And here's a good article explaining why. Basically what it boils down to is that as more money is made available for student loans, universities expand their spending, but not necessarily by expanding their student base. Rather, spending per student goes up. Which means tuition goes up. Which leads to calls for more student loan funding, and so on.
From the article:
Was college worth it? A huge part of the problem relates to federal financial-aid programs. Annual student loans, Pell Grants, tax credits and other federal assistance totaled some $169 billion a year in 2010-11 - more than 1 percent of national output. These programs are based on two erroneous premises: that almost everyone needs higher education for vocational success, and that they reduce student costs.
More than 25 years ago, Education Secretary William Bennett argued that federal aid programs benefited colleges more than students. Recent studies by Stephanie Riegg Cellini of George Washington University and Claudia Goldin of Harvard University, as well as by Andrew Gillen for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, support that hypothesis.
A new study by Nicholas Turner of the Office of Tax Analysis in the U.S. Treasury Department argues that when tax-based aid goes up, institutional scholarships go down, dollar for dollar.
Yes, yes, conservatives can be disingenuous, too. But hear me out on this.
Here's two example over the past two days, and these are mere examples of a very widespread phenomenon, in which liberals get away with making unchallenged claims about conservatives that simply would not stand if made from the other direction.
The first was Daniel Klaidman, author of the book Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, about drone strikes. The NPR show was about the contradiction that under President Obama drone attacks have increased enormously, even to the point of taking out U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, even though attacks of that nature were deplored under Bush. Klaidman went on and on about how carefully Obama, and his legal adviser Harold Koh, had thought through the question of drone strikes, whether they were legal, etc. And he admitted that even though Koh had vehemently opposed U.S. military action prior to 2009, his opinion changed when his perspective did.
At no point did the NPR interviewer ask where this perspective was during the Bush years. Did he not imagine that the people making the tough decisions then might have had similar quandaries? If Koh felt so strongly, he should have not taken the appointment, or resigned when he found that Obama would be overriding him constantly. Instead, he "thoughtfully" came down on the side of strikes and defended their use. But doesn't this entirely exonerate the Bush strategy of using them and other targeted methods of going after terrorists?
Not for Klaidman. His parting shot was to mention that he was glad, with all the power drone strikes bring to the table, that the person in the White House making the calls was "so thoughful and deliberative", unlike, it did not need saying, its previous occupant. How convenient. So we are to judge a policy by the thoughtfulness of its executive? To Klaidman, the same policy can be deplored in one case and celebrated in another, because the amount or type of thought behind it came from a different man.
The second case comes from an old standby, Howard Dean. On MSNBC recently he said: "People fundamentally don't trust Mitt Romney; they believe he only cares about people who have great wealth, which is probably true." (My emphasis.) Which is probably true! I'm trying to imagine the titanic backlash that would come from a conservative saying that people believe that Obama only cares about people of color, "which is probably true." We'd never stop hearing about it.
And liberals tell me that their problem is they're too nice. Pshaw.
(UPDATE: Here's a nice video rebuttal to the Life of Julia.
(The original Life of Julia is an Obama fantasy about how a hypothetical baby girl born this year might live out her life under Obama's policies. Here's what I think would actually happen...)
3 Years Old: Julia is enrolled in a Head Start program to help get her ready for school. Approximately $14,000 is spent providing her with a "leg up", but any apparent gains have evaporated by the time Julia enters second grade.
18 Years Old: As she prepares for her first semester of college, Julia and her family qualify for President Obama's American Opportunity Tax Credit—worth up to $10,000 over four years. Julia is also one of millions of students who receive a Pell Grant to help put a college education within reach. But because such grants and handouts have continued to push the cost of college education ever higher, college is actually even less affordable when Julia starts that when she was born. She is forced to take out a student loan to cover the difference.
22 Years Old: During college, Julia undergoes surgery. It is thankfully covered by her insurance due to a provision in health care reform that lets her stay on her parents' coverage until she turns 26. Otherwise, she would have had to use the low-cost insurance most colleges offer to their students.
