Bit of news from The Pelican Post:

Academics and business leaders claim that the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), passed last year, has not corrected the underlying problem within the student loan system. Specifically, lax lending standards and artificially low interest rates for government subsidized loans exacerbate tuition increases, while academic achievement has remained stagnant.

SAFRA eliminated federally subsidized loans, instead using all federal student loan funding for direct loans. But continued easy money policies and growing applications provide little incentive for the government or universities to keep college tuition in check…

The reason SAFRA hasn’t cured the “underlying problem” is because the “underlying problem” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The whole purpose behind student loans is to allow colleges and universities to charge more than the market will bear. Think of it like this: back in the past, to choose a career in education was to choose a path of genteel poverty. Every now and again an academic could strike it rich, but most of them didn’t make too much money. For most academics, this was fine..their purpose was to provide education and, in general, expand the limits of human knowledge. But right about the time the baby boomers started to enter college careers, it all changed. All of a sudden just being a well-regarded scholar wasn’t enough…there had to be fame and fortune. But how can you get fame and fortune out of college? Its not like they make a product everyone wants and needs; the pool of customers just didn’t generate enough revenue…what to do? Presto! Student loans.

Student loans, you see, de-coupled going to school from the cost of going to school. If the students really had to pay for it, out of pocket, fewer would go – and those who did go would be more willing to take 6 or 7 years to get a degree rather than rush it through in 4 years. Right now, the most irresponsible person imaginable – an 18 year old kid – is placed in front of a college admissions sales rep (that is what they really are) and told all of the wonderful things which will come his way if he gets a college degree…and don’t worry about paying for it, you can just sign here and you’ll have a loan. And you don’t have to start paying back the loan until after you graduate. And don’t worry about that payback thing, because our college graduates earn, on average, $100,000 per year! It all sounds so good…and how is an 18 year old to fight against that? Heck, for his whole life in primary school he has been told that college is the thing you must do…now its being offered to him, with no initial pain and with bright pictures painted of the future.

Left out of the sales pitch are such things as the fact that if, on average, the graduates make 100 grand a year, this means that half the graduates make less than that. Older, warier people realize this…but, then again, we’re not the one’s being recruited in to college. Also left out of it is the fact that an 18 year old will very likely live another 60 years…no rush to get a degree. Quite all right if you get it at 25 rather than 22; you don’t need to borrow money…and, hey, can’t you do at least some of the courses at the community college or other places where the cost is vastly reduced? Such bits of wisdom are not imparted – they would, in fact, blow the whole scam.

The scam requires an ever larger number of kids being conned in to borrowing an ever higher amount of money to pay for the product. If the colleges can’t keep this up, then a whole lot of professors, administrators and various edu-crat parasites will have to be let go or suffer pay cuts (and so desperately do the people in education fight for their place at the trough that they’ll accuse a Republican of murder if he proposes spending cuts). And, guess what?, know what happened last year? Well, Uncle Sam took the whole shebang over. That’s right – as kids are suckered in to borrowing ever more money in order to obtain education which may or may not provide a high income, they’ll be owing ever more money to the government. Money which can never be discharged in bankruptcy, by the way – and that is no matter how broke the kids wind up.

This is the creation of a class of people who will be both dependent upon government and servile to same. After all, start bucking government demands and you might not get the student loans you have been convinced you need. Worse, if you worked out a payment plan in order to bear the burden of the debts you wracked up, how would you like to put that payment plan at risk by complaining about government policies?

There is a solution to this – cancel the student loan program. First off, it will free up the kids from potential government tyranny. Secondly, by taking away the the easy money aspect of higher education it will force colleges to reduce tuition charges. Finally, by making the kids directly pay for college (or, at least, by forcing them to earn scholarships) it will make the education more valuable to them – they will cease taking so many “soft” courses which allow you to cruise through school but don’t have much economic application post-college. We’ll get a higher percentage of graduates being doctors and engineers, fewer being students of post-feminist deconstruction theory or whatever garbage it is they’re pushing these days. An added benefit to all this that those who teach in the “soft” courses will be cut down in number and lose influence – and those are the hard-core leftists who have polluted education and made it anti-intellectual, anti-American and anti-human in character.

Whether or not we’ll have the courage to do this remains to be seen. After all, if you propose this you’ll be painted as “anti-education”. This is because liberals have set the terms of debate here – the only way to be pro-education is to agree to spend ever more money on it. But as soon as someone shows some guts and goes ahead and does it, the change will happen. Education costs will come down, education quality will go up, there will be less debt upon our people…all sorts of good things will come, all sorts of bad things will end. And the person or party who does it will reap the reward…but only if they show the initial courage.

