Obama’s College Loan Fiasco

                            
How come everything this President proposes eventually turns out hurting our economy? The federal student loan program that he has touted on campuses nationwide has become so costly to taxpayers that he now finds he has to reform it. All it did was to garner him the youth vote in the 2012 campaign (which it was designed for) at the expense of we the taxpayer. It has done nothing but to drive our youth toward pursuing jobs with the government and non-profits, and dis-incentivize them to pursue jobs in the private sector, thus increasing the issue of income inequality which he says is the great moral dilemma of this century.

It also has proven that when you give people an incentive not to repay a loan, more won’t repay. Most of these student loans are issued regardless of ability to repay. So loose is this form of credit that in the moribund Obama economy it has become a vehicle to even fund basic living expenses, with thousands of borrowers consuming aid even when they’re not enrolled in courses.

The immediate problem for you and me concerns the Obama “Pay as You Earn” program which has expanded the number of borrowers and sweetened the terms. It allows students to borrow an unlimited amount and then cap monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income. If you work in the private sector unpaid loans are forgiven in 20 years, however, if you chose to work in government or for a non-profit, the Washington sugar daddy forgives your loan in 10 years. For a community organizer in South Chicago who goes to college and then grad school, the debt can be as high as $150k courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Now get this, if you go into a government job the forgiven debt doesn’t have to be reported to the IRS as income. Therefore, if you follow the job path of Mr. Obama, you can pick up $150 grand, tax free! How’s that for picking winners and losers?

The real winners of course are the universities, who have seen school debt explode with this program. In fact, some schools have gotten so creative that they now offer to make the student’s monthly payments under the “Pay as You Earn” program while simultaneously raising tuition costs, so the loans actually function as federal grants. This program was originally estimated to cost $1.7B in 2010 and now is expected to cost $7.6B in 2014. You can bet it will accelerate even faster after the fall election.

While students may appear to be getting the freebie, those who likely have little wealth are being given an enormous incentive to pursue careers in government or low paying non-profits. This will drive them away from careers where their natural ambition and talent may have driven them to higher income options. It also encourages a mind-set where it is no big deal to forfeit your loans. We already saw what that attitude did to the economy in 2008.

Leave it to this Administration to find another way to move us towards a statist economy and generate more college graduates than there are jobs to satisfy. Mercy me!

The “Coolest” President

It’s great to have a cool President, particularly when the world is crumbling around us. Our healthcare system is exploding into an  incomprehensive mess, our economy is still on life support provided by the U.S. taxpayer, an airliner with 239 passengers has vanished, and our nemesis, Mother Russia with a fading economy half the size of Italy, is muscling us around like a bully after annexing the Crimea from the Ukraine. All of this on the premise that they are responding to the desperate call of those “ethnic” Russians pleading for help from those nasty “fascists” preparing to take over the government in Kiev from the Putin crony who was in the process ceding  the country to Russia anyway.

All this, and our President goes on an Internet show, Between Two Ferns, in some sort of a comedy routine with Zach Galifanakis, of the Hangover movie series fame, to plug the Obamacare website. Following this he goes on a radio show, with Ryan Seacrest, the fellow who hosts American Idol and those red carpet award shows on cable. Does anyone over 25 watch or listen to this? This is all released  in a US magazine article with photos of our cool President hanging out with various celebrities like Justin Bieber, with Bieber saying, “What’s up, dude?” to the President, while he responds, “What’s up, Biebs?”

Most of the news about this President comes from US magazine, sort of the Wall Street Journal for celebrity worshippers under 25, one step below People magazine. However, the President does do important work. I saw a photo of him recently in his oval office casually dressed in jeans while he is talking with Vladimir Putin on the phone – at least that was what we were told.

Just how does this President get things done? Well, we learn from Sean Blanda on his 99U website that he usually wakes at 7 AM, works out 45 minutes every day, not including his basketball games or frequent golf outings. He watches a lot of “Sportscenter” and dines each night with the family. To limit “decision   fatigue” he likes to set policy via memos where he can check the box on “agree”, ‘disagree”, or “let’s discuss”.

