The news blasted all over social media, confirming the sufferings of an entire generation of degree holders. Student loan delinquency rates have hit 10.2 percent in the second quarter. It’s a 21-year high, and worsens a $1.7 trillion debt crisis.
Posts on social media reveal graduating students with debts that are rising higher despite high monthly payment. This is due to dramatic changes in interest rates combined with stagnant real wages.
Depending on the type of loan, interest rates can run between 6 and 17 percent, which means that students are paying mostly interest for a few years. With big increases, they can be under water fast. This is normal for home loans. Borrowers know they will pay more than twice the sticker price over the course of a loan. They put up with it with the expectation of a rising asset valuation. The home is the asset in question.
What is the asset with a student loan? The degree. You can stop laughing now.
Welcome to the world of student debt, Class of 2020. What seemed like free money to fund a four-year vacation turns out to be the worst-possible beginning of a new career. Expenses eat up low salaries while interest and taxes take the rest. Meanwhile, graduates are greeted with a reality that they did not expect. Their degrees can get them in the door but guarantee nothing in terms of advancement. Nearly every profession requires certifications that are hard to obtain and impossible to game.
For that matter, I know plenty of 30-somethings who are still paying on debts from college they regret attending and which contributed nothing to their real-world careers.
Life is hard enough but many of these young professionals are also carrying six-figure debts that make it impossible to consider homes and drive down their credit rating. It feels like a sand trap that is never going away. Those with family money can crawl to mom and dad but those without are seeing another decade ahead or more in which they are barely scraping by.
It’s no way to begin a career. It’s easy enough to look at these weeping young people and say they should have planned better. But at the age of 18, when these loans begin, most high-school graduates (especially of that period) have no idea what money is, where it comes from, how it works, and no clue of the hard walls built by accounting realities. They would all try another path today if they could but what’s done is done.
Were they lied to? Yes, but by no one in particular. The period of zero interest rates and fake prosperity deluded an entire generation. Cheap credit and free money encouraged vast corporate expansion that focused mainly on beefing up the labor force, tagging anyone with a degree and sticking them in jobs with low expectations and high salaries. It was all too good to be true but it appeared to be the preferred career path.
The advent of high interest rates beginning three years ago was a silent marking of the end of an era. It was the dawn of the real world of financial constraints. Those are now hitting an entire generation very hard. The credit companies are leaning in hard, collecting all they can, while the bosses at work are demanding more and more productivity, even as job security is no longer what it was. People are being fired all the time with downsizing now a constant feature of professional life.
Debt limits options. Debt hobbles choice. Debt ties you down. Debt is slavery. At the very time when the world should be their oyster, millions of young people are faced with this yoke around their neck.
Ten years ago, young people were getting the message that these loans would never have to be paid. They believed it, and voted for politicians who said this. It was always a ruse. The last administration did their best to wipe out the liabilities for some people in exchange for votes but it came nowhere near affecting the whole. Now the realities of debt finance are eating up the standard of living even as the dollar has lost 25 percent of its value (at least) in the last five years. Prices are still rising.
The problem for these young people is even more fundamental than finances. It is about expectations. Their parents lived better than any generation in American history. Thanks to leverage and boom times, they had huge houses and high living standards with health care, vacations, and rising income. This was a highly unusual time and it was never justified by the fundamentals. The Fed policies of 2000 and then 2008 spread around credit like it was growing on trees, while inflation was kept at bay thanks to the dollar’s status as the international reserve currency.
Somehow an entire generation was led to believe that this is the life to which they would be entitled if only they finished college with a magic piece of paper in hand. There was no sense that they would be starting from scratch, that their parent’s lifestyles were not only a result of a lifetime of work and asset accumulation, but had also been subsidized by cheap credit.
The single most important insight for young people just starting out is this: They cannot and will not live like their parents for a very long time. They must cut back, eat at home, reduce belongings, stay out of debt, live in small apartments, buy used cars, seek out free entertainment, and cut it out with all the frivolous spending.
This is especially true for those who get married after college. There should be no hopes of immediately living the high life like their parents who had 20 to 30 years to get there. The young couple should and must prioritize paying off all debt, never accumulating more. Revolving credit cards are out of the question. The cheapest apartment rents are necessary. Everything you buy should be from thrift stores and eBay, never retail.
A young couple who takes on this way of life will not only build a strong and lasting relationship, they will also build a financial future together. The seeming deprivation becomes a bond that is forged between a young couple. They should entirely ignore their friends who are climbing up the socio-economic ladder too quickly with fancy cars and club memberships, and dismiss Instagram postings of vacations in far-flung places. This is all nonsense.
If one or the other partner in a relationship does not understand this, and seeks to inhabit the same lifestyle from whence they came from their parents, the relationship will be doomed. Living even slightly above one’s means over a long period can lead to financial and personal disaster and a broken home. Living frugally means developing the habit of foregoing consumption and doing without, in exchange for which you build a marriage and home.