Mission accomplished, Mr. President, mission accomplished.

HAT TIP: PJ Tatler

Seems that we already are:

HAT TIP: The American Catholic

According to the IRS, the bottom 50% of wage earners in the United States paid $27.9 billion in income taxes in 2008. The top 50% paid just over $1 trillion. The top 20% paid $890 billion. The top 10% paid $721 billion. The top 5% paid $605.7 billion. The top 1% paid $392 billion. Bottom line it – the bottom 50% paid less than 10% of the amount of income taxes paid by the top 1%. We are taxing “the rich”, then, right? Well, in a manner of speaking.

The problem with “tax the rich” is this:

We’re not really taxing them. We’re taxing high income earners, which are not necessarily the same as the super rich. Think fast – when someone says “rich” do you think of Bill Gates, or your local dentist? Obama and the liberals want you to think “Gates”, but they are going after the dentist.

Liberals refuse to get it through their thick skulls. When Obama says “we’re going to tax people making over $250,000.00 a year so those millionaires and billionaires will pay their fair share”, our liberals hear “millionaires and billionaires will pay their fair share”. It just doesn’t compute with them that Obama is leaping from “250,000 a year” to “millionaires and billionaires”. The reason for this is that millionaires and billionaires don’t have a lot of income – if any – exposed to the tax man. Moderately well-off people do. Obama is saying he wants to tax the rich when what he’s really doing is proposing to tax the upper middle class.

The reason for this is because the millionaires and billionaires don’t have enough money. Recently it was pointed out that if you confiscated every last cent from the rich, you could fund our government for about half a year – and that would be a one-time shot.

In the chart above, that trillion dollars extracted in federal income taxes doesn’t come from millionaires and billionaires – it mostly comes from middle class to upper middle class people. While a Bill Gates has $40 billion and that is, indeed, a lot of money…a million people who make $250,000 a year have $250,000,000,000 – more than 6 times Gates’ money, and it is available year after year rather than as a one-time pot of gold. Do you see, liberals? It makes no sense for Obama to tax Gates…he doesn’t have enough money. Of course, if Obama went and said “hey, we’re just going to tax the middle and upper middle class people because they’ve got the money” it doesn’t sound as good as “make the rich pay their fair share”. The truth shall set you free – though as it will also screw up Democrat tax plans, it isn’t welcomed to the debate.

Additionally, if you actually went after the super rich you’d wind up with a lot of angry, super-rich people. Super rich people who are angry with you don’t donate to your campaign; they might even donate to the other guy’s campaign; they become un-interested in shelling out big bucks for your post-Administration speaking engagements; they don’t want to donate to your Presidential library; they might be unwilling to employ your former aides in well-paid, corporate sinecures. Just no upside there.

And this is why I advocate our side doing the liberals one better – calling their bluff, as it were. Propose to tax the rich – the real rich; those with wealth in excess of $5 million. Don’t even look at income – do you have more than $5 million? Then out of every dollar over that, we want a dime. So, someone with a net wealth of $10 million would pay an additional $500,000 in tax (though, as you might recall, I put various supply side provisions in there to encourage them to “hide” their money in wealth-generating, private enterprise). I want to see the look on George Soros face when Obama sends him a tax bill for $1.4 billion – he of the class warfare, “yeah let’s tax the rich” liberalism; no more faking it, George…we’re really going to tax you! We could crush this class warfare nonsense now and forever…if we just call their bluff and propose what they will never, ever agree to…a real “tax the rich” plan.

Now the Asian Development Bank notices that, by golly!, prices are rising and they may even have a bad effect on people…especially poor people! Who woulda thunk it? From Bloomberg:

Asia faces a “serious setback” from surging oil and food prices that are fueling inflation and threatening to push millions into extreme poverty, the Asian Development Bank said.

The region’s growth may be reduced by as much as 1.5 percentage points should the pace of gains in oil and food prices seen so far this year persist for the rest of 2011, the Manila-based lender said in a statement today. Domestic food inflation in many Asian economies has averaged 10 percent this year, an increase in prices that may push an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.25 a day, it said…

So, 64 million more people in Asia may be shoved under a buck and a quarter a day to live on. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that the Asian economy is bound to predominate…$1.25 gets you a soda at the convenience store here in America. In a lot of Asia, that is what you live on for a whole day. The Asian economy has done some good things but for the most part is is a scam – an exploitation of people in order to serve the needs of the global financial system, which has to keep costs low so returns are high enough to “beat the street” in the major financial centers. Of course, most of what Asians make is increasingly low quality crap…so, they are not really building as much wealth as the official statistics show.

