health coverage for the same problem at MassGen charge substantially the same total price. At Carney Hospital, just three miles away, though, the same problem with the same provider would be only a bit under $550—$400 less.

It gets more variable. An ER trip to MassGen for a patient with substantially the same problem and whose coverage was through an Aetna PPO would cost $2,170. At Carney the cost would be in the range of $550.

But never mind, Government Knows Better:

The Massachusetts Health Policy Commission…called for capping the prices of the state’s costliest hospitals.

No. Price caps provide no incentive to innovate, to improve quality, to lower prices. Secretive negotiations between health coverage providers and health providers provide no such incentives, either. Secretive pricing by health providers provides no incentives.

Competition among health coverage providers and among health providers provides those incentives because superior quality of care and lower prices are what attract customers, and open competition is what produces those outcomes. The lack is especially insidious with hospital ERs, since those “customers” are in dire straights and in no position to shop around.

Those folks (all partakers of health provision and health coverage provision, but especially prospective ER users) need to prior plan before the trip becomes necessary. That requires an ability to compare among health coverage providers and among health providers. That, in turn, requires price transparency among health coverage providers—not just for premiums charged the customer and his employer (which already are pretty visible), but the prices paid each of the hospitals in the area.

Transparency also requires hospitals to make their prices publicly available. An example of this is with Surgery Center of Oklahoma. This facility doesn’t have emergency room facilities, but their model is easily extensible to all hospital and all prompt care facilities.

BDS Comes to the White House

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Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions have come to the Biden-Harris Presidency.

The US has rejected a request from Israel to speed up the delivery of pre-ordered KC-46 refueling jets, amid escalating tensions between the country and neighboring Iran.

Those modern tankers would greatly extend the reach and endurance of Israel’s combat aircraft, a capability increasingly needed for Israel’s own defense as Iran progresses inexorably toward obtaining nuclear weapons.

The denial, though, is a measure of how desperate Biden-Harris is to get from the kiddie table to a nuclear weapons deal with Iran. He doesn’t want to risk offending Khamenei by facilitating Israel’s ability to defend itself.

Companies Tracking Customers

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It turns out this isn’t limited to cookies through browsers and overt tracking software.

There’s another software package that businesses use to track their users activities. Log4j

is used on computer servers to keep records of users’ activities so they can be reviewed later by security or software development teams.

Businesses are secretly tracking our activities as we interact with them digitally, not just quietly through cookies and tracking tools. Maybe not only those teams, either. It wouldn’t surprise me if marketing teams were using our data, and if other teams were putting together packages of our data to peddle to other companies.

It’s widespread, too.

The nonprofit Apache Software Foundation, a group that distributes the open-source tool at no cost, has said [Log4j] has been downloaded millions of times.

Nice.

And just to add a floatie to that puddle, Log4j has a serious security flaw.

The flaw is particularly dangerous given the widespread use of Log4j on corporate networks and the ease with which hackers could exploit the vulnerability, security experts say.

And

Attackers could use the bug to break into computer networks to steal sensitive data, prepare for ransomware attacks, or create backdoors that will allow them to maintain access to corporate systems even after the flawed software has been patched.

That exposure isn’t limited to personal information, either, or to the nefarious uses to which businesses put out personal information.  It ranges up to the technologies of businesses, including defense contractors.

Free Enterprise

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The politicians populating Vermont’s State government don’t like it; they’re taking an overt step to bring the State’s economy under centralized control. These politicians are using the State’s insurance industry—already an industry with limited freedom to operate in all States, not just in Vermont—as their tool to do this.

Vermont is now one of the first states to require health insurers to pay for the costs associated with at-home COVID-19 tests, Governor Phil Scott (R) announced.

Yes, this is a Republican governor. A weak Republican governor, with a Progressive-Democrat State House of Representatives and State Senate.

Never mind that, if consumers in a free market environment wanted the tests covered by their insurers, competition would lead the insurers to cover them. Never mind, either, that that same competition would drive the cost of that coverage to its lowest level.

Instead, with this Government-driven requirement, coverage costs will be elevated, propped up by the artificial, Government-created demand. And, notwithstanding the disingenuous claim of the State’s Department of Financial Regulation Commissioner, Michael Pieciak, that the tests will be free, they will not only cost all Vermonters in the form of elevated premiums and/or limited quality of coverage elsewhere in the policies, all Vermonters will be paying for the tests of the few.

Socialism in action. Vermont businesses—insurers are just the camel’s nose—are free to produce whatever goods and services they choose, so long as Government politicians approve.