on college being free

TL;DR: the solution to the student loan crisis cannot be sustainably solved by making college free, but it can solve many problems at once by heavily regulating student loan interest.  the set of problems solved by this approach are many: college has value and value should be paid for, students still have skin in the game, banks still make enough money to cover the cost of administering the loans, and it allows the 40-50 year earnings of graduates to be used productively, driving the whole economy, and not simply funnelled back to banks at rates that go many times further than the money originally loaned.

 

make something free and watch people treat it like it has no value. 

an education from college, university, trade school, or apprenticeship is a thing of value. it prepares young people with the mindset and skllls they need to be productive. that productivity has value, therefore the education that got them started down the path has value as well. after our constitutionally guaranteed primary and secondary educations, up to the age of 16-18 or so, young people have several choices on what to do next to prepare themselves for the rest of their life path. 

it’s an essential part of their commitment to their own life that they invest in themselves. to reap the greatest rewards, requires the greatest investment of time, effort, and yes, money, the latter is of course compensation for the time and effort educators provide. 

individual and society, a shared commitment

a college or trades education beyond high school should cost the student a fair amount of money, along with the commitment of time and effort to the learning process. while it benefits society to have the highest educated and skilled workforce possible, society’s collective commitment to the process shouldn’t include footing the entire bill. that teaches future parents nothing about savings, and tells students and everyone else in the process that an advanced education is owed to them, or worse, that it has no value.

fix student loans, you fix a lot of problems at the same time

the problem with student loans today is that the interest on them creates a cycle where a monthly payment they can afford doesn’t even cover the interest. 

the student keeps paying, a lot, for many years, and the balance due continues to go up. in the end, after 20 years, the remaining balance is written off (who knows who eats that, probably taxpayers), and the student is left to pay full taxes on the written off balance, often to the tune of 4, 5, or even 6 figures. 

meanwhile the banks have for decades extracted the maximum profit possible.
in other words, schools, students, and taxpayers are the losers. banks are the only winners.

it's sort of like how trump has done business. leverage finances to build something big, generate as much revenue as possible, pull out as much profit as you can, run the business until it starts losing money, protect yourself using very legal bankruptcy laws (those laws, btw, bought and paid for by the businesses who abuse them, so that, hey, at least it's all "legal"), walk away, and let the government and taxpayers clean up the mess. "privatize gains; socialize losses", yep, this is the person we elected to clean up government, and run it like a business. nice huh?

ok back on topic...

possible solution

is there a solution where banks still make money, students invest in themselves, and taxpayers pay much less than they do now? i think so.

here’s what government can do

the government should invest in the cost of advanced education by going back to heavily regulating the interest that banks can charge for student loans. i’m no financial wizard, and who knows if this is true, but in this digital age it’s hard to believe that it would cost a bank more than 1% annually to administratively process the maintenance of a student loan. that 1% could be regulated by the federal government, who could at the same time provide incentives to banks for writing loans based on quality and quantity.

rather than pouring out billions annually in grants to students, pour a fraction of that into subsidizing the 1% interest to the banks for 10 years.

here’s what students can do

they can now afford to pay for their entire education themselves. 

they can use parents’ savings, money they earn while attending school, or when those fall short, taking out 0% interest loans that cover tuition, room, board, books, and fees. 

after 10 years of 0% interest, whatever balance is left, the student can continue paying, and tack on the 1% going forward. incentivizes them to pay off the loan sooner.

what might happen as a result:

• moving from grants to interest subsidies, government costs for student tuition might go down considerably
• government can eliminate tax deductions for student loan interest
• students pay for their own education fully; they own the whole thing, paid off at 0% interest in a time frame they can
• banks stop profiting billions off the backs of students, unchaining them from the financial industry revenue stream. i’m all for banks investing and making money. just go do it somewhere else. 

on trump's racism

TL;DR: while trump may not be a racist, to them he is "their guy".  he has been very effective at using "draw your own conclusions" marketing principles to tap into that large bloc of voters that other politicians had previously worked hard to distance themselves from. 