But, here’s the kicker – some Asians have gotten quite fabulously wealthy in this economic bubble while most Asians have been able to hang on…now the people hanging on are finding their food and fuel costs skyrocketing while those who were raking it in are about to lose a massive amount of paper wealth as various bubbles (real estate, especially) go POP! This will not be pretty.

Not that we’re likely to do too well out of this – we are still (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the pivot of the global economy. But our problem is that we’ve ham strung ourselves. Taxes and regulations prevent Americans from creating wealth, but our large population and still relatively wealthy (compared, especially, to Asia) people provide the demand-engine for the world. But without new wealth, we cannot continue to import as much as we have been…and with prices rising and our wages flat or down, our ability to buy what the world wants – even on credit – will become increasingly crimped. Nice little economic death cycle, isn’t it? They need to sell to us in order to live, but the only way they can sell is if we keep up our de-industrialization policies…but if we don’t make/mine/grow stuff, we just don’t have the extra wealth to buy in sufficient quantity; not from them, and not even from ourselves.

The cure for us is easier – kick out Obama and the liberals and start creating wealth again. Asia’s problem is trickier because their “growth” for the past 30 years has been fueled by our wealth-destruction coupled with borrowing. Asia will find, after the crash, that there never really was a quick and easy path to wealth…just as it took us 100 years to rise from agrarian backwater to industrial power, so it will take them. You really can’t jam it in to 30 years and get a long term, good result.

It will be a long, hard road out of this fake money and borrowing mess – just get ready for it.

From National Journal:

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, whose outspoken libertarian views and folksy style made him a cult hero during two previous presidential campaigns, will announce on Tuesday that he’s going to try a third time.

Sources close to Paul, who is in his 12th term in the House, said he will unveil an exploratory presidential committee, a key step in gearing up for a White House race. He will also unveil the campaign’s leadership team in Iowa, where the first votes of the presidential election will be cast in caucuses next year…

Paul is 75 years old, so this will have to be his last effort – he’ll have to go with W. C. Fields advice: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And then quit; no sense being a d*****d fool about it”.

But he is a worthwhile entrant – libertarianism is running strong in America as we head towards 2012 and Paul can very often state “I told you so” about a lot of things. Additionally, he’ll force the rest of the field to edge towards small government and genuine reform, lest Paul run away with the vital TEA Party element of the center/right coalition.

From ABC:

A record 49 percent of Americans now disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan, up 8 points since January. And those who disapprove “strongly” outnumber strong approvers by nearly a 2-1 margin.

With Obama holding his monthly national security meeting on Afghanistan today, the results show a significant drop in the president’s approval rating on handling the issue, down 12 points in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll from a year ago.

The change follows an ABC/Post poll last month in which a new low, 31 percent, said the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting. Sixty-four percent said it is not worth fighting, with 49 percent feeling that way “strongly,” both record highs in ABC/Post polls…

Public support atrophies for the Afghan campaign based partially upon the length and cost of the effort, but also on the growing assumption that the Afghan people are not worth fighting for.

The flaw in foreign and military Obamunism is the clear lack of conviction on the part of Obama for such efforts. It just doesn’t seem to matter to him if we win or lose. As long as Afghanistan (and Libya, for that matter) don’t promise to be a 2012 head ache, Obama is willing to just let matters drift. But drift in the executive is deadly – people are dying and there is not only no end in sight, but there doesn’t seem to be even so much as a desire to make an end. Obama won’t fight full tilt, nor will be engage in absolute surrender. We’re drifting – and the people are perceiving this and wondering why the blood of our best and bravest should be shed for such half-efforts?

Maybe high speed rail isn’t such a good idea.

Have you ever considered what Christ was doing on Saturday?

Standing up to the Islamists in Germany.

Have we mentioned lately just how lousy Obama is as President?

Liberalism at work: Butcher babies for a living, make Time’s Top 100.

Poll: 55% resigned to a quagmire in Libya.

Right now, Obama is exciting people the way a car with its brakes cut excites people.

It appears that the city of Dearborn, once part of the United States of America, has now become part of the Moslem Ummah – part of the Caliphate and no longer under the jurisdiction of the United States Constitution. How so?

