Guest Post by Simon Black
Well, it’s official. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the US Presidential race yesterday.
This leaves Joe Biden– a career politician with obvious signs of dementia– as the presumptive opposition candidate.
To be clear, I’m not making light of Biden’s mental health. Tens of millions of people around the world suffer from dementia. It’s a terrible syndrome.
But facts are facts, and Biden’s symptoms have been on public display throughout his campaign.
It’s not because he routinely says ridiculous things like, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” [Des Moines, Iowa, August 8, 2019]
It’s because he regularly displays:
- Disorientation (like when he confused the name of his interviewer, Chris Wallace, on live TV last month, calling him ‘Chuck’ instead.)
- Extreme memory loss (like when he appeared to confuse his wife and sister on stage)
- Difficulty communicating and finding words (like the above quote about ‘poor kids’)
- Confusing obvious terms (like when he told a crowd in South Carolina six weeks ago- “My name’s Joe Biden, I’m a democratic candidate for United States Senate.”)
Maybe these are all harmless misunderstandings. But they all qualify as signs and symptoms of dementia. And it’s not unreasonable to question someone’s mental health who consistently displays so many obvious signs.
Of course, it seems like every time anyone brings up Biden’s mental health, it’s either derided as ‘insensitive’, or the response is to slam Orange Man’s mental health as even worse.
Anyhow, this is what the system has produced. So Biden’s team is now working hard to shore up support in their own party by cozying up to the Bolsheviks.
One of his new policy concessions is ‘free university.’ This was a staple refrain of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and Biden is trying to extend an olive branch to those voters.
According to his updated website, Joe Biden will “make four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free for all students whose family incomes are below $125,000.”
This means that roughly 95% of US households would qualify for free tuition (according to IRS data).
The US Department of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics estimates that four years at a public university costs $35,216 just for tuition, and that roughly 3.7 million young people graduate from high school each year.
So let’s do the math: 95% of 3.7 million kids at $35,216 each puts the taxpayers on the hook for up to $123 billion ANNUALLY to fund tuition-free university… hardly a trivial sum.
But that’s one of the bizarre effects of this Coronavirus pandemic. Nobody seems to care about spending anymore.
The US government already passed a $2 trillion spending bill, and they’re already working on a second, $1+ trillion spending bill.
No one is questioning how the country can possibly afford such sums. And that’s EXACTLY the attitude these Bolsheviks have been wanting to cultivate.
The ‘Green New Deal’ suddenly doesn’t seem so expensive anymore. And $123 billion per year for tuition-free university looks positively cheap by comparison.
This is part of what they call ‘Modern Monetary Theory,’ an idea that governments can spend as much as they want, and the central bank will simply print more money to pay for it.
So according to MMT, everything can be free, and no one will ever have to make a tough financial decision ever again. It’s genius!
Moreover, no one ever has to bother themselves with figuring out a better solution. If there’s an opportunity to spend a bunch of money, the thinking ends there. Full stop.
‘Education is too expensive, so let’s spend $100+ billion each year to fix it.’
Well guess what? Education isn’t expensive. It’s free.
Every time I hear some young person moaning about the high price of education, I always ask, “How many free online classes have you taken?”
There are hundreds of courses available online, absolutely free, from places like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. They literally cost nothing.
These are some of the finest universities in the world offering free courses in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Front-end Web Development, Digital Marketing, Accounting, Quantum Mechanics, Finite Math, Art History, Medicine, and just about everything else.
(There’s even one from the University of Maryland called ‘Alzheimer Disease and Dementia Care’ that the Biden campaign may want to check out. It’s also free.)
So there really is no cost to education. It’s the piece of paper– the actual university degree– that costs $35,216.
I’d argue there are more efficient ways to solve this problem rather than sticking taxpayers with a $100+ billion annual tab to give away something that’s already free.
For example, if the Bolsheviks really want to make university free, then they could simply establish a degree-awarding agency within the Department of Education. Let’s call it ‘Federal University’.
It would all be online. And any student who successfully completes a pre-approved curriculum of accredited online courses (i.e. courses that already exist from Harvard, MIT, etc. and are available for free) would be awarded a degree.
