“Under the terms of the settlement, the Department of Education will forgive roughly $6 billion in loans for 200,000 attendees of dozens of technical schools and for-profit colleges. The settlement also requires the Department of Education to reimburse borrowers who already made payments or even paid off the entirety of their loans. It is not clear how many borrowers covered by the settlement will receive loan forgiveness for outstanding debt and how many will receive full reimbursement for debt they already repaid.”
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“Over the past two years, the Biden administration has approved debt forgiveness claims for thousands of former students at for-profit colleges. Earlier this month, the administration announced over $5.8 billion in loan forgiveness to former students of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges.
However, the Department of Education’s role as the largest issuer of student loans in the country means that it continues to fund colleges and universities that fail to prepare students. Low standards for federal funding incentivize the creation of schools whose sole mission is to collect federal loan money. Even for-profit institutions that do serve the majority of their students still put taxpayers on the hook for attendees who can’t make the most of their education. Debt forgiveness for all borrowers, including nonprofit private colleges and public institutions, would have the same effect.”
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“There is clear evidence that “federal student aid fuels the ivory tower’s infamous price inflation, including roughly a doubling, in real terms, of sticker prices between the 1991–92 and 2021–22 school years,” wrote Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. He continues: “It also makes logical sense: If you give loads of people easy money to pay for one thing, the price of that thing will rise as people demand more of it, and with greater bells and whistles.””
“At first glance, all of these loan forgiveness programs may seem to have merit. But they are all trying to paper over problems that the federal government created and that will continue to exist after the new rules go into effect. Forgiving billions of dollars in student loans means billions of federal dollars went to poorly run schools and students who were, in many cases, unprepared for college. While those students may deserve some kind of debt relief—and which very few of them can receive through bankruptcy—the Education Department continues to issue loans to unprepared students in order to attend poorly run schools.
The expansion of benefits offered by the PSLF program spells unique problems for taxpayers and future borrowers alike. Expanding eligibility to more kinds of “public service” workers, including employees of private companies and private contractors, is expected to cost over $13 billion in the next 10 years.
As with debt forgiveness for borrowers who are misled by their schools, PSLF on its face sounds like a good idea. If a student decides to take a career in public service—an essential but presumably low-paying job—then, after 10 years of payments, that student will be rewarded for his service by having a set amount of his remaining loan balance paid. However, those who work in the public sector often have the best job security, health care, and pensions among America’s middle-class workers.
What’s more, many professions counted as “public service” are some of the highest-paying positions in the entire job market. Physicians employed by nonprofit hospitals, for example, are eligible for PSLF. However, whether a cardiologist works for a nonprofit or a for-profit hospital, his yearly salary will likely top $400,000. Thus, prospective physicians can take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for medical school, and only pay a fraction of the amount borrowed, while accruing millions of dollars in income over the course of their careers.
When academic deans can assure students that a large debt burden can be discharged by working for a nonprofit or the government after graduation, they can more easily justify exorbitant tuition costs. After all, why worry about borrowing a massive sum if you won’t have to repay it? The PSLF solution to high debt burdens for public sector workers has only aggravated the problem and will continue to. Once the government pours funding in the form of debt relief into the market for specific degrees, schools end up using these funds to justify hiking prices, thus generating a bigger student debt crisis. In turn, this enlarged crisis cries out for more government funding.
The solution to runaway student debt inflation is for the government to stop subsidizing tuition hikes. While limited debt relief for defrauded or disabled borrowers makes sense, the federal government needs to start making policy proposals that will attack the student debt crisis at its source—the cost of college attendance.
Student loan debt is a real and pressing problem for America’s poorest borrowers, but it is merely an inconvenience for millions of others, including many beneficiaries of PSLF. Solving the college cost problem in the long term requires getting the government out of the lending business.”
“Biden administration officials are now working to undo some of the harmful legal policies put in place by Trump-era attorneys general—less visible than controversial measures like the border wall and family separation, but nonetheless damaging to due process and punitive toward the people who seek asylum on American soil. Last June, Attorney General Merrick Garland scrapped rules that made it difficult for victims of domestic violence or gang violence, as well as family members of threatened individuals, to qualify for asylum.”
