TIME FOR EQUAL EXPECTATIONS

TIME FOR EQUAL EXPECTATIONS

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS, RACE, SPORTS

Two stories in the news strike a common chord: the need to stop infantilizing minority, especially black, populations. The first comes from the world of sports and involves the familiar racial hate incident hoax. Briefly, the Duke women’s volleyball team played a match at Brigham Young University, and lost. After the match, the godmother of one of the Duke players, who is black, tweeted that someone in the BYU crowd had yelled the “N-word” at her goddaughter when she was serving. It turned out that she (the godmother) is a virulent anti-white racist (“These white folks ain’t never had they ass kicked, but they better get used to it”).

The player then backed up this claim, and it became a national news story. The reliably left-wing ESPN reported it as fact. The President of BYU denounced the incident. Good Morning America, ABC News, CNN and Deadspin all weighed in, as did Lebron James. A BYU student who was accused (wrongly, as it turned out) of being the perpetrator was suspended from attending the college’s sports events. And the coach of the South Carolina volleyball team canceled an upcoming match against BYU.

All of these people and institutions studiously ignored the fact that these campus “hate incidents” nearly always turn out to be hoaxes. One might have expected that Duke, given its history, would be sober enough to reserve judgment. But of course, that didn’t happen, even though the claim here was inherently dubious. Why didn’t the Duke player, or one of her teammates, or her coach, or anyone on the BYU team, or any other observers, say anything at the time?

Meanwhile, BYU carried out a meticulous investigation that involved interviewing dozens of witnesses, searching for someone–anyone!–who could corroborate the Duke claim. No one heard an “N-word” or any other racial slur during the match. Investigators reviewed video footage of the match. Nothing. They played audio recordings of the match, with the television feed deleted so that only crowd noise could be heard. Nothing. They solicited cell phone video from anyone in the audience that might have picked up a racial slur. Nothing. BYU finally concluded that there was no evidence that the alleged racist incident ever occurred, and apologized to the student who had been wrongly accused.

As far as I can tell, no one else apologized. Not Duke, and not the South Carolina coach, who stood by her decision to cancel her team’s match against BYU. And certainly not the Duke player or the godmother who made the false allegation. This is par for the course: a fabricated allegation of racist conduct is made, is greeted with ritual sympathy for the “victim” and condemnation of the unknown perpetrator, but soon is proved to be false. But with no consequences for those who perpetrated the hoax.

Amber Athey has more on the story here, and the New York Sun has more here. A couple of days ago, Steve linked to the report on BYU’s investigation.

On to case number two: the Mayor of New Orleans is a woman named LaToya Cantrell. Mayor Cantrell apparently has a taste for high living, and likes to fly first class. It came to light that she had run up $30,000 in first class air fares on the City’s tab, flying, in separate trips, to France and Switzerland. New Orleans’ rules say that employees are to fly on the cheapest fares available, but Cantrell is unrepentant.

In her own defense, she played the race card in perhaps the stupidest manner on record. She alleged that it is unsafe for a black woman to fly economy:

Cantrell has remained defiant in the face of a backlash, defending her luxury tickets by stating that she was “doing business” on behalf of the city and that it wouldn’t be safe for her to travel coach.

“My travel accommodations are a matter of safety, not of luxury,” Cantrell said at a press conference on Thursday, September 8, 2022. “As all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded and we are left to navigate alone. As the mother of a young child whom I live for, I am going to protect myself by any reasonable means in order to ensure I am there to see her grow into the strong woman I am raising her to be,” the mayor said. She added, “Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn’t understand the world black women walk in.”

The world that Ms. Cantrell walks in is the first class world, but one can only wonder on what basis the first class cabin is “safer” for black women–or anyone–than coach. If the plane crashes, passengers all go down together. Are there Ku Klux Klan members patrolling the economy section who don’t dare penetrate the curtain to first class? The idea is so dumb that no one could possibly believe it.

And, of course, whatever dangers might lurk in the rear of the aircraft are suffered by Mayor Cantrell’s staff: unlike the Mayor, they fly coach.

These instances are among many that reflect efforts by politicians, journalists and activists to infantilize large segments of our population, especially blacks. Will Mayor Cantrell be held to the same standard as any other arrogant, rule-breaking, self-interested politician? That depends on the voters, the overwhelming majority of whom are black. Is the absurd rationale that she asserts good enough for them? We will find out at the next election.

