Tag Archives: responsibilities

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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John Bolton has a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he claims to be worried about the fate of the President’s National Security Council. I’ll leave aside the fact that his source is either a dishonest leaker or a voice in his head. This is what he buried toward the end of his piece:

Scowcroft’s model [of an NSC structure] bestowed a key advantage on the president: creating interagency staff who reached into bureaucratic depths gave him [the President] greater insight into potential agency agendas and disagreements before they rose to higher levels, thereby reducing the risks of confrontation and delay. A dramatically constrained NSC staff wouldn’t have such abilities.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to clean out the bureaucracies at those other agencies, eliminating agency agendas and the bureaucrats who push them, at the expense of the agenda of the White House for which they work.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to thin those agencies’ payrolls to shallow out those bureaucratic depths.

Maybe—just maybe—it would be better to install agency chiefs and deputies/assistants who would work with each other to resolve more of the disagreements, then consciously bring the remaining disagreements to the President for him to resolve—which is part of a President’s job.

No maybe, this time—it most assuredly would be better to fire those bureaucrats who would rather be confrontational than work as part of the team they were hired to be part of.

A Quick Summary

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The Institute for Justice each week summarizes several appellate court cases and publishes the summaries in its newsletter. (Subscribe to the newsletter here.) This one in particular caught my eye.

At George Floyd protest in Grand Rapids, MI, protester who approached police line is met with burst of pepper spray. As he turns away, another officer fires a special munition that’s meant for crowd control at long distance, striking him in the shoulder. Excessive force? Sixth Circuit: No QI for the special munition. It’s deadly force at that range. Dissent: There’s no case on point.

My dissent dissent: Now there is.

Appellate courts most assuredly are allowed to set precedents/issue precedential rulings. In the present case, too, the officer firing his special munition at what amounted to point blank range had constructive knowledge of the gross dangers of his action. It’s part of his crowd control special munition training.

Leaving Stuff to Heirs

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A man wrote to The Moneyist regarding his question of “fairness.” He and his wife are on their second marriages, and each has two biological children. The man has a million dollar inheritance from his parents, all of which he intends to pass to his biological children. His wife says that if she survives him, she intends to leave all of their common estate to her biological children exclusively. The man asked whether his wife’s intention was fair.

The Moneyist writer answered, in part:

A spouse’s inheritance is deemed separate property. So it is fair to leave it to your own biological children, if that’s what you want to do. Community or marital property, acquired during a marriage, goes to the surviving spouse. They can do whatever they wish with it.

That’s the purely legal answer. The writer, however, went on:

Your wife has made her plans clear. If she dies before you do, however, her kids could have a problem, because you plan to split the estate four ways, reducing your stepkids’ inheritance.

“Reducing your stepkids’ inheritance.” That distorts the matter. The man’s tacit plan, were he to survive his wife, to split the marital property four ways increases his biological children’s inheritance markedly from the complete shutout his wife plans for his kids while still leaving half the property to his wife’s kids. He could choose, per his legal control over the estate as the surviving spouse, to leave it all to his biological kids, shutting out his wife’s kids as she intends to do his.

The merits of the two spouses’ positions—what you and I, and The Moneyist, think is irrelevant. What’s fair is what the two spouses agree is fair.

There’s another lesson here, too, for blended families. The husband and wife, while they’re still prospective husband and wife, need to work this sort of thing out before they marry. If a disagreement over future plans for their prospective estate becomes a deal-breaker, it’s far better to know that in advance than after the marriage has occurred and then existed for some time. Of course, in the present case, there isn’t enough data regarding the timing of the man’s inheriting relative to their marrying to judge whether they could have worked this out in advance.

“here’s an idea”

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Allison Leigh Cowan, late of The New York Times had one concerning college admissions and how to weed out lawbreakers. Do some actual prescreening.

Start by asking applicants to pledge that they will be respectful, law-abiding members of the community if admitted. Assuming no one quibbles with that minimal threshold, delve a bit further using moral-reasoning prompts drawn from recent headlines. Applicants can reply with a simple “yes” or “no,” or submit longer answers:

      • Is it ever justified to spit on another human being?
      • Is it ever justified to pull a fire alarm in a crowded auditorium to protest a speaker some find offensive?
      • Is it ever justified to mar public spaces with hard-to-remove graffiti? Should perpetrators pay to clean it up?
      • Is it ever justified for a private individual to assassinate another private individual?
      • Is it ever justified to burn a Quran? What about destroying a mezuza on someone’s door?
      • Is it ever justified to restrain custodians or other bystanders as part of a protest?
      • Is it ever justified to set fire to the homes of authority figures?

These are, as Cowan acknowledges, navel-gazing questions, but diligent reviews of the answers can serve as useful prescreening.

Here’s another idea: in addition to that prescreening, a good idea in concept but as with all prescreening, it’s imperfect, take the follow-on step: those inclined to foment chaos or who change and become prone, should be expelled promptly and with prejudice when they do start to foment chaos, and those who broke laws in the doing should be criminally prosecuted, equally promptly.