Tag Archives: Subsidies

News

What factors are contributing to the higher education bubble?

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This article from the Wall Street Journal was discussed at length by Dennis Prager on his radio show yesterday.

Excerpt:

College costs have continued to explode despite 50 years of ostensibly benevolent government interventions, according to Mr. Vedder, and the president’s new plan could exacerbate the trend. By Mr. Vedder’s lights, the cost conundrum started with the Higher Education Act of 1965, a Great Society program that created federal scholarships and low-interest loans aimed at making college more accessible.

In 1964, federal student aid was a mere $231 million. By 1981, the feds were spending $7 billion on loans alone, an amount that doubled during the 1980s and nearly tripled in each of the following two decades, and is about $105 billion today. Taxpayers now stand behind nearly $1 trillion in student loans.

Meanwhile, grants have increased to $49 billion from $6.4 billion in 1981. By expanding eligibility and boosting the maximum Pell Grant by $500 to $5,350, the 2009 stimulus bill accelerated higher ed’s evolution into a middle-class entitlement. Fewer than 2% of Pell Grant recipients came from families making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year in 2007. Now roughly 18% do.

This growth in subsidies, Mr. Vedder argues, has fueled rising prices: “It gives every incentive and every opportunity for colleges to raise their fees.”

Many colleges, he notes, are using federal largess to finance Hilton-like dorms and Club Med amenities. Stanford offers more classes in yoga than Shakespeare. A warning to parents whose kids sign up for “Core Training”: The course isn’t a rigorous study of the classics, but rather involves rigorous exercise to strengthen the glutes and abs.

Or consider Princeton, which recently built a resplendent $136 million student residence with leaded glass windows and a cavernous oak dining hall (paid for in part with a $30 million tax-deductible donation by Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman). The dorm’s cost approached $300,000 per bed.

[…]Some college officials are also compensated more handsomely than CEOs. Since 2000, New York University has provided $90 million in loans, many of them zero-interest and forgivable, to administrators and faculty to buy houses and summer homes on Fire Island and the Hamptons.

Former Ohio State President Gordon Gee (who resigned in June after making defamatory remarks about Catholics) earned nearly $2 million in compensation last year while living in a 9,630 square-foot Tudor mansion on a 1.3-acre estate. The Columbus Camelot includes $673,000 in art decor and a $532 shower curtain in a guest bathroom. Ohio State also paid roughly $23,000 per month for Mr. Gee’s soirees and half a million for him to travel the country on a private jet.

[…]Colleges have also used the gusher of taxpayer dollars to hire more administrators to manage their bloated bureaucracies and proliferating multicultural programs. The University of California system employs 2,358 administrative staff in just its president’s office.

“Every college today practically has a secretary of state, a vice provost for international studies, a zillion public relations specialists,” Mr. Vedder says. “My university has a sustainability coordinator whose main message, as far as I can tell, is to go out and tell people to buy food grown locally. . . . Why? What’s bad about tomatoes from Pennsylvania as opposed to Ohio?”

[…]Today, only about 7% of recent college grads come from the bottom-income quartile compared with 12% in 1970 when federal aid was scarce. All the government subsidies intended to make college more accessible haven’t done much for this population, says Mr. Vedder. They also haven’t much improved student outcomes or graduation rates, which are around 55% at most universities (over six years).

[…]”Thirty-percent of the adult population has college degrees,” he notes. “The Department of Labor tells us that only 20% or so of jobs require college degrees. We have 115,520 janitors in the United States with bachelor’s degrees or more. Why are we encouraging more kids to go to college?”

Mr. Vedder sees similarities between the government’s higher education and housing policies, which created a bubble and precipitated the last financial crisis. “In housing, we had artificially low interest rates. The government encouraged people with low qualifications to buy a house. Today, we have low interest rates on student loans. The government is encouraging kids to go to school who are unqualified just as it encouraged people to buy a home who are unqualified.”

The higher-ed bubble, he says, is “already in the process of bursting,” which is reflected by all of the “unemployed or underemployed college graduates with big debts.” The average student loan debt is $26,000, but many graduates, especially those with professional degrees, have six-figure balances.

Mr. Obama wants to help more students discharge their debts by capping their monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income and forgiving their outstanding balances after 20 years. Grads who take jobs in government or at nonprofits already can discharge their debt after a decade.

