Sorry for the hiatus, busy busy. I had a conversation with my beautiful and intelligent wife the other day (yes, while I should have been blogging, but it got this one going) about health care, government, and religion. We went relatively in-depth about the problems facing us as a culture and tried to come up with a "unified theory" of what the hell has gone wrong in this country. The answer that was reached was not what you think: fear of death and the corruption of the idea of sanctity of life.
Fear of death has been covered in these blogs already, I know, but let me expand on these ideas, and I beg your indulgence of my indulgences.
It has become entirely apparent, as Einstein once said, that our technology has surpassed our humanity; that we have so many bells and whistles going off around us all the time and yet we cannot use them to good effect anymore. These technological marvels like life support, medications, complex surgeries, all of these things are not inherently good, but only good when applied with a view of humanity.
Is it a true good to keep someone on life support who will never wake? It is a true good to pay thousands on a medication that will only prolong your suffering, or undergo an operation that will drain what you would give to your children, grandchildren or a charitable cause so you can live easier for but one more year? I say no, that those who choose such things are not committed to the good of the people nor really the good of themselves. Prolonging suffering, wasting precious resources for small effect and destroying our own legacy is tantamount to lunacy and nothing more. But why, then, do we do it?
It all comes down to fear of death, that unknown equalizer we all MUST face, though we paint our faces an inch thick, though we get a hundred face lifts and botox injections, though we take a thousand drugs or undergo a thousand painful procedures. Once upon a time, and not really that long ago, religion provided the masses of people a way to face that fear, to believe there is something greater and better beyond this life. And so many of us were unafraid to go into that great night with our eyes open and full of hope. There was dignity and grace in the act of dying, of aging. Whatever evils religion has done, it has given us the ultimate tool to destroy the ultimate fear.
No more. We have become an irreligious society, placing our hope in science to take away what we perceive to be the bitter sting of death. And that is really fine, so long as our humanity and will can keep pace with the science we create. Yet we have not. As our technological power has become stronger, we find ourselves unable and unwilling to make the right choices regarding that unknown quantity. We have gone back to the days where all humanity was afraid of the dark. Rather than look upon our marvels and be at peace we have become more troubled and selfish; rather than using our knowledge to create something which will endure beyond us we have chosen to use our great abilities for selfishness and personal vanity.
But where is religion now? What has happened is not simply the fault of science, which is (real science, anyway) unbiased and simply IS, but the fault of religion for forgetting what IT is. The vestigial conservatism in the title of this blog is what is left of the belief in the sanctity of life that religion had given us. As with anything, everything has it's corollary, and in this case, the second half of that belief has been abandoned: the sanctity of life necessitates the dignity of death.
Pulling the plug is not murder, nor is removing the feeding tube of a person who has undergone a horrific tragedy. They are in fact truly celebrations of the sanctity of life. Life is not breathing, it is not simply existing; to a human being it is an amalgamation of hopes and fears and dreams and actions, of nobility and disgrace, of failure and triumph. Life is not sacred because it simply is, but because of the possibilities it gives to us. Many religions have forgotten that part of the equation, choosing to simply state that life must be preserved AT ALL COSTS, even if that cost is our humanity.
Religion, I believe, is mans interpretation of the will of God. And as such it is inherently flawed as all people are flawed. Things useful and necessary can be forgotten, altered, even warped into something it was never intended to be. This doesn't negate the good it has or yet can do, just as the good it has and can do cannot negate the evils it has perpetrated through the years. The same can be said of any human being.
But science, no matter how advanced, cannot advance us morally as a species, only technologically. The answers to when science should be used, and to what effect, cannot be quantified or given any greater value than already exist in our moral sense and, given the state of our world, I would say it is perfectly capable of turning us back on some of our greatest gifts.
We can measure the mass of a single atom, or a smaller particle still, but the greatness and possibility of the human experience is unquantifiable, and more beautiful than any machine that can be built. We as a people must remember what it is to be unafraid, we must look into that great unknown and realize that final thing is what truly gives the rest of our life meaning, and to be glad of it.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Liberals: Obviously Not Math Majors
It has come to my attention that many of the most "fun" statistics for liberal use these days are pretty stretchy. And I don't mean the amount of money in the budget, either. Lets look through a few "progressive" ideas over the next few days and see what the numbers say.
Yes, I know it is so much more fun to have an emotional, visceral reaction to problems, but bear with me, as I have this somewhat crazy idea that Government should be based on what works, rather than what we really, truly, with sugar and spice on top wish would work.
Lets take, for today's example, urban blacks. You will see statistics one after the other about how destitute these poor souls are, how they are victimized by the police (hey, I'm not much of a fan either, just saying), endure higher prices than suburbs, crooked and racist business owners moving the jobs away to where the white folk are, and are generally the victims of heinous things perpetrated upon them by the evil, the greedy, and the hateful.
Problem seems to be, though, that the numbers just don't add up to those conclusions.
