Richard Branson flew on his Virgin Galactic ride to the edge of space Sunday morning. In its article about the then-impending flight, The Wall Street Journal asked it readers
Are you ready for space tourism?
To which I answer: You bet I am, but not just up-and-backs to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. I’m ready for rides to Mars, to Venus, to the larger moons of Jupiter. I want to see some sights and to walk on other planets.
Students who borrowed (lots of) money to get degrees from “elite” schools—or from any school, come to that—now feel financially hobbled for life.
Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.
Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.
The universities share a measure of responsibility for these student debt problems. These schools should—and the reluctant should be required to—publish the mean and median salaries for each of the first five years of employment for each of the majors the schools offer. The schools also should be the ones making the loans to their students or underwriting private lenders’ loans to their students.
The Federal government shares a measure of responsibility for these student debt problems, also. The government should stop throwing money at the schools; that just encourages them to increase their tuition price to absorb the Federal dollars—at the immediate and direct expense to the students. Indeed, the Federal government should stop shipping money to the schools at all except for narrowly defined basic research projects, and those exceptions should be rare.
However, color me unsympathetic to the student borrowers’ plight; they bear the greatest responsibility for their situation. No one made them borrow such outlandish amounts. Even when I was in school the wage, etc, data were available; I just had to get off the couch to go get them. Today, it’s not even necessary to get off the couch: the pupils just have to bestir themselves enough to engage in some key clicks on their computerized device.
I’m especially unsympathetic to the students’ blame-shifting.
Matt Black graduated from Columbia in 2015 with an MFA in film and $233,000 in federal loans. …
Mr Black, a 36-year-old writer and producer in Los Angeles, said he grew up in a lower middle-class family in Oklahoma. He earns $60,000 in a good year and less than half that in dry stretches. The faculty at Columbia was stellar, he said, but he blamed the school for his “calamitous financial situation.”
Black needs to get a mirror and consult it. He was no child newly graduated from high school, blindly accepting the putative guidance counselor’s advice when he decided to take those loans. He was a grown adult man looking at graduate schools (he did shop around, looking at more than just Columbia, didn’t he?). No one made him take “the school’s” unvarnished word; no one made him not check for himself whether borrowing so much against a future salary he so easily could have learned was a good idea. No one made him take the loans. Indeed, no one made him decide to go to such an expensive school for his film MFA.
At least temporarily. Recall the American Rescue Plan Act which the Progressive-Democratic Party rammed through on strict party lines via reconciliation and that President Joe Biden (D) happily signed into law. That law
allows for automatic loan forgiveness up to 120% of the federal loan for farmers or ranchers who are “socially disadvantaged,” which is defined as “Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Hispanic, or Asian, or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”
It’s hard to get any more blatantly racist than that: it explicitly discriminates on the basis of race, barring Americans of the wrong race from participating at all in the program.
Union City, TN, farmer Robert Holman had sued the USDA, as administrator of the loan forgiveness program, on the basis of that blatant, intrinsic program racism. Last week, US District Judge S Thomas Anderson, Chief Judge of the Western District of Tennessee, issued an injunction against the USDA blocking it from issuing any forgivenesses until the case has made its way all the way through the courts and likely appeals.
Southeastern Legal Foundation General Counsel Kimberly Hermann, whose firm was one of two representing farmer Holman, has most of the right of it:
The Biden administration uses equity as a license to punish Americans—here farmers—because of their skin color. The Court’s order sends a clear message to President Biden that racially exclusive programs, whether on a farm or in a school, are unconstitutional.
Biden didn’t act alone on this, though. As noted above, the Progressive-Democratic Party—acting alone in Congress—passed the bill that Biden signed. His appointees in the Ag Department enthusiastically tried to act on that racism.
Heads up, though, and here’s the rest of the right of it: an injunction is only temporary and will be superseded by the district court’s final ruling. That ruling then will stand or fall on appeal, and the Biden administration’s and Progressive-Democrat-run Congress’ bigotry ultimately will be blocked or restored by the final appellate ruling.
The Cyberspace Administration of China is moving to extend its regulation of PRC companies to include those listed on American exchanges. That’s all well and good; the US looks to regulate American companies that are listed on foreign exchanges.
However.
All companies domiciled or headquartered in the People’s Republic of China became, formally, arms of the PRC’s intelligence community under that nation’s 2017 intelligence law.
No PRC company should be allowed to list on an American exchange, and those currently listed should be delisted.
Beyond that, no PRC company should be allowed to acquire, or gain a stake of any size in, any American company, nor should any PRC company be allowed to partner in any way with any American company.
The risks to the safety of intellectual property, the technology risks, the national security risks are simply too great.
There are Jobs…
…and there are jobs.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler had this to say about President Joe Biden’s (D) “jobs” plan:
[He’s] doing a “masterful job aligning his cabinet secretaries in this messaging” about creating union jobs with taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects.
Notice that. Our tax payments are going to provide union jobs under the Biden plan, and this is a good thing, the union mucky-muck says.
No non-union jobs. No jobs funded by private enterprise in a free market economy. No hand-up type support for private enterprise to expand and create non-union (or union, come to that) jobs. Only government-funded union jobs for government-favored entities.
Keep this in mind in the fall of 2022 and again in 2024.