Well the recent story of the arrest of a pastor who wanted to demonstrate outside of a Dearborn mosque is one bit of evidence. Another bit of evidence is the arrest back in 2009 and 2010 of some Christian missionaries for doing nothing more than passing out the Gospel of John at a Moslem festival in Dearborn. Think about this – if someone wanted to pass out some of Mohammed’s scribblings near a Church fair, do you think anyone would get arrested? If someone wanted to hold a pro-gay marriage demonstration outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, do you think the organizers would be hauled in to court? So, why do such things happen in Dearborn?

Because it appears that approximately 30% of the population is Moslem. That is enough to give Moslems functional control over an area, it would seem. At that point the non-Moslem population becomes cowed – fearful that if they don’t obey their Moslem masters that violence will erupt. There is no other explanation for these events – unless, by some chance, it turns out that all the police, the judges and the prosecutors are Moslem – a highly unlikely event, and thus it means that non-Moslems are turning the screws. It doesn’t matter what the laws of Dearborn say. Nor does it matter what the laws of Michigan or the United States require. Islam, by threat of violence, is in control of Dearborn and so Dearborn must become sharia-compliant. And, so it is.

To be sure, the conviction of the pastor will be overturned – and, in fact, the pastor may even be awarded damages. Outside of Dearborn, US and Michigan law still rules and it is absurdly unconstitutional to arrest someone because of a fear that someone else might commit an act of violence. But the people of Dearborn won’t care about the over turning of the verdict – especially, the Moslems masters of Dearborn won’t care. They got what they wanted – their prophet and his words were not “insulted”…and they believe they can eventually get the entire US population to be 30% Moslem, and so Mohammad won’t be insulted anywhere…at least, not without the risk of death as payment.

And is is that threat of an insane application of violence which is Islam’s strength. People who are unwilling – out of human decency – to apply insane violence are always at a disadvantage against those who do. If a Moslem desecrates a Church will will not only not behead him, we won’t even go on a rampage and kill others not even remotely connected to the event. We just don’t do it – and because we don’t, most of us are ill-equipped to deal with those who will do it.

It is going to be increasingly difficult to reconcile adherence to Islam with being an American citizen unless the broad mass of Moslems, themselves, take charge and get rid of the people who will threaten violence in defense of Islam. And there isn’t a lot of time for Moslems to make up their minds about this. Very swiftly American Moslems will have to turn on the purveyors of radicalism – or pay the price for failure to do so. Americans will not long tolerate an indigestible morsel of Sharia within the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is time for choosing side’s – America’s, or some corrupt, Islamo-fascist mountebank?

From the AP:

With gas prices climbing and little relief in sight, President Barack Obama is scrambling to get ahead of the latest potential obstacle to his re-election bid, even as Republicans are making plans to exploit the issue…

That is our MSM – only about 8 weeks behind the curve on this. While I’ve been stating that Obama and Federal Reserve policies have been bound to create inflation since March of 2009, it was on February 21st where I noted that this current spike was going to cause a lot of problems. Ever since gas prices started their remorseless rise in January all the talk of economic recovery and Obama having an easy path to re-election were complete and utter nonsense. And yet, all you get in the MSM is story after story of economic recovery and how Obama’s got in made in 2012. Sheer idiocy – its like they don’t remember what happened just three years ago.

Let me be absolutely clear about this – the gasoline price rise we have seen thus far ensures that there will be a major hit to the United States economy. There is absolutely no way to avoid this. The only question is how bad a hit – and that is dependent upon how much higher gasoline prices go. The effect we’ll see is either growth reduced to nominal amounts (a lot of analysts are down-grading their GDP growth forecasts, already…1.5% growth for later this year seems to be the emerging consensus), or all the way in to full-blown recession.

How much higher will gasoline prices go? Given that the Federal Reserve shows no sign of an early end to “quantitative easing” (ie, printing money) and given that our government continues to borrow massive amounts of money, there is no way to stop the rise in oil prices (and, indeed, in the rise of all commodities) short of a economic downturn caused by demand destruction via high prices. Even a sudden increase in oil supplies will only slow the rise. A sudden dawning of peace and freedom in the Middle East will be welcome – but would, once again, only slow the rise. The price is high because we’re printing gigantic sums of fake money…and people want more of it in return for things of tangible value, like oil.

We’ve got a government not fiddling while Rome is burning, but throwing gasoline on the fire. Obama is trying to get us to blame oil companies, as if they are responsible when someone offers them a higher price for their goods. There is a bad news/good news aspect to this – the bad news is that Obama either will not or cannot take the steps necessary to soften the blow; the good news is that his idiocy puts his re-election in great jeopardy.