Will the days of false hate crime allegations ever come to an end? Will ESPN and the New York Times ever stop repeating every such allegation as gospel? Will university administrators ever get over the racial vapors? Will blacks who make false allegations ever be held responsible? And will someone finally ask, even if it were true that one fan at a volleyball match yelled the “N-word,” why is it national news?

It is time to move on, and begin to have equal expectations of all of our citizens.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/time-for-equal-expectations.php

WHEN IS A PROTEST A STUNT?

WHEN IS A PROTEST A STUNT?

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, MEDIA, RON DESANTIS

Drawing on the White House party line, Politico Playbook PM headlined last night’s edition “GOP govs’ migrant stunts return to center stage.” The reference was of course to the flight of illegal aliens from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard (thanks, Governor DeSantis) and the busing of illegal aliens from Texas to the Vice President’s DC residence at the Naval Observatory (thanks, Governor Abbott).

The governors seek to draw attention to the opening of our southern border by the Biden administration. It is the kind of political protest (or whatever) that one might think only ’60’s radicals turned Democrat could manage. Indeed, it is straight out of the Rules For Radicals playbook. The media response puts an exclamation points to its bite and brilliance.

Let it all hang out. Make the man live with it, baby!

I understand that the illegal aliens voluntarily undertook the trips they were offered. This morning Reuters strives to make the case that they were misled. So far as we know, not a single one was harmed in the process.

How brilliant are these protests? CNN (perfect!) brought in Ken Burns (perfect!) to liken the DeSantis variant to, well, you know what. “This is coming straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” Burns…”explained.”

“What we find in our all films is that the themes that we engage in the past are present today,” he concluded. “And so when you look at the story that we’re telling of the U.S. and the Holocaust, you understand that the time to save a democracy is before it’s lost. We promise you.” I’m sure our own Jewish Community Relations Council and all the like organizations will get right on it.

To answer my own question, I have a two-part answer. A protest or demonstration is a “stunt” when it is devastatingly effective and undertaken by Republicans or conservatives.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/when-is-a-protest-a-stunt.php

MIGRANTS IN THE VINEYARD [UPDATED]

MIGRANTS IN THE VINEYARD [UPDATED]

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

The strategy of Greg Abbott and others to send illegal aliens to sanctuary cities around the country was a stroke of genius. Not that it was original: for at least the last five or six years, a friend has been emailing me to the effect that illegals should be sent to Marin County, Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco mansion, and, above all, Martha’s Vineyard. That, he said, would bring the open border problem to a screeching halt.

And it may. Ron DeSantis’s master stroke of sending two planeloads of aliens to Martha’s Vineyard has made liberal heads explode. The irony is evident to everyone. These places are “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens, but if they actually see a few of them they panic. Their yards boast “All Are Welcome Here” signs, but it turns out that some are more welcome than others.

Rasmussen finds that most people approve of Governor Abbott’s shipping illegals to sanctuary cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., by 52% to 36%. Those 36% are diehard Democrats who think it is fine for Texas to try to deal with one million aliens, but an outrage if a liberal city has to take on a few hundred.

Unlike most Americans, liberals don’t appreciate the irony. Their reaction has been priceless. The White House’s Press Airhead Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, thinks what Abbott and DeSantis are doing is terrible. She also thinks Ted Cruz is the Governor of Texas:

By the way, if KJP thinks it is “shameful” to use migrants as political pawns, one can only imagine how outraged she would have been if she had known that the Democrats were using families ostensibly separated at the border as political pawns. Too bad she missed that one.

Of all the crazed liberal reactions, this is one of the nuttiest. Sending some illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard–I wish I could afford to live there–is kinda like the Holocaust:

As for what is going on at the Vineyard, America’s paper of record comes through as usual:

Martha’s Vineyard Resident Calls Police To Report A Hispanic In The Neighborhood Not Operating A Leaf Blower.

For a non-satirical update on events, the New York Post headlines: “Martha’s Vineyard in chaos after DeSantis ships migrants to liberal enclave.”

The liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard was thrown into chaos by the arrival of two planeloads of migrants sent to the Massachusetts island by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to local reports.

Members of the West Tisbury Select Board were told about the unexpected development during a Wednesday night meeting at which Town Administrator Jennifer Rand said she’d been receiving “furious texts” from residents, the MV Times reported.