To really understand anything you first have to know that nothing happens in a vacuum, that there is a history involved in everything, and to know where things are going, you must know where things have been. You know the effect, urban poverty, and so rather than look at the history of the situation most people just lash out at what they perceive to be the "bad guys".
Do me a favor: look at the employment rates of urban dwellers in the 1930's and 40's. Now look at the 1950's; then go for the 60's, then 70's, and now today. Look at every ethnic group, family cohesion rates (families with 2 parents), income range and the violent crime stats. Now look at today. What you see is a gradual improvement up until the early 1960's, after which the situation for minorities, especially blacks, drastically worsens.
But how can that be? The 60's brought us the civil rights act, numerous laws on equality, robust unionization, the works. How can things have been better BEFORE all those wonderful things and worse AFTER? This is where history comes in handy. During the mid to late 60's all those wonderful things were done, yes, but businesses started moving out before that as crime was already gong up. A few riots thrown in for good measure and most businesses felt (reasonably) like the best way to protect their businesses was to get the hell out of Dodge.
The story the numbers tell is that prior to the unrest of the 60's, the urban minority population was experiencing a robust family life, with decent wages and relatively low crime. But leading up to the early part of that decade, the numbers waver. Not in employment on average but the crime rate and child abandonment rate. Shortly after these numbers began to rise, businesses started to move out. There were then riots in major cities, where urban blacks destroyed millions (hundreds of millions in adjusted money) of dollars of private and business property. More businesses moved for their safety. More rampant crime, more abandonment.
The problem is believed to be external, ie. businesses move so crime goes up. But in actuality the numbers don't support that story, but rather show businesses doing the smart thing to protect their assets when crime rates rise where they are located.
The truth is that the problem isn't external, but internal. The breakdown of civil society is the cause of woe, not someone foisting something upon them. Easy to prove that one too.
When you take into account not merely the "level" of education of blacks versus whites but take into account mean test scores, income is distributed in a funny way. We all know that 2 graduates are not equal just because they are graduates. Say one went to MIT and another went to Kalamazoo college. Or even if both went to MIT but one graduated top of his class with honors and another barely skirts by. So the only way to take into account these variables is to look at test averages and class placement. Here are what the data say: all thing being equal, black men get paid more than white men. Given the same basic measurement stick, black men out-earn white men by just shy of 6 percent. Huh.
What this shows, in stark numbers, is that those who choose to step out of the culture they are mired in have no greater limitations than anyone else, that those who try do, in fact, excel. The problem lay not in people holding others down but in people holding themselves down, people choosing the easy over the right, the quick payoff rather than the reward of the patient.
When the State, or a community organizer, or well meaning liberal steps in talks about "blaming the victim", the burden of proof upon them to show that there is in fact a victim of external abuses. When history and hard fact are in play- rather than platitudes and emotional reaction- it is pretty easy to say that in this case there is none. Oh, and I know some liberals will toss around that old hack about the "legacy of slavery", and I am fully prepared to throw hard data back in their smug and self serving faces.
Modern liberals have for too long held an entire people from their American birthright: to try as hard as anyone else and to go just as far. They have enslaved a people with their false promises and feel-good emotional blame games. They have given a man a fish at a time, rather that even allowing him to learn how to fish, and entire generations have been lost because of it. They have created artificial rifts in our nation by playing up non-existent problems and creating cures worse than the diseases that are in fact there. They have crushed the spirits of innumerable human beings by giving them the out: someone else is holding me down, I am a victim, I have no power, I must be taken care of, I cannot do anything on my own. They have robbed a people of true pride in themselves, the cornerstone of conservative thought, and robbed us all of the future we could have had.
Yes, I know it is so much more fun to have an emotional, visceral reaction to problems, but bear with me, as I have this somewhat crazy idea that Government should be based on what works, rather than what we really, truly, with sugar and spice on top wish would work.
Lets take, for today's example, urban blacks. You will see statistics one after the other about how destitute these poor souls are, how they are victimized by the police (hey, I'm not much of a fan either, just saying), endure higher prices than suburbs, crooked and racist business owners moving the jobs away to where the white folk are, and are generally the victims of heinous things perpetrated upon them by the evil, the greedy, and the hateful.
Problem seems to be, though, that the numbers just don't add up to those conclusions.
To really understand anything you first have to know that nothing happens in a vacuum, that there is a history involved in everything, and to know where things are going, you must know where things have been. You know the effect, urban poverty, and so rather than look at the history of the situation most people just lash out at what they perceive to be the "bad guys".
Do me a favor: look at the employment rates of urban dwellers in the 1930's and 40's. Now look at the 1950's; then go for the 60's, then 70's, and now today. Look at every ethnic group, family cohesion rates (families with 2 parents), income range and the violent crime stats. Now look at today. What you see is a gradual improvement up until the early 1960's, after which the situation for minorities, especially blacks, drastically worsens.
But how can that be? The 60's brought us the civil rights act, numerous laws on equality, robust unionization, the works. How can things have been better BEFORE all those wonderful things and worse AFTER? This is where history comes in handy. During the mid to late 60's all those wonderful things were done, yes, but businesses started moving out before that as crime was already gong up. A few riots thrown in for good measure and most businesses felt (reasonably) like the best way to protect their businesses was to get the hell out of Dodge.
