Tag Archives: ethics

A Modern Concept of “Morality”

Posted on by
Reply

Leaving aside what led these folks to take on such debt in the first place, what a difference in the concepts of honor and morality is displayed below, both across generations and within the newer generation.  Think about what values were being taught….

On the one hand, we have these two examples [emphasis added].

Ms Cyndee Marcoux, a Massachusetts librarian, says she feels trapped.  She co-signed student loans for two of her three children—and both of them are struggling.  One, Jocelyn Marcoux, 30, says she has given up on paying back the loans that allowed her to graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2005.  An import-export agent for a freight company, she says she struggled to pay for child care and medical expenses for an autoimmune disease she developed.  “If I had known the amount of money I would have to pay a month, I wouldn’t have gone,” she says.

…

The younger Ms Marcoux feels she is taking a calculated risk, because her husband owns their home and she has little savings. “If they sue us, they can’t get anything,” she says.  But her mother sees things differently; she even moved in with her 83-year-old mother to pare expenses and make payments on Jocelyn’s loans.  “I have to,” she says. “I co-signed them.“

So, the child quit and dumped the whole obligation onto her mother.  Having little of present value other than her income stream that can be taken by creditors, Marcoux the Younger feels no obligation to do the right thing, solely because it’s the right thing to do.  Yet her mother hasn’t quit, isn’t “taking a calculated risk,” and isn’t reneging on the joint obligation.  The mother understands the nature of commitment: “I have to.”  Even when there are no material consequences for not honoring it.

I also have to wonder two things: what was the mother teaching the daughter early on, and what prompted the daughter (and mother) to sign loans that they did not understand?

and

[G]randparents are getting pulled into the debt morass too; some of them co-signed when a student’s own parents didn’t qualify to help out.  Pam Gerke, a 49-year-old divorced fourth-grade teacher in Davison, MI, owes $98,000 on her own student loans—too much, she says, for her to co-sign her daughter’s loans for beauty school.  So Ms. Gerke’s mother, Darlene Kuhn, did so instead.

After the daughter dropped out and quit making the $200-a-month payments on her debt in 2010, the 72-year-old Ms. Kuhn took over. She says she fears her credit rating will fall, so she draws from the $1,400 a month she collects in Social Security—her only income since retiring.  “I tried to do a good deed,” she says.  Indeed, both Ms. Kuhn and Ms. Gerke say they are bitter about the whole experience. (The daughter declined to return phone messages.)  “My mother would rather not eat than not pay her bills,” Ms. Gerke says.  “I’m mortified as a mother and a daughter.”

Once again, the child feels no obligation to honor her commitments.  It’s too hard, apparently.  But morality and integrity aren’t too hard for her grandmother.

I have to wonder here, too, what values were being taught.  Also, how did the loan of the mother-between-the-grandmother-and-granddaughter get so large?

On the other hand, we have these [emphasis added].

Bob Stinson, 65, retired from his job as a FedEx Corp plane-maintenance scheduler in 2003.  Two years later, he co-signed for the first chunk of about $50,000 in student loans for his daughter Tiffany, a dental assistant with an associate degree.  Although Mr Stinson had stopped working due to degenerative arthritis, he and his wife were enjoying a comfortable retirement at their home outside Michigan City, MS, he says.

But after getting her bachelor’s degree, Tiffany Stinson had to sidetrack her plans to go to dental school to help her mom recover from serious surgery.  She says she stopped making her $1,200 monthly student loan payments when “I couldn’t pay for stuff right then.”  She has since resumed making partial payments….

A family emergency—not a personal convenience emergency—caused an interruption, but now the child, the primary borrower, is trying to catch up, instead of walking away and dumping it all on the co-signer.

And

[S]ome borrowers are simply working on paying off their debt faster—in part, to help get co-signers off the hook.  Valentina Fleer, a 29-year-old opera singer in New York, faithfully has made $864 monthly payments on about $90,000 in private student loans that helped her graduate from Barnard College and Manhattan School of Music in New York.  She says her father co-signed for some of the loans because “it was only way I could get the money.”

