Daily Archives: 16 September 2014

Graduated Escalation

Posted on by
Reply

A five-week campaign of US airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq has forced them to conceal their movements and blunted their acquisition of territory, US officials said.

However, the reaction of the group’s fighters—moving and living in more stealthy ways—also makes them harder to target.
…
The group…is now less likely to operate openly, having fighters hide among local populations.

Another lesson this administration has chosen to disregard, this lesson from our Vietnam War.

President Barack Obama authorized only scattered potshots for “humanitarian” reasons. At the time, ISIS forces were exposed, moving in bunches, and vulnerable to serious destruction had there been a serious air campaign launched against them.

With his decision to not strike hard, Obama has given these terrorists time to adapt to the battlefield, and he has made their destruction much harder to achieve.

With his decision to give the terrorists time to adapt by hiding among civilians—as Obama knew that they would do, with the Vietnam War’s lesson of the Viet Cong before him—Obama also has made the destruction of these terrorists much more…expensive…to achieve.

And he still can’t recognized these as terrorists; he insists on legitimizing their behavior by calling them militants.

‘Twas a famous Commander in Chief.

Doesn’t College Cost Enough Already?

Posted on by
Reply

In an effort to combat the high cost if college, the Obama administration thinks it’s appropriate to make borrowing easier.

Under a plan likely to take effect next year, the Education Department would check the past two years of a borrower’s credit, instead of the current standard of five, for blemishes such as delinquencies or debts in collection. Also, any delinquent debts below $2,085 would be overlooked; currently, delinquencies of any amount are grounds for rejected applications.

I’ll leave aside the increased pile of loans for those who least can afford to borrow, and the increased risk of default from that; these questions are addressed in that Josh Mitchell article in The Wall Street Journal that’s on the other side of the link above.

There’s another problem that’s not addressed, either in the article or by the Obama administration.

That problem is a well-known one, except apparently in Liberal circles: subsidizing a thing increases demand for it. And if supply can’t keep up with that increased demand, the price of the thing goes up. A lot.

Making borrowing for college easier will stimulate demand for college. Since the availability of college can’t rise as quickly as that demand, the only outcome is…a large increase in the price of college. This is an increase, too, that’s actively abetted by college administrators, as Professor Peter Wood noted ‘way back in 2005:

Tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else we think can be extracted from parents. Perhaps there are college administrators who don’t see federal student aid in quite this way, but I haven’t met them.

Wood was talking, at the time, about Federal student subsidies, but his remarks apply just as surely to Federal efforts to make more money available to colleges via easier to get loans like these.