Category Archives: regulation

A Modest Proposal

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The Wall Street Journal editors (I seem to have been picking on them lately…) have a modest proposal regarding student debt and forgiveness.

Congress created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program in 2007. It lets borrowers who work for government or tax-exempt organizations get unpaid debt forgiven after 10 years of payments. Its supposed goal was to help government and nonprofit employers compete with private businesses that can pay more.

The editors correctly note that in the years since its inception, the program has become badly abused and used to reward[] a politically favored group of workers and can make it harder for private businesses to compete. Based on that, the editors recommend the Republican-majority houses of Congress repeal the program altogether.

They’re correct in that, but I’d go a ways farther. Congress should make student loan relief available through our existing bankruptcy laws. Additionally (critically additionally), Congress should take the Federal government out of the student loan business altogether: no more Federal government student loans and no more Federal government guarantees of other lenders’ student loans.

And one more step: require colleges (including junior and community colleges) and universities and trade schools to publish the regionally average salaries and wages for each major the school offers or each trade certification program the trade school offers at the five-years employed mark. Associated with that, those schools should be required to be the ones extending the student loans or be either co-signers or guarantors of other lenders’ loans to their students.

Without the ability to hide behind Other People’s Money in the form of purely third party or Government loans, the abuses likely would screech to a halt.

Who Really Needs Security Clearances?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have got their panties in a twist because President Donald Trump (R) has withdrawn Perkins-Coie’s Federal security clearances among other actions regarding the law firm. The editors claim it’s all about Trumpian retribution:

That’s the only way to read his extraordinary executive orders targeting big Washington law firms for federal punishment and investigation. Mr. Trump’s decision to use government power to punish firms for representing clients breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice going back to John Adams and the Founders.

Perhaps. But that’s the editors’ spin, and they present it, in typical news opinionator fashion, as if it were fact and the only possible fact of the matter.

On the other hand, it’s also true that Perkins-Coie, other big Washington law firms, and the individual lawyers in those organizations have no need whatsoever for blanket, routinely extant, Federal security clearances just because. Those should be granted on a case-by-case basis, centered on the lawyers directly involved needing access to classified material in order to defend a client. Furthermore, as soon as that defense is concluded, or as soon as the lawyers in question are no longer involved, those clearances should be canceled; they’d no longer be needed.

Neither should a law firm itself have any security clearance at all. Only those lawyers directly involved in a case needing classified access should have the associated clearance.

These editors would do well to get their angst back under control.

Another Precinct Pipes Up

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The Merit Systems Protection Board has ordered the Department of Agriculture to

temporarily reinstate all of its nearly 6,000 probationary employees, who were fired by the Trump administration last month.

Probationary employees are just that—in trial periods of their employment—and they can be fired for any reason at all during their probationary period. Merit, or its lack, need have nothing to do with their termination.

This board is an independent quasi-judicial agency whose three members are Presidential nominees subject to Senate confirmation. As such, the board is an arm of the Executive Branch and so subject to the control of the President, as the Supreme Court ruled in the matter of firing the chairman of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is another “independent” agency that’s out of control and needs to be brought to heel.

How to Handle Federal Lands

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Terry Anderson, of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has some thoughts on how best to handle Federal lands, a unaggregated expanse of some 640 million acres, 28% of US land. In their essence, his ideas are to handle those lands in a business-like manner.

…three options: raise the price of goods and services (timber, minerals, visits to national parks), reduce labor costs and liquidate money losers.

He’s right, but those are the second steps that need to be taken, not the first step.

Twenty-eight percent is far too much of American land to be retained by the Federal government. The necessary first step is the transfer of those lands to their respective States.

Anderson’s ideas, fleshed out some in the fulness of his op-ed, does recommend [t]urn[ing] ownership of some federal lands over to the states, but that’s wholly inadequate. The vast majority of those lands should be turned over.

The amount that might be retained by the Federal government, to suggest a percentage for opening discussion, would be less than 5%, and the retention purposes might be limited to protecting some historical and scenic areas for public park use, to finishing cleaning up Superfund sites of their contamination—following which those sites should be returned to the States—to maintaining (and I say expanding) our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to siting military installations, and to setting up, or finishing, nuclear waste storage sites.

The Federal government has no legitimate interest in withholding from State and private use so huge an expanse of our land. Selling it to the States and to private citizens would raise funds for paying down our national debt, too. The modern equivalent of a dollar an acre comes to mind for a suitable sale price—that original one dollar price wasn’t so much for raising money—though it did for that then small Federal budget—than to transfer the land to owners who, by paying for it, would have some incentive to make economic-based use of it.

The retained land then should be managed IAW business principles.

Policy Chaos?

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The State Department, following President Donald Trump’s (R) EO stating that it was US policy that there are only the male and female genders, has eliminated the X gender on new US passports along with barring passport holders from changing the gender listed on their passports.

The ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project staff attorney, Sruti Swaminathan:

The plaintiffs in this case have had their lives disrupted by a chaotic policy clearly motivated by animus that serves zero public interest[.]

Chaotic Policy? Clearly no. Policy is being—properly—stabilized at the status quo ante.