I’ll bet they were furious! Not just anyone can live on Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe the Vineyard folks can ship the unwanted illegal aliens to a more downscale location, like the Hamptons. Or else the illegal immigrants, of whom there are only around 50, could all stay at Barack Obama’s $12 million estate. There is plenty of room there, and I understand his mansion has 10 bathrooms. That would be more than enough. But don’t hold your breath.

In all seriousness, if there is anything that could motivate Democrats to accept United States sovereignty, this is probably it.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that Governor Abbott also bused around 100 illegals to Kamala Harris’s Washington, D.C., residence, the Naval Observatory. This was in response to Harris’s absurd claim that the southern border is “secure.” No way, say the illegals themselves: the border is “open!” Let’s have more of this, until the Democrats say “Uncle.”

UPDATE: Will the Obamas come through for their illegal friends? Some are doubtful:

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Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

By 

Becket Adams, Contributor

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated.

They warned the closures would cause serious, possibly irreversible, developmental retardation. They warned of severe learning loss.

Alas.

The critics were not just ignored, they were also maligned by a vicious cabal of politicians, news media personalities, and education professionals, most notably American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The critics were called monsters and "grandma killers." They were accused of not "trusting" the science.

"Children are resilient," the pro-closure camp smugly asserted. (No, it’s not that children are resilient. It’s that they don’t yet have the words to describe the ways in which you are harming them.)

Now, a little more than two years after the pandemic first came to America, new data confirm the mass school closures, which, by the way, Democratic politicians and teachers' unions enforced with a religious fever even long after the restrictions were shown to be little more than superstitious hocus-pokery, caused serious harm to young students.

"American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 1. "Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades," the report reads , citing the first "nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later."

It adds, "Math scores dropped seven points during that period, marking a first-ever decline, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, often called 'the nation’s report card.' The students who took the tests — given from January to March in 2020 and in 2022 — were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade."

At the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the story is the same.

Who could’ve predicted this? Quite a few people, actually.

"There’s certainly no such thing as zero risk in anything we do, and that is certainly the case during a pandemic," Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, said in a 2020 paper arguing in favor of school reopenings.

However, he added, "there are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school. When we have this discussion about sending kids back to school, we have to have it in the context of the massive individual and societal costs of keeping kids at home."

His and similar recommendations were rebuffed quickly by lockdown enthusiasts and teachers’ unions alike, both of whom characterized the effort to re-open schools as dangerous and even lethal.

Frustratingly enough, a not-insignificant number of parents also supported the closures, embracing the belief that in-person learning would jeopardize greatly the life and health of everyone involved. But ask yourself this: Where, exactly, do you suppose these parents got this idea? They got it from partisan state and local leaders, from grossly politicized public health agencies and teachers’ unions. They had fear pumped directly into their veins. They watched in 2020 as the Democratic National Committee ran ads claiming, among other things, that then-President Donald Trump was "risking teachers' and parents' lives" is his supposedly "desperate" push to reopen schools.

"[Trump is] ignoring how the virus spreads... going against the advice of experts," the ad said. "Do you trust him to do what’s best for our children?"

"One cannot overstate what a large role the political reaction against Trump, and his early failures on the pandemic, played in the extended closures in blue states and cities," ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis rightly observed last week. "Democrats saw a political opportunity in fanning the flames on school reopening, and it came at a cost."

Indeed.

Check this 2020 headline from the New York Times: "How Trump’s Push to Reopen Schools Backfired." The subhead reads , "Distrust of the president and his motives hardened the conviction of some educators that teaching in person was unsafe, helping drive union opposition."

On Thursday, after the learning loss data were released, AFT president Weingarten responded.

"Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 [million] Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive," she said. "This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics."

The gall of this woman.

Weingarten acts as if the pandemic alone is responsible for the learning loss -- as if the restrictions she and her ideological allies promoted and enforced played no significant role. It's utterly shameless. Indeed, her comment is nearly as shameless as when National Public Radio declared this month, "Resistance to nuclear power is on the decline worldwide — and environmentalists helped lead the push. Here's why it's gaining support."

Yes, like Weingarten’s response this week, this actually happened. NPR actually said this.

