“Ray shared data showing that workers would need to make almost $30 an hour in order to rent a standard two-bedroom apartment in the Miami area without experiencing cost burdens. As of 2021, Miami’s median hourly wage was $18.59, creating a situation where many residents are forced to spend upward of 50 percent of their incomes on housing alone. The conventional financial wisdom is that households should spend no more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent.
Already in 2019, some were sounding the alarm about Miami’s rising housing prices. One study commissioned by the housing group Miami Houses for All in collaboration with city and county officials found that Miami was the third-most expensive metropolitan area in the entire country for housing costs. The same study found that over 50 percent of households in Miami were spending more than they could afford on rents and mortgage payments.”
“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.”
“We need to remember that earlier this year officials retrieved boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago that they said should have been turned over to the National Archives before Trump left office. According to reporting from CNN, investigators became aware of the existence of more such documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago in June. But instead of simply taking these documents as officials had done previously, or subpoenaing Trump for the documents, investigators took the more serious step of requesting a search warrant. This suggests that officials at the Department of Justice did not think they would get all the documents in Trump’s possession if they filed a subpoena.
There is much we still don’t know about what the agents were looking for and what they found, but the process of applying for and receiving permission for the warrant indicates the significance of what happened Monday.
Typically, I would advise a client that an FBI search at your home means that you will likely face charges. That’s because a federal judge determined that there was good reason to believe a federal crime was committed and that evidence of the crime was in your home. To be clear, the execution of a search warrant doesn’t necessarily mean that the evidence points to the owner of the home as the person who committed the crime. It just usually works out that way.
To obtain the warrant, the DOJ had to present a detailed affidavit to a judge walking through the evidence they have that a crime was committed and providing some reason to believe evidence of that crime is at Mar-a-Lago right now. I emphasize “right now” because the government needs to show that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of the crime was present at Mar-a-Lago at the time of the search. It is extremely unlikely that a judge would approve a warrant based on stale evidence that had been received many months ago. The Justice Department also would act in the most conservative, cautious manner given the enormous stakes for the Department’s reputation and the nation as a whole.”
…
“The nature of the possible charges is also very unclear. Recent reporting from both the New York Times and the Associated Press indicates the search warrant is related to classified material taken from the White House by Trump when he left office. But we know that mishandling classified documents only rarely results in charges.
James Comey was right when he testified that the DOJ typically does not prosecute cases involving the mishandling of classified material unless that material was deliberately transferred to a third party. That suggests to me that there is something important — call it a plus factor — we don’t know here. People on the right have rushed to judgment and are already saying, “This is just a docs case.” But we don’t know that. In fact, there is reason to believe it is more than that.”
“Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a bill into law Wednesday that will make it illegal to film the police within eight feet.
The legislation, H.B. 2319, makes it a misdemeanor offense to continue filming police activity from within eight feet of an officer after receiving a verbal warning. The bill originally restricted filming the police from no closer than 15 feet away, but it was amended after criticisms.
There are also exceptions for filming the police in a private residence, during a traffic stop, and for the subject of a police encounter. But the law qualifies those exceptions, saying they apply only if the person recording is “not interfering with lawful police actions,” or “unless a law enforcement officer determines that the person is interfering in the law enforcement activity or that it is not safe to be in the area and orders the person to leave the area.”
Interfering with police, or obstruction of justice, is one of the most frequently cited justifications for frivolous and retaliatory arrests.”
…
“”Can you be arrested for standing still while wearing a GoPro under this statute?” Doucette asked. “It seems the answer here is yes, which would violate the First Amendment (since standing still isn’t interfering with an officer’s duties).””
…
“State legislators should be less concerned with cops’ feelings and more concerned about citizens’ right to document how armed government agents go about their business. Giving officers another discretionary offense to slap on someone who annoys them will lead only to more confusion and more censorship.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/10/trump-fifth-tish-james-new-york-00050839
“The discontent Trump used to propel himself to the White House has always been present on the American right. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wis.) began his crusade against “the hidden Communists in America and their liberal Democratic protectors,” for example, he found support in the Republican Party and in the few conservative publications that existed at the time—The American Mercury, Human Events, even the libertarian-leaning Freeman. As McCarthy’s accusations multiplied and “became more outrageous, more galling, and more disconnected from reality,” Continetti writes, conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. still backed his crusade. There are similarities in the way Sen. Robert A. Taft (R–Ohio) responded to McCarthy’s conspiracy theories and the way Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has responded to Trump’s. While McCarthy ultimately undermined himself by launching outrageous accusations against President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Continetti demonstrates just how long conservatives have been tempted to follow aggressive demagogues while they lambaste liberals.
Traditionally, conservative elites have tried to channel populist sentiments into a respectable and successful movement. No one had to grapple with this question more than Buckley, the founder of National Review. The usual conservative narrative says that Buckley legitimized conservatism by being a gatekeeper: In keeping the conspiracism of the John Birch Society and the radical individualism of Ayn Rand at arm’s length, he made it less likely that conservatives would be labeled extremists. In the case of the John Birch Society, Buckley wrote a 5,000-word essay, “The Question of Robert Welch,” that condemned the group’s founder, arguing that “the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anticommunism in the United States would be to resign.” Buckley’s purges are often held up as a great success, but the reality is that Welch did not resign and the John Birch Society continued to have influence.
While Buckley initially aligned his magazine with segregationists in the South, a choice that has marred the movement’s reputation ever since, he was resolute in opposing Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s particular brand of populism. Wallace, of course, was a strident proponent of segregation in the 1960s. During his second run for president, on a third-party ticket in 1968, the candidate turned heavily to anti-elitist rhetoric. “As he began to attack the federal government and its know-it-all politicians and bureaucrats,” Continetti writes, “his support among conservatives grew.” Buckley called Wallace “Mr. Evil,” “a dangerous man,” and a “great phony.” He was also taken aback by the “uncouthness that seems to account for his general popularity.”
Other conservatives joined the denunciations. Wallace’s conservative fans, National Review founding senior editor Frank Meyer wrote, need to recognize that “there are other dangers to conservatism and to the civilization conservatives are defending than the liberal Establishment, and that to fight liberalism without guarding against these dangers runs the risk of ending in a situation as bad as or worse as our present one.” In modern parlance: Don’t back a man like Wallace to own the libs.”‘
https://www.vox.com/2022/7/20/23270078/europe-russia-gas-nord-stream-ukraine-war