Category Archives: morality

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.

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….

More Sequester Obama-Style

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President Barack Obama’s unions get theirs, and the rest of us can just go cling.  Plainly, his publicly pronounced “directives” are just Obamatalk.

The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year[.]

That directive was written by none other than the IRS’ current acting MFWIC, Danny Werfel, when he was Controller of President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.  The irony.  The irony.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) has the right of it:

The IRS always claims to be short on resources.  But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses.  And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration.

The IRS also has millions to spend on lavish “conferences” and on targeting groups and individuals with whose politics Obama disagrees.

Too Big to Handle

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I’ve written before about the morality of government welfare as a first resort.  Here’s a practical reason for cutting back: it’s too big to manage effectively.  Here are some failures from that too big to handle:

A postal worker who ran marathons found her race times improved after she began drawing federal disability checks for an alleged back injury.

Another disabled federal employee went scuba diving, skied in Switzerland and did flips on a trapeze.  She spent part of her $193,000 in disability payments on a boat named “Free Ride” before she was caught.

A Justice Department lawyer collected $90,000 in annual disability checks after claiming the stress of his job kept him off the job.  Apparently the cable TV show he began hosting while drawing disability pay wasn’t so stressful.

And

15,000 recipients are 66 or older.  Six of them are over the age of 100—well past retirement age.

The Federal government compounds this by being disinterested in controlling the failures and the resulting waste of taxpayer wealth being redistributed.

funding for all agencies—about $3 billion per year—is automatically appropriated and run through the Department of Labor.

And

the federal [disability] program does not require employing agencies to order a second opinion. The claimant can pick his own doctor.

If his claim is rejected, he can file for a different disability, as often as he likes.

And

The Department of Labor, which administers FECA for 70 federal entities, doesn’t track fraud referrals and convictions[.]

The program is too large to be properly controlled, and it needs drastic paring back for economic and legal reasons as well as moral.

A Thought on Disparate Impact

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There is another disparate impact case wending its way to the Supreme Court; hopefully, this one actually will be argued, and the Court will come to a right decision.  The case is Township of Mount Holly v Mount Holly Gardens Citizens, and it concerns Mount Holly, NJ’s, plan to

redevelop a housing project afflicted with crime, overcrowding and property code violations.

Naturally, some of the affected renters sued, and importantly here, they’re claiming no intent to discriminate on the part of the township or the redevelopers.  They’re just saying that, because most of the folks impacted are minority, there must be racism in there somewhere.

No racism actually is present, so we’ll make some up.  Because the redevelopment will inconvenience us.

But that’s the purpose of disparate impact, generally.