This is all-the-more true if a young couple is planning on having children. It’s simply not possible to maintain two full incomes, as moms quickly discover their primary obligation as caretakers and the career path faces massive disruption. Child care is unaffordable if it is even available, and so the best financial decision could be to move to one income. If debt is a factor, this decision is even more difficult.
It has always been true for most that every new generation must build a life for themselves. The notion that the children would enter adulthood with the same standard of living they left is the delusion of very recent origin. It is ending now, quite rudely too. The sooner young people can develop the spending and saving habits of their great-grandparents, the better off they will be over the long term.
As for student loans, those too are rather new developments. Fifty years ago, it was common for students to work their way through school, paying for tuition, housing, books, and food. If they were unable to do this, they did something else.
Today, working your way through college and paying all bills is inconceivable. Paradoxically, the expansion of student loans only ended up driving up tuition costs that made the loans necessary.
It is already too late for those with six-figure debts but a new generation can learn by watching the sufferings of those to whom the system lied. They can make smarter choices about finances, education, and the need for sound personal finance.
On May 5, for the first time since the onset of the coronavirus
pandemic, the US government will resume student loan collections. Since
March 2020, the Department of Education has suspended actions to collect
on defaulted loans. However, America is now five years removed from the
once-in-a-century public health crisis, and the Trump administration
thinks it is time to target borrowers so that taxpayers will no longer
shoulder the burden.
Student Loan Collections Have Started
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced
on April 21 that her department would restart efforts to pursue unpaid
federal student loans. This initiative would affect approximately five
million borrowers who have not made a payment in 360 days and have
transitioned to default. Another roughly four million borrowers are also
in late-stage delinquency, which is between 91 and 180 days.
The department estimates that a quarter of the federal student
loan file could be in default, which would represent a massive loss to
US taxpayers.
“American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral
for irresponsible student loan policies,” McMahon said in a statement.
“The Biden Administration misled borrowers: the executive branch does
not have the constitutional authority to wipe debt away, nor do the loan
balances simply disappear.”
The campaign will begin by prompting the Office of Federal Student
Aid to restart the Treasury Offset Program. All borrowers have received –
or soon will – communications with three requests: Sign up for an
income-driven repayment plan, enroll in loan rehabilitation, or begin
completing monthly payments. Should individuals choose not to cover
their obligations, the federal government will garnish wages, keep
income tax refunds, or target Social Security benefits.
Credit scores will also be damaged. According to a March Federal
Reserve Bank of New York paper, as many as nine million student loan
borrowers could experience sharp cuts to their credit scores in the
coming year. So, up to 15% of debtors’ disposable income could be
confiscated, and credit scores could be eroded.
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Financial experts note that students or graduates typically have
three avenues to explore: repaying loans in full, consolidating student
loans, or asking for loan rehabilitation. Whatever option is selected,
borrowers will know one thing: The US government is engaged in
no-holds-barred student loan collections.
And, unsurprisingly, many young Americans are unhappy about it.
Oh, Poor Baby
In McMahon’s statement last month, she made a point often lost in
today’s political discourse. “Debt doesn’t go away; it gets transferred
to others,” McMahon noted. “If borrowers don’t pay their debts to the
government, taxpayers do.” However, do not share that information with
the scores of Gen Z Americans who have taken to social media to air
their grievances over personal responsibility.
Popular political YouTuber Andrew of Don’t Walk, Run! Productions put together a compilation video
of various individuals complaining about student loan collections
restarting and begging the government to approve a regressive
forgiveness policy.
Your News – How You Like It!
One individual told her TikTok followers that the COVID-19 pandemic
is not over and that this is reason enough not to repay her student
loans. Another said, in earnest, that she did not owe the federal
government because she is an upstanding woman who earned a degree.
Several others claimed they could file for bankruptcy to absolve any
responsibility for repaying student loans, which is something they will
eventually find out has practically a 0% chance of happening.
Most entertaining are the people who compared student loans to the
pandemic-era paycheck protection program (PPP). This government loan
program was crafted to ensure businesses kept their staff employed
during the pandemic and would not have to repay the funds if they
followed this provision. As you can tell, both federal programs are
vastly different. The funny part is that many of these complainers have
proclaimed their intelligence but cannot devise a strategy for repaying
their debts.
Reforms Needed
Today, total student loan debt is approximately $1.6 trillion,
impacting more than 46 million Americans. Proponents will say this is
necessary to generate competent contributors to society. Critics will
argue that this is an absurd number and the country is not better off
because a 24-year-old kid from Portland, Oregon, earned a four-year
degree in lesbian dance theory. The latter would be correct. Tuition
inflation has rocketed over the last 25 years, caused by student loans,
since universities and colleges receive guaranteed funding. A
market-oriented student-loan system, meanwhile, would be a superior
alternative as lenders would consider what the borrower is studying, and
the bank would be more likely to extend a loan to someone studying
medicine or engineering rather than sociology or Shakespeare. A better
way to avoid producing a generation of university-educated baristas.
