The student loan crisis ...

If you want to know what’s really behind the student debt crisis, it’s simple.

Too much money has been loaned to people who won’t ever be able to pay it back.

If that sounds familiar it should:  it’s the subprime lending fiasco all over again.

Remember?

Politicians wanted to increase homeownership among people who couldn’t qualify for a regular mortgage.  People with bad credit or no credit.  People with few if any assets to use as collateral.  People whose current income was too low to afford the payments. 

In short, people who couldn’t prove they could afford a mortgage loan. 

So politicians forced banks and mortgage lenders to lower the bar. Just like that, almost anybody could get a mortgage. For almost any amount.  Even applicants banks would have turned down flat a short time earlier.  Whether they could make the payments was another matter. 

With so much easy money flooding the market, housing prices soared.  People bought houses well beyond their means.  When they couldn’t make the mortgage payments, which was predictable, they simply walked away and let banks foreclose. 

Banks were left holding trillions in bad debt they couldn’t recoup, which led to the collapse of the financial industry. That led to a recession. That led to the collapse of the domestic auto industry. All of which led to the rest of us – those of us who lived within our means, saved, and paid our bills – losing huge chunks of our 401(k)s, sometimes our jobs, and essentially footing the bill for what could easily have been prevented. 

Just by not loaning those borrowers more than they could pay back in the first place. 

By any reasonable measure, those people should have never qualified for the loans they got. That’s why banks didn’t want to touch them. 

Then politicians stepped in and forced the lenders.

Fast forward to today.

Politicians decided more people should go to college. But people needed money to go to college.  So government got into college loans, making it ridiculously easy for practically anyone to get a college loan, in almost any amount. 

With so much money flooding the college market, college tuition soared.  That meant students needed to borrow even more – but hey, going to college guaranteed good jobs, right?  No need to worry whether the borrowers would earn enough to pay off their loans.  It was more an “investment” than taking on debt.  It would all work out in the end. 

Too many students decided to use their student loans to simply “follow their passion” in college, without regard to where that would lead.  That might be okay if your parents are so rich you never have to worry about supporting yourself after college anyway. 

But for everyone else “just follow your passion” is perhaps the dumbest, most ill-conceived advice ever given to someone starting college. Especially when following your passion – instead of getting a degree in something with market value – often came with a price tag of $50K to $100K. 

Your passion may have been Ancient Mesopotamian Philosophy, Cult of Mithras Pottery, or something else equally obscure. But unless you become the world’s authority and get a prestigious gig from some big university teaching enough people also interested in those topics, there’s virtually no chance you’ll make a comfortable living from these right away. Perhaps ever. 

Much less pay off a $100K debt in your first 10 years out of school.

Dumb political decisions – as with the subprime lending meltdown – have left us with trillions of student debt whose borrowers are unable, or simply unwilling, to pay back. They can’t find jobs in their chosen field – which isn’t a surprise to everyone else but them.  The jobs they can get don’t pay enough to even start making loan payments – again not a surprise to anyone but them. 

However, this time it’s not the banks holding bad debt. It’s Uncle Sam. For the slow learners in the back row, that’s you and me. We’re collectively holding the bag.  

And that’s because our politicians decided a while back that banks were making too much money on college loans. Plus, were too picky about who qualified and for how much.  Politicians wanted more people to have access to college.  What better way than have government help? 

Great job, government. Thanks for saddling us with trillions in bad debt.    

Democrats on the left have a solution: just let those deadbeats walk away. Elizabeth Warren wants to give blanket forgiveness for up to $50K in student loans for each debtor in default; that would only cost us $640 billion, according to her.

Then she wants to make all public colleges and universities tuition free. No tuition, no future debt, I suppose she’s thinking. 

I have a better idea.  Or, I should say, ideas. 

First, make the debtors pay up. I paid back my college loans. So did millions of others. If they refuse to pay, offer them an alternative: Four years of military service for every $15k of outstanding debt; call it the DB Bill (like the GI Bill, but for deadbeats). Or: Five years of WPA-like work (at prevailing wages) building roads and bridges for every $15K of outstanding debt.

Everybody wins. 