The story the numbers tell is that prior to the unrest of the 60's, the urban minority population was experiencing a robust family life, with decent wages and relatively low crime. But leading up to the early part of that decade, the numbers waver. Not in employment on average but the crime rate and child abandonment rate. Shortly after these numbers began to rise, businesses started to move out. There were then riots in major cities, where urban blacks destroyed millions (hundreds of millions in adjusted money) of dollars of private and business property. More businesses moved for their safety. More rampant crime, more abandonment.
The problem is believed to be external, ie. businesses move so crime goes up. But in actuality the numbers don't support that story, but rather show businesses doing the smart thing to protect their assets when crime rates rise where they are located.
The truth is that the problem isn't external, but internal. The breakdown of civil society is the cause of woe, not someone foisting something upon them. Easy to prove that one too.
When you take into account not merely the "level" of education of blacks versus whites but take into account mean test scores, income is distributed in a funny way. We all know that 2 graduates are not equal just because they are graduates. Say one went to MIT and another went to Kalamazoo college. Or even if both went to MIT but one graduated top of his class with honors and another barely skirts by. So the only way to take into account these variables is to look at test averages and class placement. Here are what the data say: all thing being equal, black men get paid more than white men. Given the same basic measurement stick, black men out-earn white men by just shy of 6 percent. Huh.
What this shows, in stark numbers, is that those who choose to step out of the culture they are mired in have no greater limitations than anyone else, that those who try do, in fact, excel. The problem lay not in people holding others down but in people holding themselves down, people choosing the easy over the right, the quick payoff rather than the reward of the patient.
When the State, or a community organizer, or well meaning liberal steps in talks about "blaming the victim", the burden of proof upon them to show that there is in fact a victim of external abuses. When history and hard fact are in play- rather than platitudes and emotional reaction- it is pretty easy to say that in this case there is none. Oh, and I know some liberals will toss around that old hack about the "legacy of slavery", and I am fully prepared to throw hard data back in their smug and self serving faces.
Modern liberals have for too long held an entire people from their American birthright: to try as hard as anyone else and to go just as far. They have enslaved a people with their false promises and feel-good emotional blame games. They have given a man a fish at a time, rather that even allowing him to learn how to fish, and entire generations have been lost because of it. They have created artificial rifts in our nation by playing up non-existent problems and creating cures worse than the diseases that are in fact there. They have crushed the spirits of innumerable human beings by giving them the out: someone else is holding me down, I am a victim, I have no power, I must be taken care of, I cannot do anything on my own. They have robbed a people of true pride in themselves, the cornerstone of conservative thought, and robbed us all of the future we could have had.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Education: College Part II
In the State of the Union Speech, President Obama laid out a plan to cancel student loan debt after 20 years, or 10 years if they decide to work for the government. Great plan, if you want educational costs to skyrocket in ways you have never seen before and want the economy to crumble to ever finer ashes.
What incentive does paying off loans give to schools or students to try and make it affordable? All they know is that if they charge (or an institution costs) a student $100 or $100,000 a year that the government will be covering it so there is no reason to keep a single cost in line, no reason to be efficient with the money they take in. In fact, a University would be stupid NOT to raise tuition when, after all, a graduate of their institution simply has to work for a few decades, paying the minimum, and poof! all the debt magically disappears.
This is the type of perverse incentive modern liberals offer economies, from the ivy league to the Detroit projects. Why be more efficient if the cost of inefficiency is paid by someone else? To feel good? Bet that money you're raking in feels pretty good too, and with minimal work to get it. It's the New American Dream.
Meanwhile, as tuition- already divorced from any economic principles by government subsidy- goes to ever greater heights, graduates who would otherwise put their value into the private sector and employ more people would be going into government work, where the citizens have to pay for them. It is one of the most egregious liberal fallacies that the government can make the economy better by making government larger. Every single dollar paid to a state employee (who produces nothing and therefore is already a net drain on the economy) is a dollar YOU do not get to spend in the private economy.
Simple math: You make $40,000 a year. You spend about $20,000 on goods produced by other people, keeping them employed and therefore keeping the economy going. The state, though, makes certain you don't take home $40,000 even if that's what you and your employer agreed you would be paid. So really, after average income taxes, you bring home about $28,000. That means that they have robbed the economy of $12,000 to keep people employed, to produce goods to ship overseas and increase the value of our economy and our dollar. And that is just one person- imagine the net theft from our economy by doing this 100,000,000 times. Yet they do, every year.
Government expands by 20% and necessarily they have to take more of your income to keep those people (who produce nothing and are a drain on the economy already, did I mention that?) they hired employed. So now you are left with $26,000, an additional $2,000 out of the hands of those who produce what we need, an additional $2,000 that wont go to wages, making materials, providing health benefits to people working for them.
Now take even more college graduates, especially those with very expensive advanced degrees out of the economy, and pay for them with your money to produce nothing instead of having them out in the private sector where they could produce a net benefit to the country.