As the White House employs various policy changes, the Department of
Education needs to ask: Should a 19-year-old whose brain is still
developing and who likely did not study economics or finance in high
school have access to $100,000?
~
Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.
This is the last full day of Joe Biden’s dismal presidency, so let’s do what we did with Justin Trudeau and reflect on his pathetic legacy.
I’ve already provided my own economic assessment of Biden’s record, so now let’s review how he is seen by others. We’ll start with the American people. According to a new poll, they think Biden accomplished nothing.
For what it’s worth, I wish Biden accomplished nothing.
Now let’s look at some excerpts from George Will’s assessment of Biden in the Washington Post.
Joe Biden’s failed presidency is ending with a blizzard
of decisions that validate voters’ rejection of his vice president… Two
months into his presidency, the seeds of its ruin were sown with the
American Rescue Plan… The predicted result, inflation, was exacerbated
by the Inflation Reduction Act’s torrent of subsidies in the service of
“industrial policy.”
…
No prior president used mass communications more insultingly to more
Americans than Biden did with his hyperbolic warnings about the danger
of Americans imposing “Jim Crow 2.0” and voting for “semi-fascism.” …
The
Biden administration’s extralegal overreaching earned many judicial
rebukes. These concerned, inter alia, an eviction moratorium, a vaccine
mandate, student loan forgiveness, and pressuring social media companies
to intensify censorship (“content moderation”) of speech
(“disinformation”) annoying to the administration.
Kevin Williamson, opining for the Dispatch, might be even harsher.
…one naturally wants to be charitable toward him as his
failure as a politician and his failure as a father are fused together
in the waning days of his presidency, a period dominated by his
dishonest and impolitic pardon of his son Hunter… There is simply no way
to tell the truth about Joe Biden’s life and career without kicking him
while he is down…
The defining qualities of Joe Biden the political man
were arrogance and dishonesty, compounded by stupidity. …Biden
will forever be paired with Trump in the history books and will be the
smaller figure—Shemp to Trump’s Curly. …One could go through the
greatest hits: …his creepy handsiness, …his reality-proof incompetence
in the face of persistent corrosive inflation, his lawlessness on
student loans, his stupidity on uranium, allowing the chaos at the
border to fester and intensify…
But what sticks in my mind about Biden
is his slander of an obscure nobody, truck driver Curtis Dunn, whom he
spent years lying about. Dunn was the other driver in the accident in
which Biden’s first wife and his infant daughter died, an accident
investigators at the time said was almost certainly caused by Mrs.
Biden, who apparently pulled into oncoming traffic with the baby in her
lap.
Biden repeatedly claimed that Dunn was a drunk driver, a menace
“who drank his lunch,” even though there was absolutely no evidence that
this was true. It was, politically speaking, a better story, and Biden
has always put his own selfish, greasy little interests ahead of those
of ordinary people in the real world.
I’ll close with the observation that I’ll be glad when Joe Biden is gone, but that doesn’t mean I’m overly excited that Trump is coming back.
But I worry that Trump will reinvigorate the left and that this will
lead to a Democratic Congress in 2026 and the frightening prospect of a
President AOC (or someone similarly terrible) in 2028.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: The Moon is “Made Up Mostly of Gases” - “How could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee served as a member of the House Science
Committee and the Ranking Member on the Space and Aeronautics
Subcommittee. And has spent almost 30 years in Congress. She’s also an almost unbelievable idiot. There was a story going around that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee when
visiting the Johnson Space Center asked whether the Mars Pathfinder
would be able to find “the flag the astronauts planted there before”. Rep. Lee’s people denied that one up and down. Unfortunately for her, this one was caught on video..............
2024 Election
Biden Offers $300 Billion Bribe to Buy 30 Million Voters -AThat
comes out to be about $10,000 per voter. After $138 billion in bribes
already, Biden visited Wisconsin to
corruptly promise “student loan debt” transfer from his potential voters
to the taxpayers who are already facing $100,000 in debt per household
from the national debt. Why Wisconsin? It’s a battleground
state...............Biden has boasted about ignoring the Supreme Court’s
ruling to push
what he misleadingly calls “student loan forgiveness”. It’s not
forgiveness, it’s a transfer of the debt from the people he sees as his
voters, younger college graduates, especially those with MAs, to those
whom he sees as political enemies, older taxpayers............
My Take - The unending efforts by the left to corrupt the English language would be laughable if it wasn't so effective and dangerous. "Transferring" someone else's financial responsibilities is now "forgiveness".
