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Often we have highlighted the trillion dollar student debt mainly because of the corrosive effects it haves on many lives. WSJ OpEd points out the risk coming from the fact many of the loans will not be repaid and taxpayers will be on the hook.
Let’s call her Alice. One of us has known her for years. She earned her Ph.D. in the mid-1990s when academic jobs were scarce, and she wound up an academic gypsy. She left graduate school to take a one-year full-time academic appointment, but then found herself cobbling together part-time teaching jobs at different community colleges in a large metropolitan area, earning a couple of thousand dollars for each course she teaches. She is a dedicated teacher, but her annual income is between $30,000 and $40,000.
Alice owes $270,000 in student loans. She only borrowed about $70,000 to pay for grad school, but she’s never been able to afford much in the way of payments, and after consolidating her loans and accumulating interest charges for years, she’s watched her debt roughly quadruple.
If Alice taught students in a low-income high school or was a recent graduate, she would be eligible for various programs that would allow her to discharge at least some of her debt. But since she graduated at a time before income-based repayment and loan-forgiveness programs, there is no federal program to help established part-time community-college faculty discharge their old student-loan debts.
In fact, the federal government is quite content with Alice’s situation. The $270,000 she owes is carried on the government’s books as an asset. The government reasons that, since it is nearly impossible to discharge student loans through bankruptcy, it will eventually collect all of the more than $1 trillion in federal student loan debt that Alice—and millions of other student borrowers—owe.
Not likely. …
… According to the Department of Education, students borrow over $100 billion annually, and the figure rises with each new academic year.
This is a big problem. Unexpected write-offs of billions of unpaid student loans will confront Americans with a set of ugly choices: Will we raise taxes to cover the losses—which is impossible to imagine in today’s political climate? Do we cut other federal spending—which is nearly as unlikely since we’re talking about substantial sums? Or do we significantly increase the national debt. This will be a continuing crisis; each year’s increased borrowing will require confronting the same choices in future years. …
More on our land of perverse incentives comes from Michael Barone as he spotlights more government failure in the home mortgage market.
I have written frequently that I estimate that one-third of the mortgage foreclosures in the 2007-10 period were of Hispanic homebuyers. Very many had been granted mortgages, despite bad or dubious credit, by lenders who then fobbed them off on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or other mortgage securitizers, in the meantime gaining brownie points with regulators for lending to “minorities.” …
… This was an enormous policy failure, attributable both to the Clinton and the Bush administrations. …
… Now the Urban Institute and the Obama administration are pushing for more mortgages for blacks and Hispanics with subpar credit ratings. Haven’t America, the world and the intended beneficiaries already suffered enough from this perhaps well-intentioned but indubitably misguided policy?
The globalony folks are in trouble. Rather than charismatic polar bears, now they’re shedding tears for the ugly walrus. Gail Collins, a reliable left liberal voice for the NY Times columned on the walrus haulout in Alaska. She claims it happened because of lack of polar ice. Turns out it happens every year. It’s a walrus convention. Power Line posts on silly Gail.
… Like the other manifestations of climate hysteria, the walrus crisis is entirely fabricated. First, let’s note what how great it is that you can find 35,000 Pacific walruses in one place. It is a sign of a thriving wildlife population, estimated to have doubled since the 1950s.
Climate Depot has a thorough debunking of the walrus hype, beginning with Dr. Susan Crockford, a zoologist:
The attempts by WWF and others to link this event to global warming is self-serving nonsense that has nothing to do with science…this is blatant nonsense and those who support or encourage this interpretation are misinforming the public.
Walruses have always swarmed on land during the fall. This is called a “haulout.” In 2007, Wikipedia said, in its entry on walruses:
In the non-reproductive season (late summer and fall) walruses tend to migrate away from the ice and form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops.
That portion of the walrus entry was recently deleted. Hmm, wonder why?
Walrus haulouts have been observed for hundreds of years: “Dating back to at least 1604, there have been reports of large walrus gatherings or haul outs.”
So the alleged walrus crisis is more hot air. …
John Steele Gordon has a walrus post too.
The global warming crowd has been increasingly embarrassed by the fact that while their beloved computer models have been predicting ever higher temperatures, there has been no global warming for the last 18 years. Where could the heat be hiding? The favorite explanation for several years now has been that it is in the deep ocean, below 2,000 meters (1.24 miles), that the heat was being stored.
Well, so much for that theory. NASA announced today that a study has shown no warming in the deep ocean between the years 2005 and 2013. If the computer models can’t even predict the past, why would anyone, without a political agenda at least, pay any attention to what they predict about the future?
Meanwhile, Gail Collins in the Times is reporting a walrus crisis: …
… So while liberals are declaring imminent walrus catastrophe, my only reaction on seeing the photographs was a profound gratitude I wasn’t downwind of 35,000 walruses.
Now lefties have a walrus myth and these myths have a half-life of centuries. Ann Coulter posts on other enduring myths.
… Second, once the MSM figured out how to blame a white guy for a black athlete punching his fiancee, and the only news was about Ray Rice and — the true villain — NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, MSNBC’s Toure repeated the old chestnut about emergency room admissions for domestic violence spiking on Super Bowl Sundays.
As I have noted at least a half-dozen times this was a nonsense statistic invented by feminists and then cited as fact by a slew of major news outlets, culminating in a public service announcement during the 1993 Super Bowl that reminded viewers: “Domestic violence is a crime!” Finally, Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, realizing that he was, in fact, a reporter, asked, Where’d you get that figure?
He called all the experts who had been cited as sources for the statistic. All of them told him it wasn’t true.
“That’s not what we found at all,” said Janet Katz, professor of sociology and criminal justice and an author of one oft-cited study allegedly establishing the Super Bowl-wife-beating nexus. She said football games bore no relationship to emergency room admissions for domestic violence.
A week after Toure recycled this hoax from the ’90s, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski said on “Morning Joe”: “Super Bowl Sunday has the highest rate of domestic violence.”
So at least they correct their mistakes quickly over there.
Finally, The Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig is doggedly pushing the hoax about Obama getting more threats than any previous president. …