But her parents are Russian immigrants, and Ms Fleer says she didn’t feel that she or her parents fully understood their commitment when they applied for the loans.

“Today, she says, the debt “just hangs over me.  I make those payments because I don’t want any backlash hanging over them.“

As before, I have to wonder why they made the loan commitments if they didn’t understand what they were doing.  But, more importantly, Ms Fleer is honoring her commitment and actively declining to dump it onto her co-signer.

What Did He Know

Posted on by
Reply

…and when did he know it?

Recall that for weeks after the terrorist attack on our Libyan consulate in Benghazi Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and his staff and surrogates insisted that the attack was the result of mob action in response to a video.  Recall further that in the second Presidential debate Obama claimed that he’d called it a terrorist attack the day after in a Rose Garden speech.  Pay no attention to the folks behind the door making those later claims of reaction-to-a-video after Obama’s claimed Rose Garden characterization.

Fox News‘ Chad Pegram has obtained a slew of emails sent in near real-time as the attack was in progress and then winding down, and Fox News has published three of them (they also can be viewed here).

They are presented here.

and

and

These seem clear enough; however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now is busily denying their significance.

Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence.  And I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be.

See no evil, hear no evil….

Obama on Israel

Posted on by
Reply

Ann Bayefsky, writing for Fox News, has some thoughts on this.

President Obama told Jewish leaders in July 2009 that he was deliberately adopting a policy of putting daylight between America and Israel.

President Obama made Israeli settlements the key stumbling block in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Starting in 2009 he chose to castigate Israel publicly, often, and in extreme terms at the General Assembly and the Security Council.

President Obama treated Israel’s Prime Minister to a series of insulting snubs during his visit to the White House in March 2010.

President Obama cut a deal with Islamic states at a May 2010 meeting of parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty…agreed to help convene a 2012 international conference intended to pivot attention towards disarming Israel….

President Obama suggested in May 2011 that Israel use the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations—knowing full well that Israel considers those borders to be indefensible, and that agreements require the border issue to be determined by the parties themselves.

President Obama created a “global counter-terrorism forum” in September 2011 and invited eleven Muslim states to join—on the grounds that they were “on the front lines in the struggle against terrorism.”  At the insistence of Turkey, he then denied entry to Israel.

President Obama told French President Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2011—when he thought he was off-mike—that he regretted having to deal with Israel’s Prime Minister.

In August, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dempsey said: “our clocks are ticking at different paces” and he wouldn’t be “complicit” in an Israeli effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s] words, the Iranian threat is “existential” only for Israel;  only Israel is “right in the bull’s eye.”   President Obama’s “pro-Israel” policy, therefore, is to wait past the point that the intended victim of the planned genocide believes is safe.

President Obama denied Prime Minister Netanyahu’s request to meet with him in September, despite the Iranian peril.

[O]n Monday night, at the final debate, Governor Romney answered the question he was asked about what poses the greatest threat to our national security with “a nuclear Iran,” while President Obama responded “terrorist networks.”

RTWT.

Romney’s Tax Plan and Obama’s Tax Plan

Posted on by
Reply

It’s interesting, at this juncture just after the third debate—on foreign policy—to look at the proposals the two Presidential candidates have for personal taxes and personal tax reform (yes, yesterday’s debate and tax policy have little to do with each other, but never mind about that).

The Wall Street Journal provided a description of Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s proposal.  Against a backdrop of an across the board rate cut of 20% (along with a reduction in the top business tax rate from the current 35% to 25%), Romney is proposing a cap on the total value of the deductions and credits an individual or family might take.

During the first Presidential debate, Romney proposed

What are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance?  One way, for instance, would be to have a single number.  Make up a number—$25,000, $50,000.  Anybody can have deductions up to that amount.  And then that number disappears for high-income people.

He repeated the concept in early October, suggesting a $17,000 cap with higher income people perhaps having a lower cap.

In the second debate, Romney again put forward his concept.

I’ll pick a number—$25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use.  Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.