Just like the murder of the innocent unborn is reproductive health, Remarkable! Daniel has an eye for this kind of corruption as he noted in 2022:
"Almond milk was going to save the planet. There were predictions that
the almond milk market would be worth $13 billion which is pretty good
for something that requires enough sweetener to destroy your teeth just
to taste moderately palatable. But almond milk isn't milk since, even in
a woke biological paradigm where men can be women and bees can be fish,
you still can't milk a tree. And almond milk isn't almonds either,
because it's only about 2% almonds. What is almond milk really: it’s
sugar and thirty other ways of saying sugar without actually using the
‘s’ word."RK
After Taking Over 3rd Largest Radio Network, Soros Plots to Take 2nd Largest- It’s not a coincidence that this is happening right before an election. In February, we reported that Soros was about to take over the third-largest broadcaster in the country, Audacy, along with its stations............Audacy claims to be able to reach 200 million people across the range
of its properties which include sports, music and talk radio stations,
as well as a large digital platform, and while Audacy is not an
inherently conservative company, it owns a number of talk radio stations
and the talk radio format caters to commuters, early risers and working
people which is to say conservatives. And the Soros takeover will give
one of the biggest funders of leftist extremism control over not only
conservative talk radio stations but those that are, like WILK, in swing
states. That includes two other stations in Pennsylvania and many
others across the country...............
Crime in America
Gun Control Activists Wanted This 85-Year-Old Woman to Die - No
one wants children to die in school shootings. We want women like
Christine to live. Every time I click on YouTube, it seems like I get
another Sandy Hook
Promise gun control ad. I’m sympathetic to parents who have suffered
the worst possible loss and want to feel like they can do something to
redeem it. Without agreeing with them. Even setting aside all the
foundational and philosophical ideals of
liberty on which the Second Amendment is based, gun control can put
unarmed people at the mercy of the armed, but that’s always been the
case in human history. What a gun can do is reverse the usual balance of
power.......
O.J. Simpson Lived Out His Worst Punishment- O.J.
Simpson lived long enough for no one to give a damn about him.
Austere religious scholar O.J. Simpson, as the Washington Post, might
have put it, has gone to whatever hell awaits evil men. Some are
disappointed that he went there at a ripe old age. Why evil thrives and
good people suffer is an age-old question and not one that we are about
to resolve here. But I will say that O.J. Simpson lived out his worst
punishment
already. O.J. was an egomaniacal narcissist obsessed with keeping the
public’s attention. His brutal murders tanked his career but made him
even more incredibly famous.......
DEI
Navy Focused on DEI, Now It Can’t Figure Out How to Build Ships - -
“We don’t have detailed plans of action, milestones, initiatives.”
“America’s Navy values diversity, equality and inclusivity,” the woke
Navy leadership claims. “We believe that when a diverse group of
individuals come together to do a job, they can do it better because of
their differences.” The Year of Hate helped accelerate the woke destruction of the US Navy.......How’s that working out? The “diverse group of individuals” can’t seem to get anything done beyond DEI sessions.............We
may no longer have a US Navy capable of taking on China, but at least
everyone is respecting everyone else’s pronouns...........
Economics: Minimum Wage is Another Leftist Disaster
Who Benefits From California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage Hike? -Socialists.
California’s runaway one-party state goes from one disastrous
legislative session to another where anything enough leftists back
becomes law. With the state already bleeding small businesses, the $20
fast food
minimum wage hike is another bomb tossed at an industry that barely
survived the pandemic lockdowns, which shut down a lot of fast food
joints while protecting big businesses. In an economy with soaring food
prices and reduced consumer spending on eating out (among working-class
and lower-middle-class people), the business model doesn’t work and is
just leading some places to shut down. The Fosters Freeze shutdown made
the news because it was so public, but it’s hardly alone..............
Lawfare, Dual Justice, The Constitution, Deep State Corruption
By Locking Up Navarro, Dems Changed the Balance of Power -Now
they want to change it back. When House Democrats decided to lock up
Peter
Navarro for not going along with their hearings, they fundamentally
changed the game. Unlike the J6 prosecutions, House subpoenas leading to
prison time is breaking new ground. Everyone used to know how
House subpoenas worked. House committees
wanted to show off and enlist participants in their, usually partisan,
dog and pony show. Generally, administration officials complied.
Sometimes they fought them. Post-Navarro, the Biden administration,
wanted to treat House subpoenas as business as usual. And pushback came
from a very unexpected source.................
No Country for Old Supreme Court Justices 78-year-old
senator demands 69-year-old justice retire. After Justice Scalia’s
death, then RBG’s
death and then Democrats and leftists launching a pressure campaign to
get Justice Breyer to step down, I predicted we would be looking at this
as the new normal. And here it is. Moneyball for Supreme Court
justices means picking them young and then getting out as soon as they
get old. Or older.
...........Blumenthal told NBC. “I
have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the
competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s
any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying —
graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body
included.” Vietnam War hero Sen. Richard Blumenthal is 78 years old.
Sotomayor is 69. If anyone should be stepping down here, it’s Dick......