Maybe we need an “uncool” President who is fat and doesn’t care how he looks in jeans and doesn’t spend his days testing his wits against a Hollywood stoner or bantering with Ryan Seacrest while a European ally is being invaded by Russia. One who would rather spend his time working than working out. Someone who our enemies don’t consider a “prankster”.

Folks, what’s going on in the Ukraine is similar to Hitler’s pre-World War II activities; while Russia is laughing at these so-called sanctions and Putin is having delusions of grandeur, as his propaganda chief says they can  “reduce us to radioactive dust”.

It doesn’t really matter. Barack ……..he’s really cool!

More Government Ineptitude

                                                                 
Do some of you ever wonder why I write these posts? It’s really not to criticize liberals and progressives, although it may seem the way, at least since BHO got in office. It’s really about information and education that you won’t get from today’s media, and if you don’t care about that, it’s about showing you the ineptitude of big government.

Since the “savior” took over in 2008 the federal government has taken control of about ¼ of the national economy, and some of that has been given to labor unions. If Obamacare craters in 2014, as I think it will, the government will have to bail out the health insurance industry and will than control an additional 1/6 of the economy.

During this recession if you live in the Washington, D.C. area, Maryland, Virginia, and environs, there was no recession. Jobs, housing, and construction abound. So it’s hard for anyone working for the federal government to understand what’s going on in the rest of the country. This is why big government is so destructive, its sole purpose is to spend money and there is no accountability as to results or return. The only concern is whether you’ve spent your budget, and if not, someone else will get that money next year.

Because results are not important management is very poor, even at very high levels. People never worry about demotions or termination, therefore, this leads to complacency. Just look at the meetings and conferences at the General Services Agency (GSA) that were highlighted this year. Millions of your dollars wasted and hours of time spent on workers traveling to exotic places and having fun, food, and booze at your expense. That type of culture would never be tolerated in the private sector.

An example of waste, fraud and mismanagement is the recent case of John Beal, a high level employee of the EPA who bilked taxpayers of $900,000 pretending to his co-workers and superiors that he was a secret agent for the CIA. He hardly showed up at the office and was sometimes missing in action for months at a time. He was recently sent to prison for 32 months and required to pay back the money. From 1989 until 2013, he was employed in the Office of Air and Radiation (OAR) which developed policy for air pollution and climate change. His duties included assisting the Head of OAR, Gina McCarthy, who is now Head of the EPA. Imagine what analysis and policy this guy was cooking up while he was goofing off most of the time, and Ms. McCarthy was writing accolades and commendations about his work to her superiors. How many CEO’s in the private sector would be able to keep their jobs and get promoted no less, after showing such incompetence and lack of engagement about what’s going on?

Now you can see how Kathleen Sebelius could run the HHS and Obamacare for 3 years and never have one direct one-on-one meeting with Obama and nobody thought it unusual. Total disengagement, no teamwork, no concern, no accountability, only selective communication. This is why government cannot run healthcare and why waste and fraud will run amuck in such a system as Obamacare, just as it now does in Medicare, or anything else it runs.

If you want more of this, keep voting Democratic and for big government.

 

Inequality and this Presidency – A Bad Joke!

  Sometimes I think we are living a dream and a bad joke is being perpetrated on the American public and we will soon wake up and everything will be fine again. We have this President who keeps telling us that inequality in this country is our defining challenge and a moral disgrace. Not only is this blasphemy, because he runs his office as if he were our King and his crony capitalism favors all his benefactors, it also is misguided. An excellent op-ed article in today’s WSJ by Robert Grady entitled, Obama’s Misguided Obsession with Inequality, illustrates how he uses snippets of statistics that are incomplete and out of context to drive home an unsubstantiated point. He is a master of this and has done it for most of his political life.

This President tells us that “the deck is stacked against the middle class no matter how hard we work” and that future children will never escape poverty because “they will lack a decent education, healthcare, or a community that views their future as their own”. Who is he talking about, the Detroit ghetto? As Mr. Grady points out, Obama uses census income data that fails to include taxes, transfer payments, like Medicaid, Medicare, nutrition assistance, earned income tax credits, and employee benefits like health insurance. When you take this into account inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009.

