Monthly Archives: September 2014

Doesn’t College Cost Enough Already?

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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.

Of Course the President Knows This

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President Obama’s determination to train Syrian rebels to serve as ground troops against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria leaves the United States dependent on a diverse group riven by infighting, with no shared leadership and with hard-line Islamists as its most effective fighters.

It’s a fantasy.

The Syrian rebels in which President Barack Obama has become so interested of late—those former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth”—are scattered in the Syrian west and disorganized. His efforts to train and arm them so far have been…unreliable.

The Obama administration’s plans to arm Syrian rebels have been troubled by false starts since April 2013, when Mr Obama first authorized the CIA to begin a secret training mission in Jordan.

Months after the authorization, the White House still had not delivered details to Congress about the CIA’s plans, and it was not until September 2013 that the first American-trained rebels returned to Syria from Jordan.

To date, the CIA mission in Jordan has trained 2,000 to 3,000 Syrian rebels, according to American and Arab officials.

Those 3,000 (to take the generous side of the estimate) would go against 20,000-32,000 ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq combined.

These Syrian rebels, though, say their mission is to toss Bashar al Assad and set up an entirely different government for Syria; there’s no room for engaging additional foes.

Now see this map, adapted from the one in The New York Times article at the first link above.SyriaMap

The labels are hard to read: the Red squares are Syrian government held locations, Blue squares are opposition forces other than ISIS—including Obama’s “good” rebels—Purple squares are ISIS. The major circles are, from North to South, Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus.

The “good” Syrian rebels are in the Syrian west. ISIS forces are in the Syrian east, where they’re contiguous with their forces in Iraq. The rebels would have to figure out how to disengage from al Assad’s forces in the west, quitting their mission; boogie on over to the east; and then engage ISIS. Which, courtesy of the Iraqi “army’s” glide step south, away from ISIS, has lots of American equipment, weapons, and ammunition.

Of course Obama knows this. But he gave a speech, and now he expects the problem to fade from the public’s attention.

Terrorist butchery may not let Obama have his way.

 

Aside for Fox News‘ Julie Banderas and Catherine Herridge, the latter of whom especially should know better: these, now three, men were not murdered—that’s a criminal act. No, these three men were butchered—acts of evil.

What Has Ego Wrought?

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After the administration released details of the July mission to rescue journalist James Foley and others in Syria, intelligence suggests ISIS dispersed the remaining hostages to multiple locations, making them harder to locate, a military source told Fox News.

In addition, the source added guard forces around the hostages doubled while widely publicized reporting about the scope of new aerial surveillance in the region caused ISIS to change its pattern of behavior on the ground.

[Emphasis above added] Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Media Operations Captain John Kirby had this on those leaks:

We regret it at the time we had to talk about this. There was absolutely no intention of ever having to talk about that rescue attempt but because of leaks to certain reporters, it forced our hand to try and provide some context to that.

Rather circular. It was members of President Barack Obama’s administration who decided to “leak” the news of that prior rescue attempt “to certain reporters;” then Obama used those “leaks” as an excuse to talk more fully about that failed attempt, to support a claim that he’d been trying all along.

This also comes against the backdrop of Obama’s State Department actively interfering with the efforts of Foley’s family to get him back.

This cynical play for sympathy—”I tried my best”—has made it all the harder to rescue any other ISIS hostages.

In the end, too, Obama’s administration didn’t even have the courtesy, much less the morality, to tell Foley’s family directly that he’d been lost. They had to hear the news from a journalist in a phone call.

All for one man’s petty ego.

In Which a Judge Gets It Right

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…but is forced to rule wrongly.

The SEIU sued University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, alleging “unfair” labor practices in that, claimed the union, UPMC management interfered with employees’ right to organize. In connection with that suit, the NLRB issued three subpoenas demanding “highly confidential and proprietary information” be released from UPMC to the union.