DOJ Refuses to Turn Over Biden Tape on Grounds that Congress is Mean - Has Biden learned nothing from Nixon? DOJ attorneys just spent almost an hour being yelled at
by a federal judge for telling other lawyers not to comply with a
congressional subpoena even while arresting a Trump advisor for that
very same thing. Having learned nothing, the DOJ is fighting a congressional request
for the Biden special counsel interview ‘tape’ on the grounds that,
well, they don’t like Congress who are a bunch of meanies and anyway can’t we talk about something else? Like women’s basketball? Or the eclipse? Or the speed at which paint dries..............
Leftism is now, and has forever been a disaster.
How the Democratic Party Really Got its Name- -“The most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government.”
The Democratic Party claims that it’s the party of democracy even as
it tries to suppress any democratic political opposition from its own
members and from third parties because it’s not about democracy. That’s
easy to understand when you take into account the true origins of the
Democratic Party. In my book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, I delved into the true origins of the Democratic Party. And World Net Daily (WND) ran an exclusive excerpt of that true story......Theodore Roosevelt later described them as “Democratic
societies on the models of the Jacobin Clubs of France” and their
influence as “noxious” and “distinctly evil"...............
Why Most Americans Don’t Know the True Origins of the Left (VIDEO) The
true origins of the Left disappeared when it rewrote American history.
Generations of Americans have grown up knowing very little about actual
American history. In my interview with Anni Cyrus at Rise Up to Freedom, I discussed my new book, “Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left”
and why so few Americans know about the history revealed in it. The
answer is that a national centralized educational system rewrote
the teaching of American history following a Marxist template of
oppressor/oppressed, class and racial warfare, to the extent that
authentic history including key moments that defined America were
erased. In the process, not coincidentally, the origins of the Left that
I reveal also disappeared from history.........
Biden Admin Released Migrant Member of Terror Group Responsible for Killing Americans into U.S. - If
this administration were aiding Islamic terrorists, what would it be
doing different? In the various “border deal” negotiations, Republicans
stopped even
bothering to ask Biden to secure the border. Instead, they tried to hold
out for ending the mass release of millions of illegal border invaders
into America. But it was no deal. Biden refused to add anything more
than a smidgen of detention
capacity while continuing to release the invaders into the country with
court dates in the 2030s. Here’s what happens when you do that. Beyond
the cities staggering
under the burden of tens of thousands of invaders all demanding social
services and living quarters, actual terrorists are being released into the country........
Immigration
42% of Latinos Support Building a Wall, 39% Back Deporting All Illegals - Latinos
are apparently anti-Latino xenophobic racists. Who knew? The thing
about the Overton Window is that yes, it’s a way to make
the formerly unacceptable (open borders in which millions of invaders
enter the country with no recourse) seem acceptable, but it leads to
backlashes that make the formerly unacceptable seem acceptable in the
other direction. While Latinos were never the militant open borders
voters that white
liberals liked to believe they were, the Biden administration has
managed to get 42% of their great hope for a permanent minority majority
to back building a wall.......
Israel, Hamas, Democrats, and Joe Biden
Israel Takes Out Iranian Mastermind of Oct 7 - Another terror leader bites the dust. The Biden administration insisted that Iran was not behind the Oct 7
attacks, but it was always unlikely that Hamas could have pulled off a
precisely orchestrated operation that exploited technological
vulnerabilities in Israel’s security. Then earlier this week, Israel hit a building next to Iran’s
diplomatic facility in Damascus where senior generals in Iran’s IRGC
terrorist network were reportedly planning an assault. One of those generals appears to have been the mastermind of Oct 7.................
Biden’s Slow Motion Betrayal of Israel - The question wasn’t whether Biden would betrayal Israel, but when.
This will be far from the only post with the word “betrayal” in the
title, but it’s really been a slow-motion betrayal. It’s a matter of
perspective when you date it from, but by November there was already a
definite turn. A little over a month after the original Hamas attack,
the Biden
administration was pressuring Israel to use less armor, bomb less, and
change its government. Then came the warnings to wrap up the war by the
end of the year. Once it was clear that Israel would not cooperate, the
slow-motion
betrayal sped up a little with diplomatic, economic and military
pressure........
“Death to America”: Chant Dearborn Hamas Supporters Courted by Biden-This
is what Biden betrayed Israel and America for. Joe Biden decided to
turn on Israel over pressure from Dearborn, Michigan, also known as
Iran’s base in America. Heavily populated by Shiites and some Sunni
Islamic terror supporters, the place is notorious for its open and overt support for Hezbollah and Hamas. It’s a fact that the media used to report on before it began covering it up. When the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by MEMRI counterterrorism researcher describing Dearborn as “America’s Jihad Capital”, everyone from Biden to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (who has her own terror associates) as “Islamophobic”......
Bernie Sanders Has Office Arsonist Arrested Instead of Negotiating With Him Bernie’s office is worth more than your life. When Islamic terrorists attack America, Sen.