In addition, he neglects to tell you that recent (2011) studies at Columbia and the Congressional Budget Office showed that family income, including benefits, experienced a 62% gain above inflation from 1979 to 2007 and all 5 levels of the income distribution spectrum had real gains in family income. Since he became President the reverse has happened. The defining challenge for us Mr. President, is not income inequality but economic growth!

It’s obvious that income equality is a rather fruitless goal, nowhere in the world do we have it nor will any political system ever achieve it. Even in communist and socialist societies, which profess to aspire to it, income inequality is even more rampart and infested with graft and corruption. Since your income depends upon many factors related to your own desires and skills or factors that you cannot control, income equality is not a realistic objective. However, in a free market system with solid economic growth, we all benefit. We have proven that in the U.S. where even the most poor among us are taken care of better than anywhere in the world.

And now this President is striving for healthcare equality with a law that ignores the free market and inserts bureaucrats between the doctor- patient relationship and in fact dissolves that relationship by government decree. The law is so bad that he is actually revising it as it is being implemented, something our Constitution, which he swore to uphold, prevents him from doing. A law in which he misled and lied to us in order to get re-elected. A law in which he actually repealed the other day when he suspended the individual mandate for specific “hardship” cases who could not get insurance that met the requirements of Obamacare.

This has got to be a joke. I hope I wake up soon!

 

The Next Government Grab – Higher Education

While Egypt and Syria are falling apart and our economy continues in a malaise of tepid growth, I guess the best thing to do, if you don’t like governing, is to change the subject. That is exactly what President Obama did this past week. He did what he likes to do, take vacations, play golf, and go on campaign trips and give speeches that inspire selected audiences and tells them what they want to hear.

For the last 5 years he has been telling college students how his financing programs would make college more affordable. You recall that he push through a $1trillion student loan program for which the U.S. tax-payer is the guarantor. Now he does a 180 degree turn and tells them that our economy can’t afford a trillion in outstanding student loan debt. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency and then, as an incentive, allocate federal subsidies to those schools that Washington believes is providing the best education at the lowest cost.

How is that for irony? The federal government should look in the mirror before it rates anyone on effectiveness and efficiency, when you consider its track record! Why can’t the professional academics, parents, and students decide on the best universities to attend? The rise in tuition costs since 1965 is a direct result of the federal subsidy machine of tax-payer guarantor student loans and federal grants and loans to colleges which caused them to increase staff, salaries, and curriculum. This is what always happens when the government starts to provide incentives. The price goes up. Since 1983 tuition and fees have risen by 257% while family incomes advanced 16%.

We should think hard and long before allowing the Federal government to dominate our system of higher education. Like Obamacare, this is just another step toward statism; when government influences what is taught and how colleges spend their money. There is no place for this in our society and it sounds more like what Hitler or Lenin would do. How would conservative universities compete with lefty schools with this administration?

The best approach is to stop the increase in grants and subsidized loans that Obama has greatly accelerated.  Instead of “tinkering” with a system of higher education that is second to none in the world; a system that thousands of foreign students flee to every year to get the best education they can. We have enough college grads and can’t even find jobs for them right now.

 The federal government should get out of higher education. As much as those lefty professors abhor the idea of a free market, I bet they go ballistic at the thought of politicians running their universities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Faithful Execution of the Law – Obama Style

Well, it has taken me a while, but I am finally breaking my pledge not to directly criticize Mr. Obama after his recent press conference on Friday. This guy bugs me so much that I simply can’t resist. His comments are so revealing about his attitude on Presidential power and his rather cavalier approach to the constraints of the U. S. Constitution. I can only conclude that although he is revered by blacks, young people, gays, and liberal women he is nothing but a politician who only thinks about his opposition and ways to blame them for his mistakes and stays aloof of the real problems. He is a liar and a hypocrite who misrepresents the facts and assumes that since the low information voter doesn’t really follow events, what he says will be believed by the masses. This is a strategy used by dictators and tyrannical regimes. It works, except when people become educated or life gets so bad that riots occur and the military take over, which is not likely in the U.S., mostly because he will be out of here in 2016.