For those who don't understand what progressivism is, it is the gradual and progressive encroachment of the government into all facets of our life. But it is, as I said, gradual. And insidious- no huge steps to take away personal rights, just one case at a time, till progressives get the right judges to make the right rulings and presto- the state can now take your house and demolish it so a corporation can use the land instead. Or , even worse, so they can leave the lot empty for "natural space" laws and drive up housing prices by decreasing supply (therefore increasing net property tax revenue for fewer services).
Obama is not a Stupid man, indeed he is very intelligent, and very "progressive". So there is no possible way he has overlooked the long term impact of having the ever more high-end graduates out of the economy and into the government; just as there is no possible way he does not see what the effect a FULL government subsidy will do to tuition rates. If you think he hasn't, who is really the fool?
What incentive does paying off loans give to schools or students to try and make it affordable? All they know is that if they charge (or an institution costs) a student $100 or $100,000 a year that the government will be covering it so there is no reason to keep a single cost in line, no reason to be efficient with the money they take in. In fact, a University would be stupid NOT to raise tuition when, after all, a graduate of their institution simply has to work for a few decades, paying the minimum, and poof! all the debt magically disappears.
This is the type of perverse incentive modern liberals offer economies, from the ivy league to the Detroit projects. Why be more efficient if the cost of inefficiency is paid by someone else? To feel good? Bet that money you're raking in feels pretty good too, and with minimal work to get it. It's the New American Dream.
Meanwhile, as tuition- already divorced from any economic principles by government subsidy- goes to ever greater heights, graduates who would otherwise put their value into the private sector and employ more people would be going into government work, where the citizens have to pay for them. It is one of the most egregious liberal fallacies that the government can make the economy better by making government larger. Every single dollar paid to a state employee (who produces nothing and therefore is already a net drain on the economy) is a dollar YOU do not get to spend in the private economy.
Simple math: You make $40,000 a year. You spend about $20,000 on goods produced by other people, keeping them employed and therefore keeping the economy going. The state, though, makes certain you don't take home $40,000 even if that's what you and your employer agreed you would be paid. So really, after average income taxes, you bring home about $28,000. That means that they have robbed the economy of $12,000 to keep people employed, to produce goods to ship overseas and increase the value of our economy and our dollar. And that is just one person- imagine the net theft from our economy by doing this 100,000,000 times. Yet they do, every year.
Government expands by 20% and necessarily they have to take more of your income to keep those people (who produce nothing and are a drain on the economy already, did I mention that?) they hired employed. So now you are left with $26,000, an additional $2,000 out of the hands of those who produce what we need, an additional $2,000 that wont go to wages, making materials, providing health benefits to people working for them.
Now take even more college graduates, especially those with very expensive advanced degrees out of the economy, and pay for them with your money to produce nothing instead of having them out in the private sector where they could produce a net benefit to the country.
For those who don't understand what progressivism is, it is the gradual and progressive encroachment of the government into all facets of our life. But it is, as I said, gradual. And insidious- no huge steps to take away personal rights, just one case at a time, till progressives get the right judges to make the right rulings and presto- the state can now take your house and demolish it so a corporation can use the land instead. Or , even worse, so they can leave the lot empty for "natural space" laws and drive up housing prices by decreasing supply (therefore increasing net property tax revenue for fewer services).
Obama is not a Stupid man, indeed he is very intelligent, and very "progressive". So there is no possible way he has overlooked the long term impact of having the ever more high-end graduates out of the economy and into the government; just as there is no possible way he does not see what the effect a FULL government subsidy will do to tuition rates. If you think he hasn't, who is really the fool?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Education: How to Make College Cheaper
So it took a few days to do the research on this, but I finally figured out why college is, on average, so expensive and what can be done about it. It is actually pretty easy, and the logic behind it points out one of the major failures of modern liberal ideology. Yes! Two birds, one stone.
Want to make higher education more affordable to the masses? End FAFSA, and rework accreditation standards. Though this may seem counter-intuitive, the economics of it is totally sound.
Imagine you own a business making widgets and whosits, and you want to make those widgets more affordable so more people can buy them and you make more money. How do you do it? You invest in greater efficiencies, economies of scale, and focus on driving down costs of production. Pretty easy, really. Now imagine you have some friends in the government instead of a decent brain. The answer then would be to lobby your buddies to subsidies widget production so more people can afford them. This drives the cost down too, right?
Wrong. The net effect is that costs and prices are now out of line. For you to sell a widget at a straight, non-susidized $30 you could make, say, $10. Now, though, imagine the government gives you $10 a widget. What do you charge? Most liberals would say $20, but those ones are not in charge of businesses, and for good reason. You would, of course, sell widgets for $30 and pocket the subsidy. Now that works until you decide to really push on your whosit production, which is more expensive, but gives your company greater prestige and justifies everyone's salaries. Easiest way to pump more money into that is to go back to the government and tell them that the cost of widgets is going up and they need to pay more in subsidies to cover it.