 

is president trump a racist? i don't know. if there's evidence out there, it doesn't seem to be blatant, or show him to be one any more or less than your average rich white guy from his generation.

i think i do however understand why he walks, talks, and quacks like a racist.

is there evidence of racism? not much

i do believe that if the left-leaning news media who are could have found evidence of this over the past two years, they would have already.

i also believe that the right-leaning news media who (around the time that jeb, mario, and ted had high-hopes and money in the game) could have found evidence of this, they would have already.

so... given that there have been a lot of powerful people, with powerful money, on both sides of the aisle, with incentive to bring him down, and failing to find racist beliefs or actions, i tend to believe that the jury is still out on this one.

and, if you do find any evidence of this, during his decades of adult life, i bet you'll find that what might look like racism, is probably motivated more by green, than by black, brown, or white.

so...

so why did we elect him?

to drain the swamp, right?

hillary represented the best (worst?) example of a corrupt political empire, bought and paid for by the american financial sector. so, for the first time most of us can remember, americans were given the opportunity to destroy a corrupt political machine with one pull of the lever. we got to elect someone who wasn't a career politician. we specifically and purposefully elected a businessman. we elected a shrewd, savvy, independent, outsider, fuckyou entrepreneur.

but to win, he still needed votes, and to earn votes he needed to create enough value.

how do business people create value?

they create it in lots of ways, but here are two of them:

1) by dominating competitive markets
2) by exploiting untapped markets

for decades, it has been easy to see that trump is motivated only by finding potential value, adding value, then extracting value.

...because trump isn't a politician. remember?

right? i mean, that was the whole point of the campaign, and probably the most common reason given by people who voted for him.

objectively defined right and wrong are out, ethics are out, honesty is out (unless you can make a buck on it). all that stuff is replaced by loyalty and winning. he built businesses as cheaply as he could, then extracted as much personal value as he could until bankruptcy ended the party, at which time, he took off, taxpayers were there to pay the bill and clean up the mess. "hey, that's just smart business, folks"

how did trump use business value to crush the establishment GOP?

when there were over a dozen candidates in the GOP pool of possible nominees. trump ended up winning the nomination not because he competed better and harder during the campaign, and not because his vision of a great america was better defined and articulated (because his vision was actually more vague and less defined than the others, more emotion than logic, more fear than facts), rather, he won the GOP nomination because he refused to play by the same rules as the others. instead, he invented a new more exciting game, and then won that game because he was the only one playing.

the day the GOP shot themselves in the foot in front of a nation

omg do you remember? because if you don't then i'm all too happy to remind you. there was this debate. there had to have been 10 GOP dweebs on the stage. they were all unified in their demand that trump concede to their whim of declaring that he will support whoever the nominee ended up being. i've never before seen, and i hope never will see from now on, a more pathetic display of cowardice by a collection of accomplished successful politicians as this group who asked such a bullshit question. they were each so smugly convinced that it was them who would be the nominee,  but all so convinced that trump would not be, but that they were at the same time fearful that trump would magnetically split the party.

holy shit.

this was the moment THIS former republican lost ALL respect for the intellectually bankrupt emotionally manipulative republican party.

it was actually at that moment that it became obvious to the rest of us that trump would actually be the nominee. i mean, i still believed hillary would win the general election, but it was at that moment that i lost my last remaining respect for the GOP. this being the party i had been a registered member of, and idealistic true believer of, from 1981 to 1996.

you conservative fools. you let down your guard, and the idiot trump checkmated you all.

and you all. pricks all of you. when it came to hosting the republican national convention in 2016, which of you actually convened with your own party? bunone of you. none. of. you. proves you cared more about yourselves than your country. more about yourselves than your party. and more about yourselves than understanding what motivates the citizens who your fearmongering and tea party enabling fed and fostered, and finally grew up and blew up in your face.

i'm embarrassed to say that i was ever a member of your party. you used patriotism to manipulate good people into voting against themselves. you stuffed your pockets with wall street billions while redirecting hatred toward the poor of us who needed only a tiny percentage of that.

this was the election when it was jeb bush's "turn". it was ted cruz' "time". it was marco rubio's "below the zone" leapfrog. omg. freakin' amateurs. playing by the old rules. and now they're home sitting on their hands.

so what does this have to do with racism and white supremacy?

yeah, how about them white supremacists?

politicians normally avoid these folks, because their ideas are morally bankrupt and typically toxic to a sustainable political career.

but... when it comes to leveraging untapped markets to his profit and benefit, trump is a genius. and the angry white supremacists turned out to be a big pool of motivated voters who rose up and tsunami'd him into the white house.

...so to sum this up:

in other words: trump may not be a racist. but he pandered to them. they gave him the edge he needed to win office. and any actions (or inactions) by trump that look racist are nothing more than not biting the hand that feeds him. especially because he will need these "good folks" again in a few years.

so even if he is not a racist. he bought, paid for, and owns the racist voting bloc.

to the white supremacists, trump is "their guy". they know it. he knows it. and as an untapped market, as a huge pool of votes that no one ever wanted before, but still have plenty of value. so basically, tapping into that pool is a business move, not a political one.

but now he owns them, and like it or not, you are the company you keep.

the question then is: are you a racist if you befriend racists? not necessarily, but then, if winning is the only objective, that's not the point.