Too many students chasing too few jobs. Any other industry that was so deceptive and manupulative, and offered such a poor value for the money, would be excoriated by the media, if not subject to actual civil and criminal lawsuits.
Category Archives: Economics
Electronic Medical Records
So far, so bad. And Ezra Klein, to the surprise of no one intelligent, comes off as a fool.
Post-Bankruptcy San Bernardino
It’s not a pretty picture:
…as part of a plan to reduce the state prison population, nearly 4,000 criminals who would once have been sent to state prison have been put in the custody of San Bernardino County law enforcement authorities. Some have been released, putting more low-level criminals back on the streets of San Bernardino, Chief Hardy said, and adding to the challenges already faced by the police.
“All of our crime is up, and the city has a very high crime rate per capita anyway,” Chief Handy said. “I can’t police the city with much less than this. We’re dangerously close as it is.”
As lawyers wrangle in court over San Bernardino’s plan to cut $26 million from its budget and defer some of its pension payments, city officials say there is little more they can do to turn back the rising tide of violence.
No, but there is something that Sacramento could do, but won’t. It could roll back California’s draconian gun laws that have made places like San Berdoo (and Watts and Willowbrook, and other places) into the Wild West, except that no one is armed except the criminals.
Jack Lew
…and his campaign of deception.
Hey let’s call it what it is. His and Obama’s (ongoing) budget lies.
The President’s “Default”
There’s no reason to default, even without an increase in the debt ceiling:
Failing to cut Social Security checks does not constitute “default.” Neither does withholding checks intended for bureaucrats, veterans, or contractors. In the context of the federal government, “default” means a failure to make good on your debt-service payments. Our interest payments run about $30 billion a month, easily paid out of the roughly $3 trillion (or $250 billion a month) in revenue the federal government is expected to collect this year. You can do rather a lot with $3 trillion a year, but not as much as you can do with $3 trillion a year and a limitless line of credit. There certainly is no reason to default on $360 billion in interest payments when you have $3 trillion in revenue.
What can you do with $3 trillion a year? You can have Social Security ($880 billion), Medicare/Medicaid/HHS ($940 billion), Department of Defense and additional war spending ($672 billion), Veterans’ Affairs ($140 billion), NASA ($18 billion), Homeland Security ($55 billion), Transportation ($99 billion), Commerce ($9 billion), the Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works ($8 billion), Interior ($13 billion), State and international aid ($59 billion), Justice ($36 billion), the Small Business Administration ($1.4 billion), the EPA ($9 billion), the National Science Foundation ($7.5 billion), the Department of Energy ($33 billion), and the FDA ($4.5 billion) — and still have enough money to triple the budget at the National Park Service, because people love Yogi Bear and Booboo. Yeah, you’d have to close down the Department of Education, which does not one useful thing, and downsize the Treasury Department, perhaps even to the radical extent of shutting down its Healthy Food Financing Initiative (my apologies to the first lady), sell off the housing projects and close down HUD, and a few other things. I know, I know: radical austerity.
Rather, you could do all of that on $3 trillion — if you didn’t have $360 billion in payments on interest from past spending weighing down the budget. But since you do, take away the State Department and international relations, Homeland Security, Energy, Justice, NASA, DOT, Interior, Commerce, Civil Works, EPA, NSF, and SBA, say goodbye to the national parks and the guys who maintain our nuclear arsenal — all to finance past spending excesses.
Put another way, $3 trillion a year in revenue gets you federal spending at 2008 levels plus a small surplus. Not savage austerity, not the Hobbesian state of nature, not Somalia. That is what we are talking about in the debt-ceiling debate. Republicans are being criticized because they are demanding some modest spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. But refusing to raise it at all would simply necessitate balancing the budget at pre-Obama levels of spending. Of course, the deficits we have run since then mean that about $100 billion more of that spending will have to go toward debt service in 2013 than in 2008. We are spending on spending.
And as the president used to claim to believe, before he doubled down on the spending, it’s “unpatriotic.”
Universities Must Stop Charging So Much
…for delivering so little and sending students into a lifetime of debt.
The Occumorons were protesting in the wrong places.
Climate Change
…doesn’t have to be all that bad.
Of course it does. How else can they justify their collectivist power grabs?
Affirmative Action
The sad irony:
The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.
As do many “progressive” policies. And it’s sometimes not clear what the real intentions were.
The Ethanol Scam
It’s long past time to end it.
This by itself is reason enough to end the nonsense of letting Iowa be so crucial to nominating presidential candidates.
Better yet, of course, would be fixing the Constitution (perhaps by overturning Wickard) to end all kinds of nonsense like this.
Women In The Workplace
I liked this comment: “Liberals don’t believe in Darwin except when they’re ridiculing Christians for not believing in Darwin. If children of successful parents turn out better than children of jobless single mothers, that just proves we’re not spending enough on welfare and public schools.”