Student Loan Responsibility

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Melissa Korn and Andrea Fuller wrote about student loan burdens in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, using New York University as a worst-case illustration. Their subheadline made a good summary of their thesis.

By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt….

A female graduate sold her eggs to cover some of her NYU costs even as she borrowed to cover more; she’s still selling her eggs to cover expenses and try to pay on her student loan debt as she remains essentially unemployed five months after graduation. In another example, a single mother of three had a $40,000/year income when her son started school in 2018. The mother still has her own $34,000 in loans from her own bachelor’s degree and she’s borrowing another $140,000 in Parent Plus loans to help her son pursue his degree.

And this:

An NYU master’s in publishing leaves recent graduates with median debt nearly triple that of the school with the next highest loan burden for which the Education Department released data. At NYU, the graduates borrowed a median $116,000 and earned a median $42,000 two years out.

And this:

NYU’s 2015 and 2016 public-health graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median $106,000 for the degree, the Journal’s analysis of Education Department data found; half earned roughly $61,000 or less two years after graduation.

And this deflection from NYU spokesman John Beckman:

Not everyone seeking an advanced degree is going into a lucrative field, and universities have no control over how our society values particular professions.

NYU is especially bad in this arena, but only by a matter of degree. The problem itself is both widespread and very serious.

The overall situation is one more argument for getting government all the way out of the student loan business, whether making the loans or guaranteeing them. That and the alternatives below are perfectly straightforward to implement, if exceedingly difficult to effect politically. But that just requires us sovereign citizens to put our foot down and fire the politicians who won’t go along and elect those who will.

After getting government out of the way, do these things:

  • make the schools publish the average and median 5-yr-after-graduation salaries for each of its majors
  • make the schools publish the per centages of their graduates finding employment in their major areas of study within one year of graduation
  • make the schools be the ones extending loans to their students or serve as co-borrower on any private financial institution student loans
  • let graduates discharge their loans through bankruptcy—stop disguising the risks from the lenders (and borrowers), and stop inuring the lenders from those risks.

One more Critical Item; although this is a change in mindset for all of us, not only school managers and politicians. Recognize for whom college is most appropriate. There’s a crying need for a whole lot of tradesmen, and good livings to be made there—and nothing an architect draws up or an engineer designs gets built without tradesmen. Doctors and lawyers have no place to ply their trades, other than in their homes, without tradesmen. Those homes don’t get built without tradesmen. And neither do the roads/bridges, power grids, communications grids, and on and on that connect those homes to those offices and office buildings—or mines and farms to anywhere—without those tradesmen.

Insisting on your Rights is Uncooperative

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That’s the view of one lawyer.

It seems that the actor Alec Baldwin wanted a search warrant before he would turn over his cell phone to the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Department. Supposedly, Baldwin asked for one even before the sheriff asked for his cell in the apparent expectation that the sheriff would be asking.

Lawyer Christopher Melcher says that’s being uncooperative.

It is spin by Alec’s lawyer to say that he suggested the warrant. He refused to provide his phone without a warrant. That is not cooperation or a proactive suggestion.

What we think of Baldwin doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter whether he asked for the search warrant before or after the sheriff asked for his cell phone. Not only his right to have a search warrant implied by our Constitution. The government’s requirement to get one before any search is written in black letters in our Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What would be uncooperative would be the sheriff demanding Baldwin give up his cell phone without that warrant (which is different from the sheriff asking for it before getting the warrant in order to save some administrative hassle).

It’s attitudes like Melcher’s that give law enforcement and prosecutorial proceedings a bad name, whether or not Melcher is associated with either.

Russia’s West Surrender Security Guarantees

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Russia has laid out its latest demand for security guarantees.

  • No North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion further eastward to include Ukraine
  • abandon all NATO military activities in all of Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia
  • no deployment of additional NATO troops and weapons outside the countries in which they were before any Eastern bloc nations joined the alliance in May 1997
  • each side should refrain from deploying intermediate and shorter-range missiles where they can hit the territory of the other side
  • not use territory of another state to carry out an armed attack against one another

Will Russia remove its theater nuclear weapons and its conventional weapons from Kaliningrad? Of course not.

Will Russia remove its military forces to east of the Urals? Of course not.

Will Russia withdraw from Crimea and eastern Ukraine? Of course not.

There’s nothing mutual about these guarantees; they’re more a Security of Russia Guarantee, while leaving Russia a free hand in moving west.

Russia’s demands should be a non-starter and not even discussed except for a one-word statement: “No.” In fact, these demands should be answered with an offer to Ukraine to join NATO.

But this is the Biden-Harris administration, and Germany has far too much influence in NATO.

Laws and Rules

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The Progressive-Democrats are unhappy that they haven’t had their way with our government, and so they insist on changing the rules so they can get their way forever after. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) took note of this from the Senate floor last Thursday.

In the span of a few hours, one Senate Democrat had renewed calls to nuke the Senate and break the rules, and another published a national op-ed arguing that Democrats should attack the rule of law and pack the Supreme Court.
Two frontal assaults on two branches of government, proposed in the space of about two hours. Entire generations of statesmen would have seen either one of those unhinged proposals as Armageddon for our institutions.

But this is the Progressive-Democratic Party. If they can’t have their way within the law, within the rules, they’ll change the law, change the rules. If they can’t change the law or the rules, they’ll simply ignore them.

The government of the People’s Republic of China, and of the predecessor nation on the mainland, operates and operated the same way. If the men of those governments don’t—didn’t then—like the outcomes of specific laws, or if the people become too unruly (in those government men’s eyes) under existing law, they alter the law to suit those men.

This is not to say the Progressive-Democratic Party is the same as the Communist Party of China. The attitudes and techniques of the two, though, are quite similar, and they produce the same outcome: a nation whose citizens are ruled by government men rather than a nation under law where all citizens are equal, including those government men, and government is subordinate to the citizens.

“Coy,” Is It?

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The Biden-Harris administration, in its argument for the government’s appeal in the 8th Circuit of a trial court’s rulings in Religious Sisters of Mercy v Azar and Catholic Benefits Association v Azar, steadfastly refused to say whether, in fact, these entities would be subject to government suit were those entities, in fact, to refuse to provide and cover so-called “gender transition” procedures. The case and the government’s “enforcement” vagaries center on

how the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) interpret Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination by gender identity, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in relation to RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act].

Just the News mildly referred to that as the government being coy.

The government’s attorney, Assistant US Attorney Ashley Chung, then went so far as to tacitly threaten the judges:

She warned the judges not to “open the floodgates to premature litigation” based on “uncertainty” over how agencies might respond to new legal interpretations or court rulings.

This is a cynical argument by Chung. The judges won’t be opening floodgates for “premature” litigation. HHS and EEOC already have opened those floodgates with their carefully thought out decision to be “uncertain” in their “interpretation” of Obamacare, Title VII, and associated regulations and to be vague on their enforcement procedures for those.