Of course Progressives and the NLMSM want yet more specificity, and Romney declines to provide it.  In the first place, it doesn’t get much more specific than a cap—no particular deductions or credits are on the table for elimination, so there’s nothing about which to be specific there.  In the second place, Romney acknowledges that there are, also, other

ways to reduce deductions that in any case would have to be negotiated with Congress.

This is quite a different approach to Obama’s concept of negotiation.

Why a cap, rather than eliminating outright several of these market distorting deductions and/or credits?  Each taxpayer would pick and choose the deductions and credits that are of value to him in his particular circumstance, in a particular year.  Thus, these deductions and credits would compete with each other for inclusion.  What a concept: competition and individual choice.  And we’d be accumulating empirical data about which deductions and credits really do have value for us taxpayers.  But those are anathema to Progressives, whose raison d’être would disappear the moment their dependents don’t need them anymore.

Moreover, this competition, coupled with the generally lower tax rates, would reduce the degree of market distortion that each deduction causes.

The cap also preserves, for now, the degree of progressivity in our tax code that in itself is market distorting, yet is politically necessary to get any reform be passed in today’s DC environment.  See the table below.

Notice how, under the current system, the average total of deductions and credits rises with income.  The Progressives’ evil rich would bear the brunt of the effect a deduction cap.  And middle income Americans wouldn’t feel the cap at all.

Set in apposition to Romney’s proposal is Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s tax plan.  We’ve seen his idea at the link above: raise taxes on those Americans whom he despises.  And for what purpose?  Not to pay down our national debt or even to reduce the Federal budget deficit.  No, Obama intends to use his tax increase to transfer funds to his favored Americans—union, and so-called green energy, cronies who will then fund his political power.  And he’ll use the monies to fund the rapidly increasing spending for which he called in the last two budget proposals he sent to Congress.

Hmm….

Another Thought on Racism in Education

Posted on by
Reply

Florida’s Department of Education has set race-based goals for its K-12 students (the Florida’s DoE Strategic Plan can be found here and here.  For reading, these goals are

  • Asian students: 90% reading at or above grade level
  • White students: 88% reading at or above grade level of white students,
  • Hispanic students: 81% reading at or above grade level
  • Black students: 74% reading at or above grade level
  • American Indian students: 82% at or above grade level

The math goals are

  • Asian students: 92% at or above grade level
  • White students: 86% at or above grade level
  • Hispanic students: 80% at or above grade level
  • Black students: 74% at or above grade level
  • American Indian students: 81% at or above grade level

These are not trivial differences.  Education Sector’s Director of Strategic Communications, Kristen Amundson, notes

I understand that this is recognition that students are beginning at different places—and that’s honest—but I think it is, at best, ill-advised to set different learning standards for students based on the color of their skin.

She’s being generous.  This is a blatantly racist program, and it harkens back to Woodrow Wilson’s paternalistic racism.  Some races, the Florida DoE seems to be suggesting, are just inherently inferior to others, and so they should not be held to the same standards.

Adding failure to injury, while this…policy…correctly recognizes that some groups of children start from different—lower—bases than others, it does absolutely nothing to correct those differences—which are educational, not innate capability.  Recognizing that these kids start out at different levels of preparation for school, and that much of these differences correlate with race (they also correlate with a host of socioeconomic factors—family income, family stability, and so on; these factors subsume race into them, so there’s a bit of double-counting here), makes for a useful start point.  But the Florida DoE is telling these kids that nothing will be done to help them finish school on a more-or-less equal footing with their peers.  “There’s no point in teaching you to do better.  You just can’t catch up.”

Yet the Florida School Board Association Executive Director, Dr Wayne Blanton, said this—and he was serious:

The message could have been portrayed a little clearer, but as far as racism, I see nothing in wanting to raise test scores that would be racist.  You’re trying to raise all test scores, not just in one particular group.

No, doctor, the message was portrayed quite clearly.  As clearly as your own disingenuousness.  No one is suggesting Florida is trying to raise test scores only in “one particular group.”  That’s just a cynical red herring.  What Florida is doing is providing drinking fountains, or bathrooms, to all groups—but some will be better maintained than others.