Then you take the subsidies and profits and split them down the middle into widgets and whosits, and your company becomes even more prestigious for whozits, so you can justify charging more for your widgets and giving yourself and your execs a bigger pay package...Then the cycle begins again.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Universities, where widgets are graduates and whosits are research. You take the subsidy out of the equation and costs have to come into line or widgets will just go to the colleges where whosits are not produced.
But, you may say, even non-research institutions are more expensive every year! And you would be correct. The reason: accreditation agencies. These places actually never take into account the quality of what is produced, just what goes into the machine. So a college that gives laptops to it's students with the entire Library of Congress on the hard drive to research from would not get an accreditation because it doesn't have enough books or libraries. Seriously. Essentially, they are saying you have to have no choice on the outlay for a massive library, all the books therein, and all the upkeep costs, so that your students can have less access to information at a higher cost. I am not kidding or exaggerating in the least.
And the reason they do this is simple: they are too lazy to look at the outcomes, which is difficult, so instead just look at the bells and whistles. Take a look at What happened to the University of Colorado Law School. 92% of their graduates could pass the Bar Exam on the first try, a higher proportion that either Harvard or Yale. But due to the fact they couldn't afford a new, larger library, the American Bar Association (the ones in charge of law school accreditation) threatened to revoke the school's accreditation. So in order to comply with a completely arbitrary wish, one with (obviously, based on Bar Exam pass rates) no bearing on quality of education. They spent over $40 million on a new library, then had to jack up yearly tuition from $6700 to $16,738 a year, and a whopping $30,814 for out of state students. This effectively priced out on of the best schools for under-privileged law students. Guess their dreams don't matter as much as the building does.
You want to know the average amount of time teaching students by a professor at an average university? 12 hours. The rest is filled in by graduate students so the lofty professors can do research and make their tee times. This means that prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Yale can charge exorbitant tuition rates to keep tenured profs on staff while they professors never actually see their students.
Remember that the next time a State University comes around for money and somehow says that tuition rates are to blame for them needing more money. The two are entirely disconnected. When a College President says that tuition doesn't cover the cost of educating a student, don't think for a second they are somehow noble or magnanimous, they are not. It's like Carl Pohlad saying that ticket prices don't cover the cost of the Twins (a nod to Tom Sowell), so he is being noble somehow. The majority of money comes to these places through outside channels such as research grants and contracts, the students are really just how they pay themselves more for just a few hours of work. Icing on the cake, as it were.
So when you hear about budgets coming up and Universities and Colleges start whining about how bad off they are, remember that it is all smoke and mirrors, and that the ones who are to blame for the skyrocketing costs are the same ones with their hands out.
Want to make higher education more affordable to the masses? End FAFSA, and rework accreditation standards. Though this may seem counter-intuitive, the economics of it is totally sound.
Imagine you own a business making widgets and whosits, and you want to make those widgets more affordable so more people can buy them and you make more money. How do you do it? You invest in greater efficiencies, economies of scale, and focus on driving down costs of production. Pretty easy, really. Now imagine you have some friends in the government instead of a decent brain. The answer then would be to lobby your buddies to subsidies widget production so more people can afford them. This drives the cost down too, right?
Wrong. The net effect is that costs and prices are now out of line. For you to sell a widget at a straight, non-susidized $30 you could make, say, $10. Now, though, imagine the government gives you $10 a widget. What do you charge? Most liberals would say $20, but those ones are not in charge of businesses, and for good reason. You would, of course, sell widgets for $30 and pocket the subsidy. Now that works until you decide to really push on your whosit production, which is more expensive, but gives your company greater prestige and justifies everyone's salaries. Easiest way to pump more money into that is to go back to the government and tell them that the cost of widgets is going up and they need to pay more in subsidies to cover it.
Then you take the subsidies and profits and split them down the middle into widgets and whosits, and your company becomes even more prestigious for whozits, so you can justify charging more for your widgets and giving yourself and your execs a bigger pay package...Then the cycle begins again.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Universities, where widgets are graduates and whosits are research. You take the subsidy out of the equation and costs have to come into line or widgets will just go to the colleges where whosits are not produced.
But, you may say, even non-research institutions are more expensive every year! And you would be correct. The reason: accreditation agencies. These places actually never take into account the quality of what is produced, just what goes into the machine. So a college that gives laptops to it's students with the entire Library of Congress on the hard drive to research from would not get an accreditation because it doesn't have enough books or libraries. Seriously. Essentially, they are saying you have to have no choice on the outlay for a massive library, all the books therein, and all the upkeep costs, so that your students can have less access to information at a higher cost. I am not kidding or exaggerating in the least.
And the reason they do this is simple: they are too lazy to look at the outcomes, which is difficult, so instead just look at the bells and whistles. Take a look at What happened to the University of Colorado Law School. 92% of their graduates could pass the Bar Exam on the first try, a higher proportion that either Harvard or Yale. But due to the fact they couldn't afford a new, larger library, the American Bar Association (the ones in charge of law school accreditation) threatened to revoke the school's accreditation. So in order to comply with a completely arbitrary wish, one with (obviously, based on Bar Exam pass rates) no bearing on quality of education. They spent over $40 million on a new library, then had to jack up yearly tuition from $6700 to $16,738 a year, and a whopping $30,814 for out of state students. This effectively priced out on of the best schools for under-privileged law students. Guess their dreams don't matter as much as the building does.