What troubles me the most is that the White House press corps did not take him to task when he rationalize his decision to delay for one year the Obamacare corporate mandate in violation of the effective date of the existing law. He said he acted unilaterally because the Republicans were “ideologically fixed” against Obamacare and this was a tweak that doesn’t go to the “essence “ of the law. What he neglected to tell you was that in July the House passed a law giving him authority to tweak this law which he said he would veto because it was “unnecessary”, so the Senate didn’t even bring it to a vote. The House also passed a companion bill delaying the mandate for ordinary Americans as well, let’s hope he will not consider that “unnecessary”. The implementation of Obamacare is fraught with technical problems and impossible procedures which show it to be un-operational and that is why the Republicans are fixated on it!

The President’s remarks show that if he thinks a part of this bill does not affect the “essence” of the law, he can elect to change it by “executive authority” without seeking Congress to affect a legislative remedy. Therefore, this so-called Constitutional lawyer can elect to change any law passed by Congress if he thinks the change does not affect the “essence” of the law, so he can act as the Supreme Court and the Congress if he sees fit. This is the attitude of a Caesar Chavez, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Mao, and even Hitler, and now we have a President that feels that way. Not one reporter took him up on his remarks or why he is giving Congress the ability to opt out of the law entirely. Enough said for investigative journalism. That’s why we yearn for a leader, instead of a political misfit. Have a nice vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. President.

 

 

Why the IRS Scandal is Important

 Since the Obama regime (and it is a regime) can check any conservative blog on the Internet, should I expect an IRS audit this year? If I gave money to a Tea Party group, could I be targeted for additional IRS scrutiny? Also, because I am a conservative, should I be investigated using a different set of guidelines than my liberal counterparts? Or the converse, if I were a liberal and conservatives had the White House, should a different set of tax rules apply to me? Well, this is exactly what we have with the current regime and their playbook, and never since the Nixon administration have we seen this. As you recall, Mr. Nixon resigned in order to avoid impeachment.
         
Will we impeach Mr. Obama? Of course not, that’s why I hang up when groups advocating this call me for donations. I don’t support such a waste of time and money. We will never impeach our first black President. It will cause a tremendous outrage and set back the progress we have made in the civil rights arena by 100 years. There will be riots and it will eliminate any chance for future African-Americans to have a shot at the Presidency.

               Should Mr. Obama be impeached for the way he runs the Executive office? Certainly! The Nixon presidency is a case in point. For example, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is now involved in the IRS scandal. There is now evidence that this presumably neutral agency received information from another presumably neutral agency, the IRS, and used its enforcement powers against conservative groups. The FEC’s General Council staff sought tax information about conservative political groups from Lois Lerner (remember her?) of the IRS. Such a request is illegal and is a clear violation of FEC rules. The IRS is barred from releasing such information, but Ms. Lerner, based on her political bent and apparently instructions from White House Council, elected to ignore the law. There is also evidence from emails, that the FEC created a “novel” or scenario by which a conservative group could be “investigated” by the IRS which was more severe or stringent than the evaluation of liberal groups.

               All this is typical of this regime. Create a straw man, spread a bunch of lies or mistruths about him, and then proceed to tear him down as you deflect attention from your mistakes and blunders. It was done to Romney and is now being done in the Virginia gubernatorial race where an outstanding conservative, Ken Cuccinelli, the Attorney General, is running against Terry McAuliffe, the has-been cast off from the Clinton years. The Obama playbook is being used by McAuliffe as he goes negative, stays vague on his policies, and stresses the fanciful GOP “war against women” on his opponent. Does anyone still believe that?

               Just like this President, who has decided not to govern and stay aloof of the real issues in the world, but spend his 8 years in office campaigning and lecturing ideaology to special interest groups, blacks, young people, women, and spreading mistruths about his favorite straw man, the GOP.