23 Years Old: Because of steps like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Julia is one of millions of women across the country who knows she'll always be able to stand up for her right to equal pay. She starts her career as a web designer. She was lucky to get a job at all, though; millions of her peers are unable to because of continued high unemployment.
25 Years Old: After graduation, Julia's federal student loans are more manageable since President Obama capped income-based federal student loan payments and kept interest rates low. These low rates, coupled with skyrocketing college costs, have led to an explosion in student loans. Julia has a job and is responsible about paying back her loans, but millions of her peers don't or can't, and the system loses billions of taxpayer dollars.
27 Years Old: For the past four years, Julia has worked full-time as a web designer. Thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care. Of course, her employer no longer provides health insurance, because requirements like that have made it cheaper just to pay the Obamacare penalty. Julia has health care, but little choice over her care.
31 Years Old: Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform. Prior to reform, she would have been required to pay a $25 co-pay for the entire pregnancy. Julia tries to be grateful that changing America's system of health insurance saved her $25.
37 Years Old: Julia's son Zachary starts kindergarten. The public schools in their neighborhood have better facilities and great teachers because of President Obama's investments in education and programs like Race to the Top. Of course, Julia and her husband had to take out a massive mortgage to afford a house in that neighborhood.
42 Years Old: Julia decides to start her own web business. She qualifies for a Small Business Administration loan, giving her the money she needs to invest in her business. But she quickly realizes that bureaucratic red tape involved with starting a business is so costly and time-consuming that it's more worthwhile to just stay with her existing job.
65 Years Old: Julia would have enrolled in Medicare. But the system, drowning in debt, was drastically cut decades before Julia was eligible. It now covers such a minimal amount of care that Julia is forced to dig into savings to afford private health insurance.
67 Years Old: Julia retires. After years of contributing to Social Security, that system, too, has been drastically cut for budgetary reasons. Julia gets back much less than she paid in.
And now for a change from our usual politics- and economics-heavy talk to something weirder: physics.
Quantum mechanics is weird. Richard Feynman, one of its most important discoverers, said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Well, it just got weirder.
This article says that effects can occur before their causes. Don't ask me how that can possibly work; I have no idea. But the experiment seems to show that it's possible.
As always with entanglement, it's important to note that no information is passing between Alice, Bob, and Victor: the settings on the detectors and the BiSA are set independently, and there's no way to communicate faster than the speed of light. Nevertheless, this experiment provides a realization of one of the fundamental paradoxes of quantum mechanics: that measurements taken at different points in space and time appear to affect each other, even though there is no mechanism that allows information to travel between them.
I wonder if it's possible to change the experimental setup a bit: can Alice and Bob take their measurements and then tell Victor what to do? If Alice and Bob measure that Victor didn't entangle, but tell him to entangle and he does, something has to give. It's a little unsatisfying to say they must not have been able to communicate because of speed-of-light issues. Let them communicate and see if we can violate causality on the macro level.
In America's system of separated powers, the executive power is more limited that in most systems. The President cannot, for example, propose a budget. (In the parliamentary model, the government generally proposes budgets which are then debated and usually passed by the legislature. It's usually a smooth process because the government is usually the party of the majority. Not so in America, where we often find the executive and legislative branches controlled by different parties.)
However, one great advantage of the Presidency is the so-called "bully pulpit", a term coined by Teddy Roosevelt, who meant "bully" in the sense of "great" or "terrific". My generation might called it an "awesome platform", a great place from which to advocate for an agenda or position.
President Obama seems to have taken "bully" to mean something else: to harass or coerce. His preemptive attack on the Supreme Court over Florida v. HHS cannot possibly have any populist effect: the legislative work, after all, is done. The only effect it can possibly have is to try to cow the Supreme Court justices to decide in favor of the government. That is the other form of bullying.
Whether he'll get away with it is another matter. I would hope not. Everyone expects the case to be decided 5-4, with Justice Kennedy, as usual, the swing vote.
And tried to remind myself that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man. I tried to think about my conversation with Steven. I tried to remember that I was actively seeking to practice some Zenlike form of nonattachment. I tried to remember that no one is my property and neither am I theirs, and so I should just enjoy the time we spend together, because in the end it's our collected experiences that add up to a rich and fulfilling life. I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.