“Somehow working for the private sector is bad and working for the public sector is good? I don’t see on what basis one would make that conclusion,” Mr. Vedder says. “If I had to make some judgment, I would do just the opposite.”

He adds that the president’s approach “creates a moral hazard problem. What it signals to current and future loan borrowers is that I don’t have to take these repayment of loans very seriously. . . . I don’t have to worry too much about getting a high-paying job.” It encourages “sociology and anthropology majors compared with math and engineering majors.”

The most trouble thing for me is that we are taxing money away from current earners, and borrowing money from future earners, in order to subsidize many, many degrees that will never pay back the initial investment we are making to send them to college. The more that government jumps in to pay people to do useless degrees and then doesn’t get the money back, the more students are going choose useless degrees. Other countries like New Zealand and Canada have major problems right now because these loans are not being paid back. That’s what happens when government takes over student loan administration – they aren’t as concerned about being paid back.

What’s also troubling to me is that people who choose not to go to college but instead to go to trade school or start their own businesses are subsidizing the worthless degrees that so many people choose to pursue today. Why would the government waste taxpayer money on these worthless degrees? Well, because college is four years of liberal indoctrination. Students are so stupid that they will actually accept the propaganda pushed by professors as if it were true, even though these professors often have no experience in the private sector themselves. And these students will have the illusion of being educated as they vote for the secular left come election time. They don’t even realize that they are voting to harm their prospective employers and increase the national debt which they will have to pay back. When I try to talk to them about it, they seem to fall back on name-calling instead of making any kind of factual case. This seems to be the result of college as well. They’ve learned to demonize their opponents rather than debate them with evidence.

News

If we pay women to have children before marrying, will they do it more?

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Dina tweeted another article from the UK Daily Mail about the problem of paying women to have children before marriage.

Excerpt:

Talking about her future, a young woman neighbour told me: ‘Everyone is going to be a single mother in the  end — you just have to find the  right donor.’

Her view was shared by many of those who lived in the various council estates where I grew up. Single parenthood was the normal method of rearing children.

While my own father left our home when I was young, my mother, who has lived in Britain since emigrating from Jamaica with my grandparents, has been devoted to her children.

Although my father was a good dad and maintained contact, lots of my friends were not so fortunate. Few had any involvement with their fathers.

In many of these homes, the State was almost invariably the main breadwinner, with the families in receipt of welfare cheques.

With the State providing unceasing financial support, there was little thought given to the costs and responsibilities of having children.

[…]The welfare state was meant to be a symbol of civilised society, giving support to the genuinely poor and vulnerable. Today, though, it too often acts as a gigantic engine of social breakdown. Costing more than £220 billion a year, it simply incentivises personal irresponsibility and family collapse.

Far from rescuing people from disadvantage, it traps many claimants and their children in the destructive cycle of welfare dependency, where values such as ambition and commitment are lost. It should come as no surprise that in the parts of the country where welfare dependency and joblessness are most prevalent, fatherhood is the exception rather than the rule.

A report published last month by the independent think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, showed that the number of lone-parent families is increasing by 20,000 every year, with the total expected to reach  two million by 2015. Incredibly, in some areas of the country, such as Riverside in Liverpool or Ladywood in Birmingham, more than 70 per cent of households with dependent children are headed by lone parents.

Children who grow up in these places rarely come across a male role model.

Today, around half of British births take place outside wedlock, while just over a quarter of all families are headed by lone parents.

Despite a wealth of evidence that absent fathers put children at a disadvantage, I find it deeply depressing that the political class is terrified of taking any action to shore up family life.

Leftist political parties in the UK put in place a system in which women were encouraged to have children out of wedlock because they would receive taxpayer money – money taken from high-earning married men – in order to have children before getting married.

There’s actually a reason why the government pays women to have children before marriage. It’s because of an ideology called radical feminism. Radical feminism supports single motherhood by choice, because radical feminists are opposed to traditional marriage. In a traditional marriage, the man typically works to provide money to support the family, and he derives from that provider role the authority to lead the family on moral and spiritual issues. Women typically focus more on raising and educating the children and supporting the husband/father by doing home-related tasks. These traditional rules are suited to men and women respectively, but they are opposed by feminists because they are “unequal” – just because they are different. And that’s why radical feminists want to undermine marriage. What better way to undermine marriage than by paying women to replace the male role in marriage with government?