And, yes, like Weingarten’s response, it’s a malicious, self-serving rewriting of history.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/critics-of-the-pandemic-school-closures-have-been-vindicated

THE WEST’S ENERGY DISASTER WORSENS

THE WEST’S ENERGY DISASTER WORSENS

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ENERGY POLICY

There is no excuse for advanced economies to experience a shortage of electricity, or of energy generally. The world has more than ample supplies of fossil fuels. And, if you buy the global warming hype, nuclear energy is the obvious alternative, although that implies universal use of electric vehicles that are devastating to the environment.

Nevertheless, an electricity crisis is upon us. From the U.K.: “Energy could be rationed ‘for years.'”

Europe faces years of energy rationing without Russian gas, the boss of Shell has warned. Ben van Beurden said it was a “fantasy” to think that Europe’s energy crisis would be resolved soon and he warned that if Moscow were to cut off all supplies, life would be “very hard”.
***
Gas prices for Britain for this winter closed on Friday at a record high of 827p per therm, more than 16 times higher than the average prices over the decade pre-crisis. Soaring wholesale gas and power prices have already fed through to record household bills, which are due to increase by 80 per cent to £3,549 a year from October.

The current crisis in Western Europe is due in part to the threatened cutoff of Russian natural gas. But countries like Britain and Germany are vulnerable to such a cutoff because they fecklessly failed to provide for their own energy self-sufficiency. That was an incredibly stupid policy, but one that is now being pursued by the Biden administration despite having the Western European example before it.

But how about France? France gets the bulk of its electricity from nuclear power, so Russia’s natural gas should be irrelevant. Right? France 24 reports: “French PM says companies may face energy ‘rationing’ this winter.”

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne warned company bosses on Monday about the risk of energy rationing this winter and urged them to take steps to reduce their consumption.
***
She said the government was already drawing up contingency plans which included a “quota trading system” that would enable companies to buy and sell power quotas.

How can this be, given France’s unique investment in nuclear power?

France is more sheltered than many European countries from the surge in gas prices caused by Russia’s decision to reduce its exports to Europe after its invasion of Ukraine in February.

France generates some 70 percent of its electricity from a fleet of 56 nuclear reactors, but 32 are currently offline either for routine maintenance or to evaluate corrosion risks.

Not sure what is going on there. But governments, including France’s, welcome the current energy crisis because they think it will facilitate their pet project:

“Every company needs to mobilise and act. I call on everyone to establish their own energy-saving plans in September,” she said, while stressing that the crisis caused by record-high energy prices would help the transition away from fossil fuels.

“The months ahead are just a step in the bigger transition that we need to make,” she said.

No such transition is occurring, nor will it. The chimera of wind and solar energy is a bad joke, but one for which citizens of developed countries are about to pay dearly. This is a topic we have written on many times, but this graphic, which Steve recently posted, conveys the big picture at a glance:

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we had energy independence–not just independence, but dominance–only a few years ago. It took a concerted effort by the Biden administration to screw it up. But the Left’s war on our prosperity and our way of life is only beginning. In Gavin Newsom’s California, sale of gasoline-powered vehicles is supposedly banned by 2035. Of course, that won’t happen. But the idea is that all vehicles, not just the current tiny percentage, will be electric. So how will all those EVs be charged? Not during the usual charging times, at least for the time being:

Hoping to avoid blackouts, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, warned Tuesday that it probably will issue a series of Flex Alerts over the next several days. Flex Alerts are voluntary calls for conservation during the afternoon and evening hours, when energy use tends to soar. Residents will be asked to turn up their thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using dishwashers or other large appliances, and hold off on charging their electric vehicles, all during the 4-9 p.m. time frame.

There is no excuse for blackouts in a developed country, but with regard to energy pretty much the entire West is regressing. We have ample sources of reliable energy, but are inexplicably choosing to depend on inherently unreliable, ridiculously expensive, and environmentally damaging sources instead. Eventually Western countries, including the U.S., will come to our senses, but the harm done in the meantime will be incalculable. And you know who isn’t “transitioning” away from reliable sources of power, like coal? China.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/the-wests-energy-disaster-worsens.php

CASE STUDY IN LEFTIST IDEOLOGY PATH DEPENDENCE

CASE STUDY IN LEFTIST IDEOLOGY PATH DEPENDENCE

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN HEALTH CARE, IDENTITY POLITICS

Cast your mind back to the early 1980s for a moment, and the early innings of the AIDS epidemic. It was widely understood that AIDS was predominantly spread through high-risk or unprotected homosexual contact, and public health authorities, even in San Francisco, initially said that gay bathhouses that were venues for casual and largely unprotected sexual encounters should be closed down.