Bernie Sanders warns against fighting them. When Hamas attacks Israel,
Bernie condemns the Jewish State for fighting back and demands a
ceasefire. When criminals run loose around America’s cities, Bernie
insists that we treat the social injustices that cause their crimes and
let them go. But when Bernie’s own office gets torched, it’s a whole different ball game............
After Letting Osama Go 9 Times, Ex-Clintonite Complains Israelis “Fire First and Then Ask Questions” -- 100,000 dead because the Clinton administration “wouldn’t fire first”.
The Clinton administration had 9 opportunities to kill Osama bin
Laden. Hours before 9/11, Bill Clinton gave a speech in Australia
bragging that, “I nearly got him once. I nearly got him. And I could
have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called
Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and
then I would have been no better than him.” Almost 3,000 people died.
Over a hundred thousand died in the ensuing conflicts. Now Leon Panetta,
Bill Clinton’s former chief-of-staff who served
various security roles in the Obama administration, which belatedly got
Osama, has popped up to criticize Israel for being too ready to kill
terrorists...............
Biden Admin Upset Israeli Gov Hasn’t Briefed It On Invasion Date - I can’t imagine why. Prime Minister Netanyahu has announced that Israel intends to go
into the final Hamas stronghold in Rafah. Israel has set a date for
the military offensive against
the remaining Hamas terror battalions in Gaza’s southernmost city of
Rafah, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Monday
night...........Matthew Miller, the US State Department spokesman, told
reporters on
Thursday, “To my knowledge, we have not been briefed on that
date.”..............
Biden Demands Israel Stop Attacking Hamas Even If It Doesn’t Release the Hostages - A
total betrayal. The grim farce of negotiating with Islamic terrorists
always plays out the same way. The terrorists keep attacking while
playing the victim, make
escalating demands and once you start negotiating with them, the
negotiations never produce peace and don’t even reliably ensure the
release of hostages. The Biden administration initially rejected the
Islamist/Leftist
demands for a ‘ceasefire’ during which Hamas would be free to attack
Israel. Then came around to proposing them in exchange for the release
of the hostages. And now adopting the Leftist/Islamist position is just
demanding a unilateral Israeli ceasefire without the release of the hostages.......
Muslim Refugee Stabs 70-Year-Old British Man to “Free Palestine” - “He
swore by Allah that, if he had had a machine gun, and more weapons, he
would have killed more victims.” Free Palestine is popular all over. And
when you’ve gotta free
palestine, then you’ve gotta free palestine or someone else will snap it
up.Muslims as the most oppressed 2 billion supremacist majority that
denies basic human rights to non-Muslims in their own country are very
upset at the temerity of Israelis in refusing to be murdered in their
homes. And so it’s time to stab some folks to free Palestine.
Philly Mayor Claims Ramadan Shootings “Sacrilegious” - “We
stand united with the Muslim community.” Politicians tend to claim
without evidence that Ramadan, an Islamic
religious period during which violence tends to amp up, is a time of
peace. America and Israel were warned not to bomb Islamic terrorists
over Ramadan. None of these non-Muslim politicians ever give the various
Muslim gunmen the memo that Ramadan is a time of peace. And so the
violence continues, not only in Yemen, Iran or Israel, but also in Philly......
Rep. Rashida Tlaib Refuses to Condemn “Death to America” Chants Soon
Rep. Tlaib will be chanting, “Death to America” on the House floor.
Americans were shocked when a video of an Islamist anti-Israel rally in
Dearborn went viral complete with chants of, “Death to America”. The event took place in Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s district. And when a FOX
News reporter tried to ask Rep. Tlaib to condemn it, she instead bleated
about “racist tropes”, “my community” and “Islamophobia.".....
My Take - Islam is a criminal, political, terrorist movement
masquerading as a religion, and the hypocritical double standards of
these leftist misfits like Bernie Sanders and Leon Panetta is blatant treason. As for informing the Biden administrative of their plans: Well, I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect they they tell Biden on Monday, Hamas may very well know what those plans are by Tuesday. Or earlier. Who in their fight mind would trust the Biden administration with that kind of sensitive intel? RK
Transgenderism: The lies and the consequences
Puberty Blockers Are Not a ‘Pause Button’, They’re a ‘Sterility Button’ A 12-year-old boy who had taken puberty blockers for 14 months had nearly 60 percent of his sex glands had “fully atrophied.” Any significant medical intervention has a physical price. That price
may be justified by the need, but anyone who claims that there isn’t a
price, is lying. From those cheerful drug ads of families happily cavorting and living
life after they’ve taken their daily dose of CAVORTIL/XS (not to be
taken with food, other medicine or oxygen, may cause panic, unexplained
bleeding from ears, nose and toes, may not actually work, all lawsuits
subject to mediation and postponed until 2093) to media coverage, the
goal is to brand procedures and medications with some dumbed down and
simplistic buzzword........Isn’t that so reassuring? Parents are told that the alternative to
this ‘pause’ is depression and suicide. Just give your kids some puberty
blockers and give them time to “figure it out”. The reality is very different. Real life has no pause button. Neither does biology.........
