Tag Archives: politics

Another Reason Why

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Here is another reason our nation’s student loan debt has gotten out of hand. The subheadline goes

Millions of Americans suddenly owe billions of dollars in student debt after years of forbearance

The foolishness of the forbearance itself contributed to the enormous risks the massive student loan overhang represents for our economy. There’s nothing sudden, though, about the reappearance of that debt.

The article then does nothing to correct this distortion. Here’s the lede:

Millions of Americans had their student-loan payments put on pause during the pandemic. Now they are back on the hook again.

They never were off the hook; none of those loans were forgiven in any legal way. They’ve always been on the hook. “Millions of Americans” have owed those billions of dollars all along. This sort of distortion is even more heavily contributory to those risks.

Full stop.

There’s a Hint There

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President Donald Trump’s (R) National Security Council is being reorganized and downsized streamlined in a badly needed revamp. One demonstrated need is this:

The goal, according to one official, is to streamline processes within the NSC, which coordinates national security and foreign policy for the president….

This is a continuation of Fiona Hill’s (remember her?) anger over her ad hoc interagency coordination group foreign policy inputs not being obeyed by Trump I. It’s not the NSC’s job—or it should not be—to coordinate national security and foreign policy for the President. It’s the NSC’s job—or it should be—to coordinate national security and foreign policy inputs to the President’s own national security and foreign policy development and decisions.

The move is intended to increase DoD’s and State’s direct involvement in those inputs, and that’s entirely appropriate. Homeland Security’s inputs should be increased, as well, given that that Department was created long after the NSC. The three departments, too, already form—or should form—the core of all of those policy development inputs.

Misguided Categorizations

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The Wall Street Journal has them in its article concerning some outcomes of the just-passed House version of the budget reconciliation bill. The headline reads

The Biggest Losers in Trump’s Megabill

Some Medicaid users are categorized as losers. House-passed work requirements would mean some few millions would lose Medicaid coverage unless they show they’re working part time or are actively seeking work or they are volunteering. Separately, nearly a million and a half illegal aliens would lose coverage. It’s hard to see how these are losers. Those going back to work rather than coasting on our taxpayer handouts stand to gain morally and in the medium- and longer-term economically by having jobs and being able thereby to move up the economic ladder. Those volunteering will do much good for their community while gaining—if they volunteer seriously—valuable work experience. The illegal aliens being denied coverage can’t be losers, since it’s not a loss to no longer receive that to which they were never entitled in the first place.

Older food-aid recipients are categorized as losers from those same work requirements, here being extended to age 64. This is an especially wrong categorization since these folks actually gain in two ways. The first and immediate way is from the same gains as just above, for all that the longer-term part is absent. The second way these folks actually gain, though, directly addresses that longer term: by working those added years, they’re plussing up the Social Security payments they’ll receive when they actually retire.

Clean-energy projects are categorized as losers. The House-passed bill cancels these projects’ tax credits on an accelerated (relative to the originally proposed glacial) schedule. This time, the projects really are losers, but our economy gains enormously by cutting off those money wasters and by reducing the energy production and market distortions such credits have created.

Some student-loan borrowers are categorized as losers. The House-passed bill would put them on one of two offered repayment plans. This actually makes the borrowers winners, since it makes it possible for them actually to repay their loans and get those yokes off their necks.

EV/hybrid car owners and buyers are categorized as losers. Here, as with clean energy, the battery car buyers will lose out on subsidies, but our economy as a whole—and ultimately those battery car buyers—will gain sharply. These wastes of our taxpayer money will stop, and those subsidies’ production and market distortions will disappear.

While it’s true enough that the House-passed bill has much for which to be criticized—it doesn’t reduce tax rates enough, and it doesn’t cut spending nearly enough—these five items aren’t on that list.

An Irrelevant Argument

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Or it should be.

Recall that the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has canceled Harvard University’s authorization to enroll foreign students over that school’s decision to not bother in any serious way to protect the safety and free speech rights of Jewish students and to keep enrolling “students” who then engage in anti-American and pro-terrorist riots, building seizures, and vandalism, along with its refusal to expel and bring charges against those “students” already enrolled who’ve engaged in those behaviors. These school administration decisions could rise to the level of civil rights law violations, similar as they are, to Columbia University’s decisions which has resuled in that school being charged by HHS with civil rights law violations.

Harvard’s situation:

Harvard enrolls about 7,000 international students—more than 25% of the student body—and like many US universities it relies on their tuition payments, which are often full-fee.

As Noem noted,

It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments[.]

This echoes SecState Marco Rubio’s acknowledgment that even getting a visa (student or otherwise) in the first place is a privilege and not a right. Both acknowledgments also carry the flip side that our government has no obligation to grant visas and no obligation to authorize colleges or universities to enroll foreign students.

Still, Harvard has filed an appeal to Noem’s decision and is seeking an injunction, trying to get a judge to once again dictate from the awesome heights of a district court knoll top what a coequal branch of our government can do regarding foreign policy. In his letter “to the community,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote that the cancelation,

imperils the future of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams[.]

This is both cynically specious and wholly irrelevant. That Harvard has designed its business model to be so dependent on foreign student enrollment in no way obligates our government to allow such enrollment. Further, in no way do future “thousands of students” or “scholars” have any intrinsic right to a student visa, or any other form of visa.

The DHS decision here certainly should serve as a warning to others at colleges and universities, and at any other institution or enterprise, that coming into our nation for any purpose is a privilege and not a right, and that granting such a privilege incurs an obligation on the grantee to obey all of our laws, including the free speech rights of others and the sanctity of property, whether privately held or government held.

There is no part of Harvard’s argument that is relevant to the case. What matters—all that matters—is what does the law say? Is this cutoff permissible under existing law?

If the cutoff is permissible, then a non-activist judge who obeys our Constitution and his oath of office, must deny the injunction request. Harvard should have two basic choices: shape up and stop coddling rioters and vandals, or work to change the law.

Unfortunately, the case went before just such an activist judge. Federal District Judge Allison Burroughs has issued Harvard’s requested injunction staying the DHS cancelation.

Not the Right Answer

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Nvdia’s honcho, Jensen Huang, thinks the administration’s export controls on chips is a failure. He claims all the controls have done is to galvanize[] Beijing to push ahead faster with its own artificial-intelligence technologies.

The local companies are very talented and very determined, and the export controls give them the spirit, energy and the government support to accelerate their development[.]

No doubt. That’s not the whole story, though. Forcing the PRC to spend its own resources on those developments rather than importing the latest and greatest, and then reverse engineering them, copying them, skipping development steps—freeloading off our expenditures—is good for us.

Aside from that, ever since the beginning of the Industrial Age, Western political, economic, and intellectual freedoms have powered Western innovation far ahead of anything dictatorships have been able to achieve, from Russia, the USSR, mainland China, pre-WWII Japan. That’s why they were at such pains to copy Western developments rather than developing their own. The copying was, for a long time, a major component of post-WWII Japan, too.

Rather than giving up on chip export control, we need to tighten them further to the point of cutting off chip exports to the PRC altogether, and we need to get Europe to do the same. There’s no reason to doubt the fundamental innovative superiority of the West so long as we preserve those political, economic, and intellectual freedoms and expand them by getting our governments out of the regulatory way. Free markets always will do better at enhancing our innovative prowess than centrally planned markets in the long run, and in the intermediate run, as well.