Federal District Judge Arthur Schwab found the NLRB’s subpoenas, among other things, over broad and unfocused, and so illegitimate. He also found the subpoenas fundamentally irrelevant to the underlying case (which itself would have rendered the subpoenas inappropriate). He went further. In noting that the NLRB itself made no serious effort to argue the relevance of its subpoenas, he wrote [emphasis added]

The Court does not see how these requests have any legitimate relationship or relevance to the underlying alleged unfair labor practices; instead, the requests seek highly confidential and proprietary information…and, the requests seek information that a union would not be entitled to receive as part of a normal organization effort. Indeed, the scope and nature of the requests, coupled with the NLRB’s efforts to obtain said documents for, and on behalf of, the SEIU, arguably moves the NLRB from its investigatory function and enforcer of federal labor law, to serving as the litigation arm of the Union, and a co-participant in the ongoing organization effort of the Union.

But he was forced to the wrong outcome and to uphold the subpoenas; although he stayed his upholding pending appeal.

However, the practical effect of case law as to enforcement of subpoenas of federal government agencies is that this Court is constrained to essentially “rubber stamp” the enforcement of the Subpoenas at hand.

The Third Circuit, the appellate court for Schwab’s district, can overrule Schwab and strike down the subpoenas. The appellate level is the normal place where Federal agency subpoenas get struck. Schwab also, though, has given the Third an out.

If the practical effect of this legal predicament is to be altered, it is not the District Court’s role to do so, but the role of the appellate court. The Court is at a loss of how to adequately address the above issues of whether the matter under investigation serves legitimate purposes, whether the inquiry is relevant to that purpose, and not unduly broad or burdensome, while still conforming to the extremely narrow and limited nature of the proceedings at hand. If the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit finds that the District Court has the authority to conduct a meaningful and/or thorough review of the three (3) Subpoena[s] at issue here, the Court is prepared to do so.

Schwab’s opinion can be read here.

Scottish Independence

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The view of a poor, dumb colonial.

Suppose the Scottish referendum next week goes in favor of independence. What would be next for Scotland?

Among the complexities of separation is the matter of pensions provided by employers. Most such pensions are not fully funded; although, most such pension providers have apparently viable plans for curing the shortfall, over some number of years. However, the EU (and we’ll assume Scotland succeeds in joining the EU for this bit) requires all pension funds with members in two or more countries to be fully paid up. Moreover, funds that are not have only two years to get fully paid up. There are quite a number of large-ish UK companies, employing thousands each, whose pension funds have members in both countries, and whose pension funds are on one of those “some number of years to fund” plans.

There’s some chatter in the UK about splitting the pensions in two, one for the UK and one for Scotland, as a means of ducking this problem. I see a possibility of splitting the companies themselves in two, each with its own pension scheme. Either course, though, is fraught with complexity.

A larger complication is the UK national debt, some £1 trillion ($1.62 trillion): how would this be divided, and based on what criteria? I’ll elide whether the new Scottish economy could handle its new debt.

That sort of thing is trivial, though, compared with a couple of larger questions. Scotland has some serious economic problems, including that debt, a risk of sharp inflation, lack of clarity on what it would use as a currency, what sort of trade arrangements a settled-on currency would imply, and so on.

The economic problems will have their impact on independent Scotland’s near- and mid-term stability.

Too, accession to the EU requires a unanimous vote of the existing members, and that’s not a done deal. Which means Scotland would not be able to count, soon, on any EU…assistance.

Frankly, I think Scotland would be better off outside the EU than in it (recall the EU’s treatment of Ireland and Iceland), but this is a move Scotland has to make, and properly so, without my sage advice.

Regardless of EU membership and those “larger problems” just mentioned, though, independent Scotland will need to broaden its economy. 80% of its national income is from North Sea Oil which, aside from questions of how to divide that with the UK, is a declining asset value [sic], and the bulk of the remaining 20% is from tourism. A self-sustaining independent Scotland will need a more broadly based economy in order to function without the UK subsidies it currently gets.

Finally, I don’t know that Scotland would be better off independent from the UK. Certainly, there are advantages for a nation that’s free to chart its own course without having to say, “Mother, may I” to a higher-up. I think, though, given Scotland’s socialism and those subsidies, the UK would be better off with an independent Scotland.

The aftermath also will be fun to watch. Northern Ireland? Catalonia? Basque Country? Sicily?