June 30, 2023 Lisa Gates, Vice President of Communications, (614) 224-3255
The Buckeye Institute Celebrates Victory in Student Loan Case
Columbus, OH – On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Biden v. Nebraska,
ruling that President Biden’s student loan debt cancellation plan is
unconstitutional, agreeing with arguments The Buckeye Institute made in
its amicus brief and its case Latta v. U.S. Department of Education. In a 6-3 decision, the court said, “The text of the HEROES Act does not authorize the Secretary’s loan forgiveness program.”
“The Supreme Court’s ruling is a victory for the U.S. Constitution, taxpayers, and The Buckeye Institute’s client in Latta v. U.S. Department of Education,”said David C. Tryon, director of litigation at The Buckeye Institute. “It was obvious that President Biden didn’t have the authority to cancel nearly half a trillion dollars in debt, and the court’s decision a clear warning to future presidents that you cannot ignore the constitutional limitations of your office.”
Chief
Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, agreed with Buckeye’s
position when he explained that if Congress had intended to give the
secretary of education the power to grant “a mass debt cancellation,” it
would have made a “clear statement to that effect.” Congress did not do
so, and Chief Justice Roberts noted that “In essence, the Secretary has
drafted a new section of the Education Act from scratch by ‘waiving’
provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with
radically new text.”
Tryon
continued, “As the court found, ‘the HEROES Act provide[ed] no
authorization for the Secretary’s plan…let alone “clear congressional
authorization” for such a program.’ This ruling protects our client and
other borrowers from future financial liability and harm if future
administrations demanded repayment of loans which this administration
unlawfully tried to forgive.”
# # #
Founded in 1989, The Buckeye Institute is an independent research and educational institution – a think tank – whose mission is to advance free-market public policy in the states.
The
Buckeye Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit, and tax-exempt
organization, as defined by section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue
code. As such, it relies on support from individuals, corporations, and
foundations that share a commitment to individual liberty, free
enterprise, personal responsibility, and limited government. The Buckeye
Institute does not seek or accept government funding.
Government institutions are in the
business of making things worse in order to collect more money to make
them better. We declared war on poverty and impoverished ourselves.
After promising to fix homelessness, the streets are covered in needles
and human waste.
Nowhere is this truer than in education.
Education results are inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on them. New York has the highest per pupil spending at $25,645 and the second lowest literacy rate in the country. Utah has the lowest per pupil spending in the nation and a 90% literacy rate.
Good thing the education market is set to hit almost $2 trillion
by 2025. At 10% of GDP, we will spend far more than China (4% of GDP)
with much worse outcomes to show for it. But Educrats will claim that if
we only spent 25% of our GDP, Johnny would finally be able to read. All
that’s holding him back is that Chicago public school teachers with an
MA only make $89,083.
The American Federation of Teachers put out a study
claiming that funding levels should cause New York school districts to
"perform well above average on national fourth and eighth grade math and
reading exams." They did not. And no matter how much money is wasted,
they never will. You can’t buy literacy with subsidies for a broken
education system. At any level.
Ever since Bill Clinton told
working class people that manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back, so
they all better go to college and learn to write lesbian feminist
poetry, the number of college enrollees and graduates has shot up. So
have their illiteracy rates.
1 in 3 American adults with a job and a BA lack minimum skills
in ‘numeracy’ and 1 in 5 "lacks minimum skills in literacy". The
college grads with the highest literacy and numeracy rates worked in
engineering, math and science and the lowest worked in Dr. Jill Biden's
noble calling of education. Those who can’t learn are tasked with
teaching so no one else will know anything.
A recent Gallup survey found that college graduates now read six fewer books than
in 2002 or even 2016. Those numbers were just another swoosh on the
long downhill slide of academia. The Department of Education's own
literacy survey had found that prose proficiency among college graduates
had dropped from 40% in 1992 to 31% in 2003.
The number of college graduates increased from 27% in 2005 to 32% in 2019. Are we any smarter for it? Current numbers suggest that
“half of U.S. adults, aged 16 to 74 years old — 54% or 130 million
people — lack literacy proficiency” while “the average American reads at
the 7th- to 8th-grade level”. College for everyone is only making
everyone dumber.
Having failed to teach basic literacy at the
elementary school, middle school and then high school levels, they’re
trying and failing to teach basic literacy at the college level.
"40% to 60% of first-year college students need remediation in English, math, or both" at a cost of $7 billion. In California community colleges, 80% of students
go into remediation. Even with remediation, they're much less likely to
graduate. Students who were promoted through a failed public school
system get to college only to discover that they’re not actually ready
for college.