“Every taxpayer earning less than $75,000, or joint-filers earning less than $150,000, will receive a $350 check, plus another $350 if they have children, reports CBS. A married couple with children would qualify for the maximum of $1,050. Higher-income people would receive smaller refunds.
The checks are the most advertised portion of a budget deal totaling some $300 billion. They help dispense with a $97 billion budget surplus buoyed by unexpectedly high tax returns from the highest-income Californians.
It should almost go without saying that giving out individual stimulus checks is more likely to exacerbate inflation than cure it. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021, which included $1,400 stimulus checks, is estimated by one Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco analysis to have raised inflation by 3 percentage points.”
“As has been oft detailed in recent days, the U.S. and European states blithely ignored multiple assurances made to both the Soviet Union and Russia that NATO would not be expanded up to their borders. The allies also demonstrated their willingness to ignore Moscow’s expressed security interests with the coercive dismemberment of Serbia, “color revolutions” in Tbilisi and Kyiv, and especially support for the 2014 street putsch against Ukraine’s elected, Russo‐friendly president.
Whether such actions should have bothered Moscow isn’t important. They did, and perceptions are what matter. In this case, perception was reality. Indeed, Washington would never have accepted equivalent behavior by Russia in the Western hemisphere — marching the Warsaw Pact or Collective Security Treaty Organization up to America’s borders, backing a coup in Mexico City or Ontario, and inviting the new government to join the military alliance. The response in Washington would have been explosive hysteria followed by a tsunami of demands and threats. There would have been no sweet talk about the right of other nations to decide their own destinies.
True, this might not be the only factor influencing Putin’s decision on war. He has articulated strong, though distorted, views of Ukrainian nationhood and Kyiv’s proper relations to Russia. However, security concerns have always loomed largest. He and other officials criticized NATO expansion early, when the alliance began its move eastward. Most famously, he raised the issue in his talk to the 2007 Munich Security Conference. His position reflected Russia’s perspective but was serious both in substance and delivery.”
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“If allied behavior was not a sufficient cause for Moscow’s invasion, it certainly was a necessary cause. Putin might believe Ukraine should be part of Russia, but for the last 22 years did not attempt to conquer the country. His more limited attacks in 2014 were triggered by the Western‐backed ouster of a friendly government. Whatever Putin’s view of reconstituting the Soviet Union, after two decades all he has managed to do is retake Crimea and extend Russian influence over the Donbass, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. A repeat of Adolf Hitler he certainly is not.
Again, this does not excuse Moscow’s latest conduct, which is grotesque, criminal, and immoral. However, it offers a terrible reminder that U.S. intervention has consequences.”
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“the Russo‐Ukraine war adds another example to Uncle Sam’s history of foreign policy malpractice. The conflict is not strictly America’s fault, since Moscow made an independent decision to attack its neighbor. For that, the Putin government bears responsibility.
However, the U.S. and its European allies set the stage for the war, engaging in behavior that clearly yet needlessly antagonized Russia. For contributing to the horror now engulfing Ukraine, Washington should be held responsible and its officials held accountable. Otherwise more people will keep dying because of Uncle Sam’s foolish hubris.”
“In 2019, New York enacted an extreme risk prevention law, otherwise known as a “red flag law,” that can bar individuals who are believed to pose a danger to themselves or others from possessing firearms. New York state police decided not to invoke that law against the Buffalo shooter, who didn’t have a previous criminal record, but had made serious threats of violence. On Wednesday, Hochul issued an executive order requiring police to do so going forward.”
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“She also called on the state legislature to pass bills that would require police to report guns associated with crimes within 24 hours and mandate that semiautomatic pistols sold in New York be microstamped so that law enforcement can link cartridges found at crime scenes to the gun that fired them. And she announced the creation of a dedicated domestic terrorism unit within the state police, along with efforts to investigate social media companies that have provided platforms for hate speech.