Next, to head off future defaults, make colleges and universities place warning labels on all their courses, and especially on Majors.  Make them disclose that if a student chooses to major in French Poetry of the Middle Ages, for example, there are practically no jobs in their field for them when they graduate; in fact, graduates with that major typically work at convenience stores on night shift for a little more than minimum wage, or as waiters if they’re lucky. Tell the truth.   

Finally, get the government and politicians out of student loans altogether.  They’ve really screwed this up, as usual. Let regular FDIC-member banks handle student loans going forward.

And end government guarantees for student loans – banks will do a better job weeding out future deadbeats if they are on the hook for bad student loan decisions.

Let banks make money in return. It’s only fair.

The fat lady sings on the Mueller investigation ...

So the redacted version of the Mueller Report is out. 

So what.

Like most Americans, I suspect, I’m glad it’s out.  But there was nothing in there that surprised me.  In fact, there was really no “there” there after all. 

I won’t bother reading the entire thing. There’s no point.  I’ll leave all the breathless parsing of every word to the folks in the tinfoil hats.

Like Democrats. And the left-leaning media.  They’ll see what they want to see as they always do.  They’re just like people who see images of Jesus in burnt toast or in a peanut-butter sandwich. Or shadows that prove the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.

They are true believers and there’s no changing their minds. Why bother?   

I say let them have at it.

I have seen enough of the excerpts from both the Trump fans and Trump haters to form my own conclusions, however.  And much like Bill Barr’s summary, I’ll keep it brief. 

First, the Russians did try to interfere with our elections by pumping out disinformation through social media that ultimately had no effect on the results. In a campaign that that spent close to $2-billiion, between Trump and Clinton, the Russians spent a couple of hundred thousand bucks total, mostly on embarrassingly bland postings.

They did have a role in the leaks of Podesta’s e-mails, but nobody associated with Trump worked with them.  They also tried multiple times to get Trump campaign staff to work with them with promises of damaging info on Clinton, but nobody took the bait.  Nobody. 

Net/net: Trump and his campaign never colluded with Russia to win the Presidency.   

Next, here's a big surprise: Trump is not a nice guy. He has a bad temper, especially when he thinks he’s getting screwed over. He lashes out at those he thinks let him down.  He’s not afraid to counterattack publicly when he feels he’s been wronged and call out by name those he believes are attacking him unfairly.  He thinks the media and the political establishment – particularly Democrats and never-Trumpers in the bureaucracy – are out to get him any way they can, by any means at their disposal.

The Mueller Report proves his point.    

Most of the second “volume” of the report is dedicated to exposing all of the above. As if nobody knew all that.  Still, name-calling and being a nasty bastard at times isn’t a crime. 

Nor is it evidence of obstruction of justice. 

Finally, the Mueller team tried desperately to find something, anything, to bring down Trump. It’s clear now that they were absolutely pissed, despite unlimited resources and a hand-picked group of Trump haters working with other Trump haters in the bureaucracy, to come up empty.

They hated Trump for constantly disparaging them as participating in a politically motivated “hoax.” They despised him for questioning their integrity, and the integrity of Mueller. 

They wanted so much to nail him they tried everything.  Yet they failed to prove anything. Any evidence of a crime.  Any evidence of criminal intent. Nothing.   

 In the end, they settled for bad-mouthing him on the obstruction issue.

That’s because they couldn’t actually prove obstruction of justice.

First, you can’t obstruct a crime that wasn’t committed (collusion and conspiracy) and second because they were never denied any access to Trump staff or documents. In essence, Trump never did anything to impede the investigation. He may have wanted to, but he didn't.

Trump encouraged his staff to testify truthfully.  Trump’s people handed over 1.4-million documents requested by Mueller, an unprecedented number of documents for any special counsel probe. Trump never asserted Executive Privilege to withhold anything during the probe, or in the report itself, which he was within his rights to do.

Since they couldn’t prove obstruction, they had to do something to get some revenge. They stated that even though they couldn’t prove obstruction, they couldn’t disprove it either.

What? That’s like saying we don’t have enough evidence to prove you committed a crime, but hey, maybe somebody else might. And oh, by the way, here’s where to start.

They might just as well have said: “Hey … Democrats in Congress, are you listening?”

So much for their impartiality. And they think Trump is petty and vindictive? 