So someone who wants to major in Mathematics could complete a pre-determined series of the free, online math courses that already exist, and receive an accredited degree.
In this way the government would be using existing resources to solve the problem in a fiscally efficient way, instead of spending $100+ billion each year of taxpayer funds.
It’s a remarkably simple idea… one of at least a dozen other ideas that a halfway-competent person could think up after spending 15 minutes on this issue.
But you never really see that sort of thinking. They don’t clearly define problems and figure out efficient ways to solve them. Instead, it’s always about raising taxes and spending money.
Lately they’ve been very successful in getting people to stop caring about how much money the government is spending.
And I wouldn’t expect the Bolsheviks to let go of that momentum anytime soon. They’ll think of plenty of other ways to spend your money.
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Great idea, really, EXCEPT there is not profit in it. No debt to be HAD.
Soooooooooooo, it’s a no go. 🙂
Yes, the debt [creates/is created by] a kind of vacuum into which untoward things emerge and develop.
During the last financial crisis, I came across this revelatory confession of a hedge-fund manager, about which I wrote to a friend.
=============
Here’s some proof of this: even with all the austerity measures at the local, national and personal level, aggregate US debt has grown since the crisis of 2007-2008. Now the bubble has moved, in part, to student loan debt, because the growing debt bubble needs to be somewhere. We cannot vanquish it. We never could, and we never can, as it is mathematically impossible to do so.
This is what happened with the mysterious CDS and MBS securitization. In an interview, a hedge-fund manager admitted being subject to a seemingly supernatural process:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/interview-hedge-fund-manager
This is not just the exotic EFFECT of finance, this IS finance, in a nutshell. This is what happens in all modern economic transactions, although we don’t have the opportunity to see it quite as clearly..
Governments worldwide have stepped in to backstop the banks and to take on the out-of-control exponentially-growing debt that has brought the private sector to its knees; they’ll keep loading up on their own out-of-control exponentially-growing debt and/or keep printing money (two sides of the same coin, excuse the pun) because they can’t do anything else, short of intentionally imploding the system. But the longer it goes on, the worse the consequences.
In Europe, unelected bankers are ALREADY OFFICIALLY RUNNING THE GOVERNMENTS of Italy (kicking out a right-wing PM) and of Greece (kicking out a left-wing PM). The presidencies of GWB and Obama are equally signed with the shadows of the eminences griges from Goldman Sachs; no matter which party’s superficially-stated policies you prefer, there is only the fiction of underlying “change”, as should now be clear to all.
Beyond discarding this as a left-right issue, we must also discard it as even -to some extent- a political issue at all. It’s larger than any country’s politics or any politics humankind has ever known.It’s certainly larger than the communist-capitalist divide (both of these systems pimped “growth” and championed the imposition of industrial labor as a human norm). It is literally a fight for the survival of humanity, nothing less.
So, the human species has the (colloquially-termed) “choice” of surviving at least a little longer… OR some “driver” (our technologies, among which I count religion, patriarchy, money… they are “technologies” which help us break down energy gradients faster, is how I see these social constructs).. some “driver” will hasten our population and consumption explosion and subsequent planetary demise.
If first life, and then humanity, arose as a product of a certain set of physical parameters.. that has a parallel in my mind to the vacuum.. the endless maw created by monetary parameters.
While our constraints are physical rather than theoretical, my feeling is that instead of being “driven” or Pushed, we may be Pulled.. “called forth”, as the hedge-fund manager put it. The “big machine” needs to be “fed” and we are just along for the ride.
“free university”
like cellphones – when it’s free, that means you yourself are the product.
“free university”
but seating will be limited. so, who will be guaranteed a seat and who will be excluded?
Do it all online, problem solved!
the limited seating is a feature, not a bug.
He is a touch off on his math. Each class year costs 123 billion. I think the odd student makes it out in four years so the annual cost would be 492 billion.
Agreed, his math is a little off.
Additionally, the whole notion of college will be morphing into virtual campuses, this event is merely the incentive to abandon the traditional business model of 4 years of on site attendance/classrooms/dorm life.
Biden sniff fail…
Higher education was quite affordable before the federal government got involved with massive student loans to anyone who wanted a degree in diversity, feminism or black history.