The goal is to ensure that people like the Buffalo shooter don’t fall through the cracks again. When the shooter was 17, he said that he wanted to commit murder-suicide at his high school. He was required to undergo a psychological evaluation and referred to police, who decided not to take further action for reasons still unknown. So when he turned 18, there was nothing preventing him from legally purchasing a weapon. And he did. The weapon he used in the shooting was purchased from a store in Endicott, New York: a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that he illegally modified to increase its capacity.
Under New York’s red flag law, that never should have happened.”
“What if someone told you that you could dramatically reduce the crime rate without resorting to coercive policing or incarceration? In fact, what if they said you could avert a serious crime — a robbery, say, or maybe even a murder — just by shelling out $1.50?
That’s such an incredibly good deal that it sounds too good to be true. But it’s been borne out by the research of Chris Blattman, Margaret Sheridan, Julian Jamison, and Sebastian Chaskel. Their new study provides experimental evidence that offering at-risk men a few weeks of behavioral therapy plus a bit of cash reduces the future risk of crime and violence, even 10 years after the intervention.”
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“999 Liberian men were split into four groups. Some received CBT, while others got $200 in cash. Another group got the CBT plus the cash, and finally, there was a control group that got neither.
A month after the intervention, both the therapy group and the therapy-plus-cash group were showing positive results. A year after the intervention, the positive effects on those who got therapy alone had faded a bit, but those who got therapy plus cash were still showing huge impacts: crime and violence were down about 50 percent.”
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“10 years later, he tracked down the original men from the study and reevaluated them. Amazingly, crime and violence were still down by about 50 percent in the therapy-plus-cash group.”
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“The most plausible hypothesis, according to Blattman, is that the $200 in cash enabled the men to pursue a few months of legitimate business activity — say, shoe shining — after the therapy ended. That meant a few extra months of getting to cement their new non-criminal identity and behavioral changes. “Basically, it gave them time to practice,” Blattman told me.”
“The uproar over infant formula shortages is prompting lawmakers to confront how a federal nutrition program may be helping a small handful of formula manufacturers dominate the U.S. market.
The federal government’s widely-used nutrition program for women, infants and children, known as WIC, is by far the largest purchaser of formula in the U.S., with more than half of infant formula in the U.S. going through the program. And just two companies serve close to 90 percent of the infants who receive benefits through the program, in part because of the way WIC awards its contracts.”
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“The Abbott recall and resulting shortages were especially disruptive for WIC recipients. About half of all babies born in the U.S. qualify for WIC, which serves low-income families. Many of these households don’t have the time or resources to drive around looking for alternative formula brands or scour the internet for available stocks. Even if parents and caregivers could find alternative formulas, their WIC benefits might not have covered the specific brand they could find when the shortages first hit.
For the past three decades, WIC has used what’s called sole-source contracting, which is designed to save the program money by allowing the states to buy formula far below retail prices. The National WIC Association estimates that state rebates save about $1.7 billion in costs each year. When a state contracts with a company, all WIC participants in the state use that same manufacturer. Just three companies have been awarded contracts during this time: Abbott Nutrition; Mead Johnson, which makes Enfamil; and Nestle, which makes Gerber.”
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““The dirty secret about WIC is these formula companies actually lose money on formula that they sell through WIC,” because the lowest bidder ends up winning the state contracts, explained a former Democratic Senate aide. “But what happens is… if you give birth in a hospital and you request formula, you’re going to get the formula that is whoever has the WIC contract,” allowing the formula makers to reach a massive pool of new customers. Getting a state WIC contract can also mean more favorable shelf space at retailers across the state and more brand loyalty.
Not everyone agrees about the extent to which sole-source contracting has driven consolidation in the formula industry, versus other factors, like overall consolidation across the food sector and high food safety regulatory costs, since infant formula is more highly regulated than most other foods.”
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” But the USDA’s Economic Research Service in 2011 found that switching a state WIC contract gave the new manufacturer about a 74 percent bump up in market share in the state. Most of that is the result of WIC participants switching — since they make up more than half the market — but the rest is the result of more preferential treatment at the retail level.”