If anyone asked me which school was the best to do an MBA, I would say the Wharton School of Business at University of Pennsylvania. Well, they just released an assessment of Biden’s massive pre-election vote buying scheme. You might have heard that the total cost of this scheme would be around 400-500 billion dollars. But that’s not what Wharton says.

Here’s an article about it from Business Insider:

President Joe Biden’s plans to forgive student loans could cost more than $1 trillion, according to estimates by the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Biden’s plan to cancel up to $10,000 in debt for people earning less than $125,000 a year, rising to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, would cost between $469 billion and $519 billion over the 10-year budget window, depending on whether it covers future students who haven’t started their studies yet, according to the model.

This is higher than its previous estimates.

Here’s where the extra 500+ billion comes from:

The plan would additionally create a new income-driven repayment (IDR) plan, under which they would pay back a maximum of 5% of the portion of their earnings that lies above 225% of the poverty line, up from the current 10% and 150%.

[…]If the Department of Information automatically enrolled borrowers in the IDR program, costs could actually reach $520 billion, according to the model.

That additional $520 billion would take the total costs of the student loan forgiveness plan to over $1 trillion, Wharton said.

It’s an election year. I guess the Democrats don’t think that their other election integrity measures (Zuck Bucks, ballot drop-offs, expanding mail-in voting, denying access to election observers, Big Tech “fact checks”, FBI election interference, etc.) will work. So they have to enslave generations yet unborn to pay for more Democrat votes. Democrats are the party of slavery. They really believe in enslaving people to pay for their reckless, irresponsible decisions.

I had a talk with a Canadian recently about health care. He had a lot to say about his own country’s free health care system, and how wonderful it was to not have to pay for health care. I was skeptical about the rosy picture he painted. After all, I have friends in Canada, and they have told me about their country’s high tax rates. And I’ve heard about the waiting lists, too. Let’s look at the evidence.

The Fraser Institute is a non-partisan think tank based in Canada that looks at policies to see whether they are achieving good results for Canadians. Each year they release statistics about the cost and performance of Canada’s health care system. The most recent report is for 2021 (preliminary numbers).

The report (PDF) says:

In 2021, the average unattached (single) individual, earning an  average income of $49,215, will pay approximately $4,296 for public health care insurance. An average Canadian family consisting of two adults and two children (earning approximately $150,177) will pay about $15,039 for public health care insurance.

Do Canadians really pay $15,039 per year for health care? Or are they paying to get on a waiting list for health care?

Let’s see another 2021 report, this one about health care wait times:

Specialist physicians surveyed report a median waiting time of 25.6 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment—longer than the wait of 22.6 weeks reported in 2020. This year’s wait time is the longest wait time recorded in this survey’s history and is 175% longer than in 1993, when it was just 9.3 weeks.

The waiting time for a referral to a general practitioner to a specialist increased from 10.5 weeks in 2020 to 11.1 weeks in 2021. And the waiting time from seeing a specialist to actually getting treatment  increased from 12.1 weeks in 2020 to 14.5 weeks in 2021. And remember, this is Canadian health care. This isn’t the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, or Johns Hopkins. This is not the best health care in the world. That’s why Canadian politicians who swear their loyalty to the government health care system pack their bags and make for America when they need treatment. And they pay out of pocket for the best care.

Well, maybe these wait times are because the government is spending less on health care?

No. Actually, costs have been going up, and faster than other products and services.

Why is it going up? Well, like the public school monopoly, most of the money goes to administrators. There is no competitive free market system, where providers compete with each other for the dollars of their customers. No one cares about reducing costs to consumers while improving quality. Why would they? Canadians have zero choice in who gives them health care.

I did a quick search of Canadian news stories for the last week, to see what Canadians say about their health care system when they are talking to each other, instead of to Americans.

Here’s a story from the Globe and Mail, the more leftist of Canada’s national newspapers. (archived here)

It says:

One of the biggest problems such provinces are facing is a critical shortage of family doctors. One in five people in B.C. don’t have one, with more people pouring into the province every day. Last year, 100,000 people arrived – a record number that only exacerbates a desperate situation.

[…]According to Statistics Canada, 4.6 million people over the age of 12 did not have a family doctor in 2019.

[…]The shortage of physicians is a problem that has been growing over the years. Canada now ranks 51st in doctors per population, according to Index Mundi. In the 1970s, we ranked anywhere between fourth and eighth. The nursing shortage in Canada is just as severe.

And they confirm the Fraser Institute’s per-capita cost number:

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has placed Canada 31st in hospital beds per population among the 38 countries that the OECD rank. In the meantime, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, total health care spending in the country was estimated to be $308-billion in 2021 – or $8,019 per Canadian. This number represents 12.7 per cent of our GDP, which puts our health care spending among the highest in the world.

$8,019 per Canadian! That’s “free health care”?

The article talks about British Columbia in particular:

B.C. Liberal MLA Shirley Bond pointed out that, on one day this week, almost every urgent- and primary-care centre in the city of Victoria was at capacity and not taking patients. The only one that was had a 4.5 hour wait.

My Canadian challenger said that Americans were dying in the streets, because they couldn’t get health care. But I think he was actually talking about his own country. Can you imagine not being able to get into an emergency room, or an urgent care provider? That’s what they have in British Columbia.

Where I live, I can go to 3 different hospital systems within 10 miles of my house. And that’s not counting the urgent care clinics on every city block. 24-hour pharmacies open on Easter at 3 AM. My health insurance costs $85 a paycheck. And when I needed an MRI, I got it the same week.