My final conclusion is that the entire Mueller investigation was a sham.  But I thought that from the beginning.  The report just proves it.  If they could have found anything worthy of indictment of Trump, they would have done it. No matter how flimsy or convoluted the case.

But they couldn’t. To me, it’s over.  I’m done with it at last.  Thank God.

Should I be ashamed for being a straight white male?

I know I’m supposed to be. But I’m not. 

I had nothing to do with being a straight white male. I was born that way, and, I guess, I just sort of accepted it. Nothing I could do about it. So I’ve learned to live with it. 

It’s not easy to be me. 

Everything I read these days blames me for all the ills in this country.  Racism. Homophobia.  Xenophobia. Misogyny. Income inequality. Climate change.  Toxic masculinity.  Some even blame me for slavery more than 150 years ago. 

Honestly, I had no idea I was the cause of all this.

I was born in the early 1950s. My parents were white. My grandparents were white. All my aunts and uncles were white. So were all my cousins.  As far as I know, they were all heterosexuals.  I guess I should have expected to be a straight white male – it was hereditary. 

I don’t think anybody in my family ever had anything to do with slavery.  My mother’s parents, and I believe their parents, were Methodists – traditionally abolitionists.  My father’s parents and grandparents were Seventh-Day Adventists, traditionally opposed to slavery, too. Like many white males, I’m confused about my role in supporting slavery generations ago. 

The media and Democrats tell me I had the advantage of “white privilege.” Funny, but I don’t remember having any advantage being white. Nor apparently did my parents or grandparents.

Everybody worked hard all their lives, never made a lot of money, and to my knowledge never got a leg up or special treatment because they were white. Most of the men spent time in the military, served in WWII, and when they came home had to start over. That wasn’t easy. 

My father, for example, was a major in the Air force when he left the service. The only job he could find then was working at a lumberyard in Miami. He got a job at the Post Office working nights to support his wife and two kids; he went to college during the day to earn his master’s degree on the GI Bill.  Then he went on the road selling college textbooks for many years.

He was a hard worker with a good education. That was his advantage. Not his whiteness. It didn’t guarantee him anything, either. In his later working years there were times when he was out of work, which happens to white males, too.  Times when we didn’t have a lot of money. Times when my mother worked to help make ends meet. We were never poor, we always had good food, decent clothing and shelter, but we were never what you would call affluent. 

My sister and I never got an allowance. At an early age we were taught to work and save for things we wanted beyond the basics. If you wanted something extra, you worked for it.     

I had a paper route, sold seeds door to door, mowed lawns, and shoveled snow to earn spending money as a kid.  I don’t think my male whiteness gave me any advantage. When I was 15 I got a summer job hand-sanding cars in an auto-body shop in Miami, taking orders from James – an older black spray-painter, and a good man – I don’t think white privilege had anything to do with it.

Starting at 16 I also worked in a band.  We worked a lot and played for anyone who could pay us.  We once played an after-hours club (actually a topless joint); the almost entirely black clientele that night liked us because we were good, not because we were white.

     

Good grades and good test scores alone got me accepted to the college of my choice. I took out college loans to pay for college, and then paid those loans off in full, on time, even when I was only making about $4,000 a year in my first job out of school. I didn’t think I was special because of that. It was my debt, alone.  Nobody gave me a discount or cut me a break because I was white, or male.

When I ran my own business for about 30 years, some of my client contacts were white; some were black; some were Hispanic; some were Asian; some were gay; and most were female.

I think if you asked any of them how I treated each of them, not one would ever say their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation had any bearing on my relationships with them. I did good work for everyone.  And treated them all the same: with courtesy and respect.

It never occurred to me I should treat them any differently. 

So I’m now puzzled how I could have lived a lifetime without ever understanding how evil I’ve always been. How I – and other straight white males like me – secretly harbored racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and misogynist tendencies all along. And how I’ve always enjoyed some great advantage solely on the basis of being a straight white male. 

I suppose I’ll just have to continue to learn to live with it.

The party of weasels ...

I’ll say it again: I can’t abide a weasel. 

You know who I’m talking about. 

As kids they constantly cheated at every game.  They lost a race because they didn’t hear you say “go.” They swung and missed and yet said they “tipped it” or “checked their swing.” Their foul balls were never out, but “on the line.”  When they dropped a pass they screamed “interference.” If they were losing, they always wanted to stop the game.  Or change the rules. Or start over.  