You want to know the average amount of time teaching students by a professor at an average university? 12 hours. The rest is filled in by graduate students so the lofty professors can do research and make their tee times. This means that prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Yale can charge exorbitant tuition rates to keep tenured profs on staff while they professors never actually see their students.
Remember that the next time a State University comes around for money and somehow says that tuition rates are to blame for them needing more money. The two are entirely disconnected. When a College President says that tuition doesn't cover the cost of educating a student, don't think for a second they are somehow noble or magnanimous, they are not. It's like Carl Pohlad saying that ticket prices don't cover the cost of the Twins (a nod to Tom Sowell), so he is being noble somehow. The majority of money comes to these places through outside channels such as research grants and contracts, the students are really just how they pay themselves more for just a few hours of work. Icing on the cake, as it were.
So when you hear about budgets coming up and Universities and Colleges start whining about how bad off they are, remember that it is all smoke and mirrors, and that the ones who are to blame for the skyrocketing costs are the same ones with their hands out.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Budgetary Woes: The False Choices of Obama's Budget
I was watching the Daily Show the other night, and one of President Obama's financial advisers was the guest. I am not going to lie, I was so irritated by his doublespeak and nonsensical assertions that I ranted for quite some time after. I will spare you the meanderings of the rant and, instead, give you the Cliff's Notes version.
The gentleman was under the impression that the "Stimulus" bill and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) were unjustly under fire, and the new budget proposed by the administration, which is even larger than the last, is necessary to dig us out of this recession. This guy is an economics PROFESSOR. No wonder college kids these days are graduating so stupid.
The idea that government spending can have a net positive effect on the economy is true. IF that government is running a surplus. The State can then flush that money back into the system to free up liquidity in markets, employ in the short term many people for infrastructure projects to make the wheels of commerce run easier, even give rebates to the citizens to provide a short term boost in spending. Because, in the end, it is real money.
But we are so far in the hole that every dollar thrown down the rabbit hole of the recession is a net drain on our economy. The state needs to borrow much of it, which will need to be paid back. The rest of it, and in this case the majority of the money used, is worthless. Worse than that it actually makes each dollar you already have worth less. A modern dollar is a unit of currency that is an idea of the net value of the total assets of the united states. It is backed by what we have and what we produce within this country. So simply printing more money doesn't make more money, it just means it takes more of it to do the same things.
In the 1970's, the money supply was increased by about 17%. Ask around about how that policy worked then: the resulting inflation caused interest rates to skyrocket. This in turn caused people to stop buying houses, investing in businesses and so on. If you look at today, the Fed has increased monetary supply, backed by nothing at all, by between 130% and 150%. The only reason we are not awash in a sea of worthless dollars is that much of that cash is in banks right now, and they, selfishly or wisely, are not lending it out.
The Obama Administration is holding out a promise based on economic fallacy, and is simply kicking the bill down the road- the only hope he holds is that inflation will not swamp the nation on HIS watch. He sees the same thing that many Americans see right now, that the wide modern liberal grip on the House and Senate is very temporary, that his reelection is not a certainty, and that any problems he creates for the future will not be attached to him after he is gone. He has blamed his predecessor for everything, including what he himself has caused, but the same will not be able to be done to him if the legislature switches hands.
The false choice Obama gives us is this: Prosperity through greater debt or crushing economic failure. The truth of the matter is that through his own actions and those of the Fed he has brought on economic failure in any circumstance. The only question is when and how bad it will be.
We could choose to go down now, take our lumps and come out stronger on the other side, or we can choose to make this the next administrations problem (or the one after that)and become a third world country. The unemployment levels we see today are not the effects of bad banking regulation, but rather our economy resetting to where it realistically is. This has been caused not by bad mortgages or faulty derivatives but by how much our own government has unbalanced our capital systems.
When the State tells banks where they can loan their money and whom they can loan it to it sets a dangerous precedent. Banks have a vested interest in lending only to those who can pay the money back, and with interest. They loan to those people or companies who have that ability because that is the only way to make sure your own money is protected. If a loan goes bad at a bank, the bank is left holding the bag. But guess what? They have your bag, too, and the money you think is sitting in a vault somewhere is actually sitting in that house that went belly up because the government told the bank that had to lend to someone who claims food stamps as income. And they have the gall to call banks "predatory"? Who was looking out for your money? The banks. Who messed that up? Modern Liberal politicians who don't understand that not everyone can afford a house.
And this new Obama budget is more of the same, more financing that would make Enron executives squirm with joy. More robbing those who have earned for those who have not and telling people it is good for the country. Hell, at this point it is robbing those who have not earned because they haven't been born yet to give to people who haven't earned who have been. More money we do not have for false promises on pillars of sand.
