Tag Archives: ethics

What Do Progressives Have Against the Federalist?

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Why study it?  Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has some thoughts on the matter.

…despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can’t be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds.

And

The Federalist deals with the reasons for preserving the union, the inefficacy of the existing federal government under the Articles of Confederation, and the conformity of the new constitution to the principles of liberty and consent.  It covers war and peace, foreign affairs, commerce, taxation, federalism and the separation of powers.  It provides a detailed examination of the chief features of the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

Shockingly,

It advances its case by restatement and refutation of the leading criticisms of the new constitution.

Actual logic.  What’s up with that?

Amazingly, our pseudo-elite schools blow off this collection of essays almost entirely.  At Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley, for instance, political science majors can get their BS/BAs without so much as a reference to The Federalist, and their law school graduates (except for Princeton, which has no law school) can get their law degrees with the same level of ignorance of how our legal system, and the laws within (and without) it, are intended to operate.

Never mind that the collection of essays comprises a most sound analysis of the problems our Constitution was intended to solve (have these institutions, or their graduates, even heard of the Articles of Confederation?) and the manner in which the government of which our Constitution is the blueprint was intended to operate.

Again, I ask: why do Progressives avoid The Federalist as assiduously as they do?  I can think of two reasons.  One is Berkowitz’: the essays are about a Constitution that they think no one can understand because it’s old, and it’s not binding on anything, anyway.  It’s wholly irrelevant.

But there’s another reason, too.  If they knew and understood these arguments, they’d have a harder time trying to criminalize those who disagree with them.

Update: corrected the last link, which had been broken.

The Desperation of President Obama

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President Obama has opened a new front in his re-election ad hominem campaign.  Now, through his chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, he’s accusing those who disagree with him of being criminals.  This is a continuation of the Obama effort to draw attention away from those failed policies behind the curtain, and it demonstrates both his own moral bankruptcy and his inability to defend his policies on their merits or results.

What Obama is saying now, using Axelrod’s mouth:

We’re also going to be prepared, and I want to be clear, to respond to the attacks that we expect to continue from—not just from the Romney campaign but from the Karl [Rove] and Koch brothers contract killers over there in SuperPAC land, who are going to continue to pound away on behalf of Governor Romney[.]

Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

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Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr, a 31-year veteran of the CIA and the author of Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, has some thoughts on our ability to answer this question a year ago.

This administration built on work pain­stakingly pursued for many years before Obama was elected—and without this work, Obama administration officials never would have been in a position to authorize the strike…that resulted in bin Laden’s overdue death.

Some of that work consisted of things President Obama considered more unsavory than assassination.

In 2004, an al-Qaeda terrorist was captured trying to communicate with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi…. That captured terrorist was taken to a secret CIA prison—or “black site….”  After being subjected to some “enhanced interrogation techniques”—techniques authorized by officials at the most senior levels of the US government—the detainee became compliant.  …he told us many things—including that bin Laden…depended solely on a single courier who went by “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.”

Culminating, ultimately, in this:

…the CIA was able to discover the true name of the courier.  Armed with that information, the agency worked relentlessly to locate that man.  Finding him eventually led to tracking down and killing bin Laden.

In sum,

…the trail to bin Laden started in a CIA black site—all of which Obama ordered closed, forever, on the second full day of his administration—and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009.

Because Obama Knows Better.

Others also have objected to Obama’s arrogance.

Government Pensions

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Steve Malanga, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, had some rather dismal things to say about the health care and pension obligations of various state and local governments.

Citing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, he wrote

Unless Illinois enacts reform quickly, [Emanuel] said, the costs of [pension and retiree health-care] programs will force taxes so high that, “You won’t recruit a business, you won’t recruit a family to live here.”

Indeed,

Early last year, [Illinois] imposed $7 billion in new taxes on residents and business, pledging to use the money to eliminate its deficit and pay down a backlog of unpaid bills (to Medicaid providers, state vendors, and delayed tax refunds to businesses).  But more than a year later, the state is in worse fiscal shape, with its total deficit expected to increase to $5 billion from $4.6 billion….