Still think you want Canadian health care? Still think you want a government monopoly to make everyone “equal”?

I’ve been posting a lot about people in the public schools who expose children to danger, then attack parents who question what they are doing. I found a story about this for this post. I also have a new study that shows that respectfully disagreeing with children about transgenderism does not cause them to harm themselves. Then I want to talk about the root cause of these problems.

Let’s start with the UK Daily Mail:

A California mother says the government wrongfully took away her daughter, pushed the girl into transitioning to male, and is to blame for his suicide age 19.

Andrew Martinez, born Yaeli, stepped in front of a train on September 4, 2019.

[…][The] bereaved mother Abigail Martinez accused her Los Angeles County school of encouraging Yaeli to take hormones and undergo gender reassignment surgery as a child, while failing to properly treat her severe depression.

Martinez, 53, a mother of four, claimed school staff told Yaeli not to speak to her mother about transgender issues, but secretly had her join an LGBTQ group that persuaded the girl that the only way to be happy was to transition.

Read this:

The El Salvador-born mother said an older trans student ‘coached’ Yaeli on what to tell social workers to put her into foster care, so that the state would pay for her gender reassignment.

[…]Martinez said one trans friend and their parents ‘coached’ Yaeli, persuading her to run away from home in July 2016 and tell the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) that her mother had slapped her in the face.

As in most of these cases, the child was depressed by her same-age peers. Children tend to focus on appearances, not achievements, because they have no achievements. They attack people who are weird or look different. This doesn’t happen in the workplace. That’s why parents should not place their children in schools where the opinions of peers are seen as very important. Bullying causes some children who would do fine in a workplace to get depressed. And then the schools and hospitals suggest transitioning as a “cure” for the depression they caused, by not reining in the bullies.

Look:

…the mother claimed it was Yaeli’s depression that was the problem, not gender dysphoria.

[…]Instead of proper treatment for mental illness, Martinez said her daughter was encouraged by the school and her LGBT support group to take hormones and pursue gender reassignment surgery, and cut Martinez out of the process.

There’s no father in the photo in the article. Mothers who want to protect their children from the state and the schools need to prioritize commitment-ability in men, not appearance and fun. The men with uncomfortably strong theological and moral beliefs are exactly the ones who tend to stick around.

Mothers often don’t want to make moral judgments the way that fathers do:

I didn’t want to be the mean mom to say ‘no no no.’ I wanted to give her the help she needed at that time.

Mothers want to be liked. Fathers want to lead.

The secular left authorities told the mother not to talk to her child about God:

‘On the visit days, when she came to my house, I was told not to talk about God,’ Martinez said. ‘They told me if you do that, you’ll never see your daughter.

Her taxes pay their salaries. She can work for money to pay them with her God-beliefs, but they tell her what she can and can’t say to her children with their atheist-beliefs. Atheists think they know better than parents.

Everyone thinks that Obama was such a great president, but actually, he is the one who put in these policies that turn government and schools against parents:

A former civil rights director for the federal Department of Health and Human Services Roger Severino… told DailyMail.com that he believes district officials were afraid of losing funding and desperate to show their pro-trans credentials after being sued by the Obama administration in 2013 for discriminating against a trans boy, and inappropriately pushed gender reassignment on children as a result.

People like to say that disagreeing with transgenderism will cause children to self-harm, but research shows that is false.

What do the studies show?

Here’s a recent post about Sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) from the Christian Medical & Dental Associations by Andrè Van Mol, MD. SOCE refers to therapies that help people to change from same-sex orientation to opposite-sex orientation in sexual attraction, identity and/or behavior.

He writes:

To recap, using a strongly representative sample of a United States sexual minority population in data from the Generations study of the Williams Institute, Sullins used several validated measures to assess behavioral harm from having experienced sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE, now preferably called SAFE-T).

The findings “demonstrated positive evidence of the absence of harm from SOCE therapy.” Specifically, “Those who had undergone [failed] SOCE were no more likely to experience psychological distress or poor mental health, to engage in substance or alcohol abuse, to intentionally harm themselves, or to think about, plan, intend or attempt suicide, than were those who had not undergone SOCE.”

Unfortunately, any time conservative Christian men like me try to bring some rational argument and scientific evidence to bear on these problems, we get attacked by the feelings-oriented people in government and schools.

Our society has no place for male leadership

Men have a vision for children – to know God, to be independent, to be responsible, and to enter into respectful, productive relationships with worthy people of the opposite sex. We try to point children in a good direction, but many people see our leading as wrong, because children don’t get their way.

I was once interested in marriage to a “conservative” Christian woman. She was very concerned by my plans to raise children who would be financially independent and effective at serving God. She wanted them to do what they liked. I explained that people who do what they like are unstable, and unable to help people around them. The funny thing was that she was deeply in debt after doing a degree in BALLET, and unstable in her own life. She didn’t see my stability and wealth as anything to respect. Children need to rule fathers, she said. Feelings are more important than facts.

I really think we need to be more respectful of male leadership, so that children will not become victims of “compassion”.

Related posts

• Far-left students shout down father who lost his child to transgenderism
• American father loses parental rights after ex-wife announces their child is transgender
• LGBT fascism: father imprisoned for calling his biological child “daughter”
• Report: Teacher calls CPS on parents for refusing to gender their child “correctly”
• What would public school teachers do if your daughter was raped by a transgender student?
• Mom explains how she pulled her daughter out of transgender spiral
• UK parents accuse school of secretly brainwashing their child into transgenderism
• What is it really like for a young woman to regret her gender transition?