The gentleman was under the impression that the "Stimulus" bill and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) were unjustly under fire, and the new budget proposed by the administration, which is even larger than the last, is necessary to dig us out of this recession. This guy is an economics PROFESSOR. No wonder college kids these days are graduating so stupid.
The idea that government spending can have a net positive effect on the economy is true. IF that government is running a surplus. The State can then flush that money back into the system to free up liquidity in markets, employ in the short term many people for infrastructure projects to make the wheels of commerce run easier, even give rebates to the citizens to provide a short term boost in spending. Because, in the end, it is real money.
But we are so far in the hole that every dollar thrown down the rabbit hole of the recession is a net drain on our economy. The state needs to borrow much of it, which will need to be paid back. The rest of it, and in this case the majority of the money used, is worthless. Worse than that it actually makes each dollar you already have worth less. A modern dollar is a unit of currency that is an idea of the net value of the total assets of the united states. It is backed by what we have and what we produce within this country. So simply printing more money doesn't make more money, it just means it takes more of it to do the same things.
In the 1970's, the money supply was increased by about 17%. Ask around about how that policy worked then: the resulting inflation caused interest rates to skyrocket. This in turn caused people to stop buying houses, investing in businesses and so on. If you look at today, the Fed has increased monetary supply, backed by nothing at all, by between 130% and 150%. The only reason we are not awash in a sea of worthless dollars is that much of that cash is in banks right now, and they, selfishly or wisely, are not lending it out.
The Obama Administration is holding out a promise based on economic fallacy, and is simply kicking the bill down the road- the only hope he holds is that inflation will not swamp the nation on HIS watch. He sees the same thing that many Americans see right now, that the wide modern liberal grip on the House and Senate is very temporary, that his reelection is not a certainty, and that any problems he creates for the future will not be attached to him after he is gone. He has blamed his predecessor for everything, including what he himself has caused, but the same will not be able to be done to him if the legislature switches hands.
The false choice Obama gives us is this: Prosperity through greater debt or crushing economic failure. The truth of the matter is that through his own actions and those of the Fed he has brought on economic failure in any circumstance. The only question is when and how bad it will be.
We could choose to go down now, take our lumps and come out stronger on the other side, or we can choose to make this the next administrations problem (or the one after that)and become a third world country. The unemployment levels we see today are not the effects of bad banking regulation, but rather our economy resetting to where it realistically is. This has been caused not by bad mortgages or faulty derivatives but by how much our own government has unbalanced our capital systems.
When the State tells banks where they can loan their money and whom they can loan it to it sets a dangerous precedent. Banks have a vested interest in lending only to those who can pay the money back, and with interest. They loan to those people or companies who have that ability because that is the only way to make sure your own money is protected. If a loan goes bad at a bank, the bank is left holding the bag. But guess what? They have your bag, too, and the money you think is sitting in a vault somewhere is actually sitting in that house that went belly up because the government told the bank that had to lend to someone who claims food stamps as income. And they have the gall to call banks "predatory"? Who was looking out for your money? The banks. Who messed that up? Modern Liberal politicians who don't understand that not everyone can afford a house.
And this new Obama budget is more of the same, more financing that would make Enron executives squirm with joy. More robbing those who have earned for those who have not and telling people it is good for the country. Hell, at this point it is robbing those who have not earned because they haven't been born yet to give to people who haven't earned who have been. More money we do not have for false promises on pillars of sand.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Compassion
It has been brought to my attention that some people who have read these posts do not think I have any compassion, that Conservatism has little to no sympathy for others. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Conservatism requires a personal sense of compassion, a deep sympathy for those who surround you- a sense of community and a feeling of shared pain. That it requires no governmental enforcement is a positive, not, as most on the far left today assume, a negative.
How can this be? Simple: Conservatism cares about people AS INDIVIDUALS, real people with real stories and individual problems and needs. A massive and top heavy government can never hope to provide the care for those people on an individual basis. So they are reduced to generalizations and social security numbers to keep them straight. Helpful, no?
Not really, as the data on poverty shows. The poverty rate of Americans in 1900 stood at 18.3%, with the federal budget standing at 6.4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That is 18.3% without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, nothing. Opportunity was yours, your money could be spent on whatever you thought would make your life and the lives of those you loved better.
Fast forward a century. The poverty rate has dropped a whole 4.9 percentage points, while the programs created to supposedly end poverty altogether cost our people about 1.5 trillion dollars last year alone. That means that the State could have written a check to every one of those people below the poverty line for $37,688. But it didn't.
Instead all that money was taken from people with families, businesses with employees. The money that could have been used to increase the size of the production floor to hire more workers? Gone. The money a person could have used to help pay their child's tuition? Gone. Taken by a government who neither personally understands nor cares about you as an individual, but rather sees you as a number in the system or part of a line on a chart. Where is the compassion in that?