The result?  For one, Caterpillar, which makes heavy construction machinery, decided last February to build its next plant in Not-Illinois.

But Illinois isn’t alone.  California is acting just as…suboptimally.  In Oakland, property taxes are still being collected, to the tune of an additional $410 per year beyond “ordinary” property taxes, to pay off a municipal pension fund that went bankrupt over a generation ago—in 1976.  So is Massachusetts going broke.  The Massachusetts taxpayers Foundation found that, for 10 cities in the state, the average per person debt for unfunded retiree health-care government obligations was more than $13,500.

There is, though, no competition among the states for getting businesses to locate in them.  It’s a no brainer, as the difference between the neighbors, Illinois and Indiana, illustrate.  Indiana’s per capita debt for unfunded retiree health-care benefits is $81. For Illinois, it’s $3,399.

Hmm….

Some Thoughts on Student Debt

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Having railed about Federal government debt for a bit, I got interested in student debt—an other end of the scale.  Specifically, I got curious about who borrowed, by chosen major field, and what the outcomes might be of those borrowings, based on salaries for jobs in those fields.  Much of the data in this post come from Steven A Harrast’s paper, Undergraduate Borrowing: A Study of Debtor Students and Their Ability to Retire Undergraduate Loans, which can be found here.  The data in this paper are from 2003-2004, so they predate the current economic dislocation, but the principles, I think, are intact.  The paper has a lot of good information in it; RTWT.

Using a student loan calculator, we can see some expected first year salaries and “affordable debt” suggestions for a number of majors.  I’ve selected four to be used illustratively throughout this post, and I used the calculator’s default values otherwise.

Major

Starting Salary

Maximum Manageable Debt Load

Sociology

$35,300

$35,976

Education

$35,900

$36,587

Engineering

$56,600

$57,683

Mathematics

$50,000

$50,957

These outcomes hold generally: the maximum manageable debt load is roughly the first year’s salary.  More than that is “excessive borrowing;” although this is a squishy limit.  Harrast defined excessive borrowing as “the difference between debt at graduation and lender-recommended debt level,” where the latter is based on an ability to pay 8% of a graduate’s second-year salary.  Others consider excessive debt to be total debt (which would include credit card, mortgage, if any, and the like, in addition to student loan debt) greater than 37% of income, which would lead most lending institutions to decline to lend.  All three definitions lead to substantially the same amount of “excess” for the purposes of this post.

Also, it’s clear that STEM-type majors (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) pay more, and so can borrow more, than do non-STEM majors.

Who incurs excessive student debt?  According to Mark Kantrowitz, of FinAid.org, that breakout looks like this for our example majors.

Major

Per Cent Overborrowing

Sociology

5.7%

Education

4.3%

Engineering

3.5%

Mathematics

3.6%

STEM students do better at managing their greater debts.  And importantly so: the overall average per cent of students excessively borrowing, across all majors, was 4.1%.

It’s also useful to lower the bar a bit and look at the size of excessive debt, given that it exists.  One way of looking at this is to look at the 75th percentile borrowing.

Major

Student Loan Debt at Graduation

Excess Student Loan Debt at Graduation

Sociology

$30,888

$11,795

Education*

$26,944

$7,850

Engineering**

$22,239

$3,146

Mathematics***

N/A

N/A

*Here, an average of Consumer Science and Education and Special Education
**Here, an average of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering
***Data were not provided by Harrast.

Plainly, some jobs are more valuable than others.  More importantly, the rigor associated with learning those jobs seems to correlate well with the ability of students to manage their debt buildup, and of the newly graduated to manage their accrued debt.

As some have asked,

Want to major in gender studies, women’s contemporary literary issues, or African-American history? Feel free, but don’t expect a dime from the US taxpayer. Because you likely won’t be able to pay your debt, and you most likely won’t be able to find a job to support yourself. Which means the degree is essentially worthless. And that is a luxury this country cannot afford any longer.