You hated playing with these kids. 

Now they’re all grown up. And a lot of them apparently became Democrats.  

People like this are the key reason I can’t stand the Democrat Party.  If they can’t win something fairly – by the rules – they won’t just suck it up like a decent human being and move on. No, they try to find some angle, some excuse, to get a do-over. Barring that, they try to renegotiate the rules, well after the fact, or try to change the rules altogether.

They lose a bet and demand a new game of best two-out-of-three; when they lose that they demand best three-out-of-five. It just never ends. It’s do-over after do-over. 

They can’t admit defeat.  They are whiners – another dismal trait, and cheaters.  You can’t take them at their word because their word means absolutely nothing. They lie, they claim you said something you never did; they intentionally take things out of context to “prove” their point.

They refuse to acknowledge their own words and deeds. “That’s not what I meant.” “It’s not the same.” “You’re misinterpreting what I said.” “It’s not how it looks.”

How often have you heard that from a Democrat?

Democrats also love to engage in “what-about-ism,” and false equivalencies.

Jussie Smollett blatantly fakes a hate crime and lies about it, and a jackass like Juan Williams compares it to Trump lying about the border crisis. Huh? 

You dumb bastards:  Smollett was caught red-handed and even wrote a check in advance to his “attackers” plus sent them texts on what to wear – MAGA hats -- and what to do when they “attacked” him. He didn’t want them to hurt him too bad. Just make it look good.  

Yet by all accounts – including comments from Obama’s former head of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson – there really IS a crisis on our border. 

How are these two things even remotely the same? In what universe?    

But when the other side catches them in obvious hypocrisy, they refuse to acknowledge it.   

Democrats were quick to use Kavanaugh’s banal comments about playing drinking games and partying in his high-school yearbook, completely out of context, to vilify him and demand he withdraw his nomination for the Supreme Court.  But when the Democrat Governor and Democrat Lt. Governor of Virginia were discovered to have posed in blackface, at best, and perhaps a KKK outfit at worst, when they were in college … well that’s different, say the same Democrats.

Before he ever ran for office, Trump engaged in tasteless locker-room banter about women that was secretly captured on an Access Hollywood tape. When that tape finally was made public, years later, Democrats called him a sexual predator not worthy of any public office and said he should drop out of the race for President. 

Yet Virginia’s Democrat Attorney General has been credibly accused by two women of sexual misconduct; one claimed he raped her; the other claimed he forced her to perform oral sex on him. One said he told her he knew she wouldn’t bother to report him, since a previous rape charge by her against another student was dismissed.  He said no one would believe her now. 

This should outrage everyone. But not Democrats, or their pals in the media. 

All the Virginia-related stories have conveniently disappeared from the media. And the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General are still in office.  Democrats in the Virginia statehouse have blocked Republican attempts to hold hearings on the charges against the Attorney General. 

Remember, these are the same Democrats that said all women must be believed. The ones who bullied Republicans into holding hearings after sketchy claims of sexual misconduct were lodged against Kavanaugh – after the confirmation hearings had already concluded.  And who believed Avenatti’s “witness” who lied about alleged gang rapes engineered by Brett Kavanaugh while he was in high school.  And who championed Christine Blasey Ford in the Kavanaugh hearings, even after all her claims were discredited.  Just ask Senator Hirono – all men are guilty. 

But the accusers of Virginia’s Attorney General are not to be believed. 

Their hypocrisy is astounding. 

Just the other day I heard some Democrat on TV say that Republicans are hypocrites calling for Virginia’s Attorney General accused of rape and forced oral sex to resign.  Especially when Republicans ignored what “someone who puts his hand over a woman’s mouth” to keep her from crying out for help did – a reference to Ford’s debunked testimony in the Kavanaugh hearings.

As usual with these weasels, it’s not the same.  Not even close. 

It doesn’t matter to Democrats.

They’re still the same little weasels you hated to play with as a kid.  The cheaters. The liars.  The fakers. The cheap-shot artists. The ones who broke the rules and tried to get away with it. 

The ones with no sense of integrity. No honor. No sense of fair play. 

They’ve found a home in the Democrat Party.