Compassion requires, by definition, that you feel the distress and pity for the suffering or misfortune of another. That requires one on one interaction, a true knowledge of the person you seek to give aid to. This is something a group of people a thousand miles away, who fly on military jets and bill it to the same people they are supposed to care for, simply cannot have the capacity to do.
But the mother watching her child hooked up to a respirator can. And so can all the child's aunts and uncles, their friends and neighbors. They feel it in a real, whole way; the pain of it, the fear, the need to help is automatic and noble. I know. I have been there.
But where is the nobility in giving if it is forced by another? Are you giving of yourself, or are you more interested in giving from some other person's pocket? And do you understand that by taking what that person has you have stolen their ability to do as much as they could have done? That is what the government now does- takes from someone's pocket, someone you do not know, who cannot possibly have any real sympathy for your plight, and giving it to you or someone else. There is no compassion there; and in doing so is there supposed to be some satisfaction, some sense of having done the right thing?
America has been the most generous giver, per capita, for quite a long time. It has been historically one of our greatest strengths, that willingness to give freely of what we have for the good of those around us. Especially among those at the high income levels. But now the amount of personal donations by middle class people and below are on a rapid decline. Even before the current economic fear took hold we had stopped much of that charitable giving. But why?
The only answer I can see is that the outrageous, inefficient and faceless giving by our own government has so damaged our culture that we feel it is no longer the responsibility of the individual to give to those in need. We count it as laziness that a person would not seek a government handout rather than a strength. The brave people who created this nation would be ashamed at our lack of personal care, our dearth of real sympathy towards our fellow man, and the very idea that we as a people have ceded our moral character to the will of an elite collective and those who would seek to save us from ourselves by taking what we have.
I know the thought, the idea, of giving from a nation is one that stirs pride in many people. But in the emptiness of compassion, the impersonal indifference to our growing indigence towards those around us and closest to us, we must ask: what cost does that pride come at- where has the compassion gone?
Conservatism requires a personal sense of compassion, a deep sympathy for those who surround you- a sense of community and a feeling of shared pain. That it requires no governmental enforcement is a positive, not, as most on the far left today assume, a negative.
How can this be? Simple: Conservatism cares about people AS INDIVIDUALS, real people with real stories and individual problems and needs. A massive and top heavy government can never hope to provide the care for those people on an individual basis. So they are reduced to generalizations and social security numbers to keep them straight. Helpful, no?
Not really, as the data on poverty shows. The poverty rate of Americans in 1900 stood at 18.3%, with the federal budget standing at 6.4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That is 18.3% without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, nothing. Opportunity was yours, your money could be spent on whatever you thought would make your life and the lives of those you loved better.
Fast forward a century. The poverty rate has dropped a whole 4.9 percentage points, while the programs created to supposedly end poverty altogether cost our people about 1.5 trillion dollars last year alone. That means that the State could have written a check to every one of those people below the poverty line for $37,688. But it didn't.
Instead all that money was taken from people with families, businesses with employees. The money that could have been used to increase the size of the production floor to hire more workers? Gone. The money a person could have used to help pay their child's tuition? Gone. Taken by a government who neither personally understands nor cares about you as an individual, but rather sees you as a number in the system or part of a line on a chart. Where is the compassion in that?
Compassion requires, by definition, that you feel the distress and pity for the suffering or misfortune of another. That requires one on one interaction, a true knowledge of the person you seek to give aid to. This is something a group of people a thousand miles away, who fly on military jets and bill it to the same people they are supposed to care for, simply cannot have the capacity to do.
But the mother watching her child hooked up to a respirator can. And so can all the child's aunts and uncles, their friends and neighbors. They feel it in a real, whole way; the pain of it, the fear, the need to help is automatic and noble. I know. I have been there.
But where is the nobility in giving if it is forced by another? Are you giving of yourself, or are you more interested in giving from some other person's pocket? And do you understand that by taking what that person has you have stolen their ability to do as much as they could have done? That is what the government now does- takes from someone's pocket, someone you do not know, who cannot possibly have any real sympathy for your plight, and giving it to you or someone else. There is no compassion there; and in doing so is there supposed to be some satisfaction, some sense of having done the right thing?
America has been the most generous giver, per capita, for quite a long time. It has been historically one of our greatest strengths, that willingness to give freely of what we have for the good of those around us. Especially among those at the high income levels. But now the amount of personal donations by middle class people and below are on a rapid decline. Even before the current economic fear took hold we had stopped much of that charitable giving. But why?
The only answer I can see is that the outrageous, inefficient and faceless giving by our own government has so damaged our culture that we feel it is no longer the responsibility of the individual to give to those in need. We count it as laziness that a person would not seek a government handout rather than a strength. The brave people who created this nation would be ashamed at our lack of personal care, our dearth of real sympathy towards our fellow man, and the very idea that we as a people have ceded our moral character to the will of an elite collective and those who would seek to save us from ourselves by taking what we have.
I know the thought, the idea, of giving from a nation is one that stirs pride in many people. But in the emptiness of compassion, the impersonal indifference to our growing indigence towards those around us and closest to us, we must ask: what cost does that pride come at- where has the compassion gone?
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