Monthly Archives: June 2013

Democrats in the Way, Again

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Interest rates on student loans are set to double on Monday after lawmakers failed to find a bipartisan solution to keep the federally subsidized borrowing costs down.
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[T]he current, 3.4% interest rate on Stafford loans—the most popular funding for college students—set to expire on July 1….
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The higher rates would add about $3,000 to the total interest on a $23,000 student loan repaid over 10 years.

In fact, the rates will double to nearly 7%.  However, those $3k are mostly partisan hype: they work out to an extra $12.50 per month on the loan payment for graduates with jobs.  Oh, wait….

On the other hand,

In May, House Republicans passed a bill that would index rates on new loans to the rate on 10-year Treasurys (currently about 2.6%), plus 2.5 per centage points, with an 8.5% cap.  But with little Democratic support in the Senate, that bill is dead in the water.

Thus, the Senate Progressives are perfectly willing to burn students and their loans because these self-important Democrats couldn’t get their way.

Then there’s this minor set of details, courtesy of Glenn Harlan Reynolds, law professor at the University of Tennessee, in that same Wall Street Journal op-ed:

According to an extensive 2012 analysis by the Associated Press of college graduates 25 and younger, 50% are either unemployed or in jobs that don’t require a college degree.  Then there are the large numbers who don’t graduate at all.  According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, more than 40% of full-time students at four-year institutions fail to graduate within six years.  The National Center for Education Statistics reports that almost 75% of community-college students fail to graduate within three years.  Those students don’t have degrees, but they often still have debt.

And

Now here’s where the real immorality kicks in.  The skyrocketing cost of a college education is a classic unintended consequence of government intervention.  Colleges have responded to the availability of easy federal money by doing what subsidized industries generally do: Raising prices to capture the subsidy.  Sold as a tool to help students cope with rising college costs, student loans have instead been a major contributor to the problem.

In the end, the way to work the student debt problem is to reduce the need for the borrowing: get school costs down to saner levels.  Reynolds suggested a way:

Remove the incentives for universities to accept government-subsidized student-loan money regardless of a student’s prospects of graduation or gainful employment.

To which I add the following:

  • the schools shouldn’t receive the subsidized loan monies—i.e., the schools would have to be reimbursed after the fact—until the borrowing student has actually graduated and begun working
  • subsidized loan monies—taxpayer funds—should not be available at all except to students in majors that have serious prospects of bettering our nation’s strength and prosperity (stated differently, making better off the taxpayers on the hook for those monies).  STEM majors would qualify; Gender, Women’s, and Sexual Studies majors or majors in General Literary Studies need not apply.

Naturally, Progressives will have a herd of cattle over such criteria; money grows on the trees of the rich, after all.  Too bad.

The Impotence of Bluster

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President Barack Obama’s sharp talk on what other countries ought to do with our own Edward Snowden is having no effect.

[T]he State Department pointedly warn[ed] a defiant Ecuador there will be “grave consequences” if the foreign government grants Snowden asylum.

And Obama expressed his disdain for Snowden the “29-year-old hacker,” saying he wouldn’t be “scrambling jets” to catch him.  But then, as Power Line put it, Obama couldn’t be bothered to scramble jets for Benghazi, either.

Just to demonstrate the effectiveness of Obama’s very stern finger wagging, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa

thumbed [his] nose…by offering the US $23 million a year in aid…in order to improve the humanitarian situation in the United States.

Yeah.  Obama showed him.

Obama and Laughingstocks

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I’ve written before about this.

Bret Stephens has more in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The Obama administration has decided it wants out from nettlesome foreign entanglements, and now finds itself surprised that it’s running out of foreign influence.

That is the larger significance of last week’s Afghan diplomatic debacle, in which the Taliban opened an office in Doha for the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”—the name Mullah Omar grandiloquently gave his regime in Kabul before its 2001 downfall. Afghan President Hamid Karzai responded by shutting down negotiations with the U.S. over post-2014 security cooperation.

Now the U.S. finds itself in an amazing position. Merely to get the Taliban to the table for a bogus peace process, the administration agreed at Pakistan’s urging to let Mullah Omar come to the table on his owns terms: no acceptance of the Afghan Constitution, no cease-fire with international forces, not even a formal pledge to never again allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorism. The U.S. also agreed, according to Pakistani sources, to allow the terrorist Haqqani network—whose exploits include the 2011 siege of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul—a seat at the table.

Yet having legitimized Haqqani and given the Taliban everything it wanted in exchange for nothing, the U.S. finds itself being dumped by its own client government in Kabul, which can always turn to Iran as a substitute patron. Incredible: no peace, no peace process, no ally, no leverage and no moral standing, all in a single stroke. John Kerry is off to quite a start.