One story describes
a student named Latasha Gandy responding to a placement test showing
she needed remedial classes by asking, “How is that possible that I'm
not ready for college when I graduated with a 4.2 GPA?”
In
response to the cries of racism, universities are jettisoning remedial
classes. California State Universities dumped theirs, putting more
pressure on adjuncts to pass illiterate students. That fits into the
larger destandardization movement of getting rid of grades, expectations
and tests. Hiding standards makes it a little less obvious how
worthless the entire educational system is.
If you can’t see the numbers, you can pretend that they aren’t there.
Biden’s
illegal trillion dollar bailout shows that the real customer of the
educational industry is the government. And what the government wants
are woke illiterates who know party dogma but can’t make their way
through a simple sentence or handle cash register addition.
Free college is worth every penny.
Education
is about everything except basic skills and competencies. A college
degree is a mark of cultural affiliation, a badge of political
allegiance and a warning sign of basic illiteracy. The institutions of
higher education are employment agencies for political activists, think
tanks for leftist sand castle wonks, and community organizing centers
for the next generation of rioters.
Like their former Soviet
counterparts, their only real subject is party dogma which is dumbed
down to a level that even the dimmest dolt can repeat back for a passing
grade. Much as Marxism-Leninism pervaded every subject at a Soviet
university, wokeness has spread from the social sciences and humanities
into actual science, from engineering to medicine.
Biden’s
trillion dollar student loan bailout services his base constituency at
the expense of the country, but the educational system long ago sold out
the country for political radicalism. When it comes to learning
competencies and skills, any functional first world country leaves us in
the dust. But that’s not what our education system is for. Educrats
assert that education is for conveying societal “values”, teaching
“tolerance” and promoting “activism on issues such as racism and climate
change”. It doesn’t matter if Johnny can’t read: it’s best if he never
does.
Reading enables the literate to compare sources, analyze
language and find their own answers. Math skills offer independence and
the ability to understand where the tax money is going. Neither are
desirable competencies in the United States of Woke where ideas are best
conveyed in TikTok videos by influencers and in the classroom through
oral invective.
The idiot machine of education is doing exactly
what it’s supposed to, making idiots, at a premium price, most of which
goes to various elements of the leftist machine from unions to
consultants to academics to publishers to the politicians they all
subsidize with their donations.
And the politicians send our money back to them.
American education isn’t broken because a $1.4 trillion educational
industry employing millions can’t figure out how to convey the basic
skills that 17-year-old girls teaching in frontier one-room schoolhouses
were able to a century ago. Even a dunce like Dr. Jill Biden, never
mind somewhat smarter educators, would be capable of teaching basic
skills to first graders.
They’re choosing not to because they’re working on pulling off a much more challenging feat.
Anyone
can teach basic skills, it takes a lot more work not to teach them, and
to poison the well and salt the earth so that students never learn
anything and are ready, overnight, to believe that the founders of the
country were evil monsters or that women don’t exist. Call it
anti-teaching.
Anti-teaching is much more expensive because it
requires spending enormous amounts of effort distracting parents, other
educators, the electorate and various relevant organizations from the
reality that students aren’t learning anything except that fat shaming
and the constitution are evil. All sorts of destructive stunts, racism,
school shutdowns, common core, virtual learning, attacks on standardized
testing, and graphic sexual materials are used to divert their
attention.
And
our educational system, the worst outside of Somalia, does it year
after year. Property taxes are raised, lotteries are gamed and all sorts
of revenue is hijacked with promises that another $1,000 per pupil,
more benefits for teachers or free college will finally fix things.
So the suckers never figure out that the game isn’t fixing education: it’s destroying it.
We
could spend a million dollars per student and the illiteracy rate would
be far worse. Every classroom could be made out of solid gold and every
man, woman or child could be gifted with a free pass to Harvard, Yale
or the Fashion Institute of Twin Falls, Idaho with even more
catastrophic outcomes for a functional society and adults capable of
adding 2 + 2
Biden’s trillion dollar bailout for the idiot
machine.is a forced contribution by taxpayers to the grand scheme of
indoctrinating foot soldiers for the leftist revolutions tearing apart
the country.
It’s not about the money, it’s about destroying America.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.
The Department of Education had
been banking on getting its hands on $114 billion or so in income due
from federal student loans issued over the past quarter-century.
Instead, a watchdog has delivered some bad news: It's actually set to
lose $197 billion, in part due to the suspension of loan payments made
during the pandemic, reports CNBC.
The report of this nearly $200 billion loss comes from the Government
Accountability Office, whose analysis released Friday found that such
loans made between 1997 and 2021 will cost the government about $9 for
every $100 doled out. That contrasts with the initial projection that
the Education Department would bring in $6 for every $100 lent...........To Read More....
“So, before all Americans become the bearers of ivory tower bills,
greater consideration should be given to the various spillover costs
involved. As in the words of Thomas Sowell, ‘There are no solutions,
there are only trade-offs.’” ~ Kimberlee Josephson