Now how should we fix this? Is the solution to tell men to “man up”? No. That is a slogan, not a solution – it does not address the root cause of the problem of fatherlessness. One positive change is to remove the welfare that makes it easier for women to have children out of wedlock without needing to choose a man who is proven to be able to perform the provider role. Today, we have a massive problem where women are not even looking to men to provide for them. Traditional male roles are out. Bad boys are in. Many women grow up fatherless and have no idea what a man actually does in a marriage. When selecting men for relationships, their most important criteria is physical appearance – not providing, protecting, moral leading or spiritual leading.

I’ve even noticed a trend lately where women are even claiming that good-looking terrorists like Tsarnaev and murderers like Hernandez are innocent of the crimes they actually committed, just because these men are “too good looking to be guilty”. This is a whole other level of wrong, but it’s not surprising with women who have been taught that men have no special roles that they are supposed to be performing. The faster we cut off the money for women who prefer bad-boys to provider-men, the better off children will be.

News

Obama’s budget proposal would increase taxpayer funding of abortion

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The Heritage Foundation explains.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2014 budget released yesterday persists in entangling taxpayer dollars in the abortion industry.

Obama’s budget includes $327 million for Title X family planning programs, a more than $30 million increase over last year’s request. Title X is one of a number of sources of government funding to Planned Parenthood, which performs roughly one out of every four abortions in the United States and was recently accused of tacitly supporting infanticide.

In 2011 alone, Planned Parenthood received over $542 million in total taxpayer funding while performing a record 333,964 abortions. According to analysis by the Susan B. Anthony List, Planned Parenthood has performed almost 1 million abortions in the past three reporting years alone.

Even though the organization boasts the title of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has ridden the waves of taxpayer funding to millions of dollars in annual surpluses. During its last reporting year, like many before it, Planned Parenthood saw a very comfortable income, reporting excess revenues exceeding $87 million and net assets of more than $1.2 billion.

How does Planned Parenthood feel about infanticide? Let’s see:

If the organization’s single-minded provision of abortion services isn’t enough to question the continual stream of federal tax dollars, recent disturbing admissions by a local Florida Planned Parenthood affiliate should at least raise scrutiny of the organization’s federal funding.

A few weeks ago, a local Planned Parenthood representative testified against a Florida bill that would require abortion doctors to provide emergency care for infants born after a failed abortion attempt. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,” asked one Florida legislator during the hearing, “what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

Instead of expressing the need to provide potentially life-saving medical care to the child, Planned Parenthood official Alisa LaPolt Snow simply responded, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”

The Obama Administration also continues to export taxpayer funding of abortion, requesting $37 million for the United Nations Family Population Fund (UNFPA). Despite continued assertions that UNFPA has been involved in China’s coercive one-child policy, the U.S. government persists in sending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to an organization complicit in forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations.

Previously, I wrote about how Obama voted for infanticide several times and he opposed the ban on partial birth abortions.

Excerpt:

BAIPA [The Born Alive Infant Protection Act] (both the federal and Illinois state versions) on the other hand, was introduced to insure that babies who survive attempted abortions are provided the same medical care and sustenance as any other infant born alive. BAIPA was introduced after evidence was presented that babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions were simply discarded in utility closets without food, care, or medical treatment until they died.

As both Andy and I pointed out last night (and numerous times before), state senator Obama fought against the Illinois version of BAIPA that was identical in all material respects to the federal version. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama claimed that he voted against the Illinois BAIPA because it failed to contain a “neutrality clause” making it clear that the bill did not affect the right to an abortion. This is false. Documents obtained by National Right to Life show that the Illinois BAIPA did, in fact, contain a neutrality clause identical to the federal version.

As noted yesterday, not one U.S. senator voted against  BAIPA. Even NARAL didn’t oppose it. At the time of the vote, CNN reported that NARAL’s spokesman said the following:

We, in fact, did not oppose the bill. There is a clear legal difference between a fetus in utero versus a child that’s born.And when a child is born, they deserve every protection that the country can provide. (Emphasis added).

The logical import of Obama’s vote against BAIPA is that he disagrees, i.e., once a baby has been targeted for abortion it thereafter has no inherent right to the food, comfort, and medical care provided to other babies born alive. Indeed, during Illinois state senate deliberations on BAIPA, Obama stated that one of his objections was that the bill was “designed toburden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion.” Apparently, once the decision to abort has been made, a child is doomed even if born alive.

When it comes to abortion, there is no one more radical than Barack Obama.