And

Iraq? The administration made the complete withdrawal of our troops a cornerstone of its first-term foreign policy, and now finds itself surprised that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki won’t lift a finger to prevent Iranian cargo planes from overflying his airspace en route to resupplying Bashar Assad’s military.

Syria? President Obama spent two years giving the country’s civil war the widest berth, creating the power vacuum in which Iran, Hezbollah and Russia may soon achieve their strategic goals.

And Iran: In 2003, Tehran briefly halted its secret nuclear-weapons work and agreed to suspend its enrichment activities, at least for a few months. Yet since then, every U.S. effort to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear course has failed. Is it because the Obama administration was insufficiently solicitous, patient, or eager for a deal? Or is it that Tehran believes that treating this administration with contempt carries little cost?

RTWT.

The damage of the last five years and the coming three years will take far longer to redress.  We need to get started; 2014 is only a few months off.

Obamacare Hub and Privacy

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Courtesy of Senator Max Baucus (D, MT)—President Barack Obama isn’t the only politician appreciating the joys of greater flexibility after a last election—we get the following concerning Obamacare’s ability to pry into the private affairs of American citizens.

Baucus had asked HHS to provide “a complete list of agencies that will interact with the Federal Data Services Hub,” the agency of Obamacare that is responsible for determining eligibility, exemptions, grant sizes, and so on related to the delivery of Obamacare…services.

The Hub will, it turns out, draw from the Social Security Administration, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Veterans Administration, Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Defense, and the Peace Corps and it will suck data from the states’ Medicaid databases.

That’s a broad reach of information feed to support determining who’s buying insurance and who needs to be finedtaxed or subsidized.

Here’s a subset of the personal, private information being collected by the Federal government on every individual American:

Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship and immigration status, incarceration status, and enrollment status in other health plans….

Of course, the Feds aren’t going to actually store those data, or so they claim.  They’ll only “securely transmit” those data.

Sure.  Never mind that the Feds’ regulatory notice filed last winter was for

a new “system of records” that will store names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, taxpayer status, gender, ethnicity, email addresses, telephone numbers on the millions of people expected to apply for coverage at the ObamaCare exchanges, as well as “tax return information from the IRS, income information from the Social Security Administration, and financial information from other third-party sources.”

They will also store data from businesses buying coverage through an exchange, including a “list of qualified employees and their tax ID numbers,” and keep it all on file for 10 years.

All of those data listed above, plus a potful more, will be collected by the Hub.  And retained, apparently under the fiction that 10 years is just temporary storage solely for “secure transmission.”

And all of that temporarily stored information can be bruited about at will without so much as a fare-thee-well to the information’s owners—us private citizens.  The following can have our data without notice:

agency contractors, consultants, or grantees…need[ing] to have access to the records…as well as law enforcement officials….

Of course, it’s the Feds’ definition of “need,” not ours; it’s against the Feds’ evident lack of interest in safeguarding this information of ours that they’re collecting:

  • A [GAO] report found that weaknesses in IRS security systems “continue to jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the financial and sensitive taxpayer information.”
  • A separate Inspector General audit found that the IRS inadvertently disclosed information on thousands of taxpayers between 2009 and 2010.
  • In 2011, the Social Security Administration accidentally released names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of Americans.

Where’s the NSA when we need it?  Oh, wait….

A Thought on Fisher

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Justice Clarence Thomas has one.  Fisher v University of Texas at Austin was a case that wound up in front of the Supreme Court that involved a white woman who was denied admission as a result of UTA’s racial preference admissions system that explicitly deprecated some students and elevated others in the UTA admissions system solely on the basis of race, or so she claimed in her suit.

Monday, the Supremes took the easy way out and sent the case back to the Appellate Court on the legal technicality that that court had used the wrong criterion in reaching its decision upholding UTA’s race-based admissions system.

Justice Thomas, in his separate concurring opinion, had this to say concerning race-based discrimination, as cited in The Wall Street Journal:

While I find the theory advanced by the University to justify racial discrimination facially inadequate, I also believe that its use of race has little to do with the alleged educational benefits of diversity. I suspect that the University’s program is instead based on the benighted notion that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities….  The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.

Slaveholders argued that slavery was a “positive good” that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. See, e.g., Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837, in P. Finkelman, Defending Slavery 54, 58–59 (2003) (“Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually….”)

…A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. They argued, for example, that separate schools protected black children from racist white students and teachers. See, e.g., …Tr. of Oral Arg. in Bolling v. Sharpe, O.T. 1952, No. 413, p. 56 (“There was behind these [a]cts a kindly feeling [and] an intention to help these people who had been in bondage. And there was and there still is an intention by the Congress to see that these children shall be educated in a healthful atmosphere, in a wholesome atmosphere, in a place where they are wanted….”)

…Following in these inauspicious footsteps, the University would have us believe that its discrimination is likewise benign. I think the lesson of history is clear enough: Racial discrimination is never benign.

What he said.