In those days, however, the ethic of “liberation” and “sexual freedom” was riding high, and to be sure, homosexuality was still stigmatized by large portions of the population, such that San Francisco was an oasis for gays celebrating coming out of the closet at long last.

The furious protests of gay activists shouting that they would not be “shoved back into the closet” caused public health authorities to do an immediate about face and retreat from the common sense step of closing the bath houses. Read the Randy Shilts book And the Band Played On for a honest narrative of this shameful response—Shilts was gay himself, and died of AIDS in 1994.

And then the head of the of the infectious disease division of the NIH, a certain Dr. J. Edgar Fauci, declared that heterosexuals were just as much at risk as gays (which was not true), and thus everyone should just wear full-body condoms all the time—only a slight exaggeration, inspired by Naked Gun.

In other words, the leftist politics of liberation trumped sensible public health measures, and thousands of people died because of this political correctness. If ever there was a case of shutting down to “stop the spread,” it was then.

Fast forward to the present moment, and the outbreak of Monkeypox. It is well known that Monkeypox is spread predominantly in much the same way as AIDS, but our public health bureaucracy, now thoroughly politicized partly because of the AIDS epidemic, did cartwheels to avoid directly saying “AVOID unprotected gay sex. Oh, and by the way, can we please change the name of the disease because ‘Monkeypox’ is racist or something. . .”

My hunch was that it’s not 1983 any more, and that straight talk (no pun intended) to gays about the risks of Monkeypox would not summon forth an ideological reaction. Times have changed, and the ideology of sexual freedom uber alles is no longer the primary principle of the gay community.

And sure enough, UPI reports today:

Survey shows gay men cutting back on sex to avoid monkeypox

A survey conducted among American gay and bisexual men in early August found about half saying they’d cut down on sexual activity — including one-night stands and app-based hookups — in response to the global monkeypox outbreak.

The survey, conducted online Aug. 5-15, was led by Kevin Delaney, of the Monkeypox Emergency Response Team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These findings suggest that men who have sex with men are already taking actions to protect their sexual health and making decisions to reduce risk to themselves and their partners,” Delaney’s team reported.

The timing of the survey — and its finding that America’s gay male community reacted swiftly to the monkeypox threat — coincides with a recent global decline in monkeypox cases.

Who’s living in the past now? Leftists who learn nothing and forget nothing. And now allowing outdated political correctness to damage the gay population once again.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/case-study-in-leftist-ideology-path-dependence.php

OPINION

Here’s Why College Prices Have Spiraled Out Of Control And Bailouts Won’t Help

BY REALCLEARWIRE

By Kenneth Schrupp for RealClearHistory

With the Biden administration’s announcement this week that it would continue the moratorium on student loan payments through the beginning of next year and will forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt per student, student loan forgiveness is at the top of the current political agenda. Meanwhile, there’s little talk about bringing the cost of college under control, or why the cost of college became so outrageous in the first place. 

While proponents of student loan forgiveness argue American taxpayers need to pick up the student debt tab to level the racial and socio-economic playing field, the reality is debt forgiveness disproportionately benefits the well-off and educated, as the wealthiest 40% of Americans hold 58% of student debt, and 56% of debt is held by those with prestige and income-boosting post-bachelors’ degrees. 

RELATED: Biden Student Loan Amnesty Specifically Benefits D.C. Staffers

Instead of forcing the 87% of American adults who don’t have student loans to pay for the college experience of educated elites, American leaders must reform the universal federal student loan program that has driven the cost of college to grow eight times faster than wages.

Until 1965, the cost of college at private and public institutions remained fairly in line with inflation — these were the good old days, when a minimum wage summer job could cover all of one’s annual tuition, and then some. So what happened in 1965? President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Higher Education Act, which created guaranteed student loans by subsidizing capital for banks that would provide loans to low and middle income students. 

This simultaneously expanded college access, especially for less privileged students seeking to attend private institutions, while keeping loan burdens manageable because private banks still controlled who could receive student loans and for how much. From 1964-77, the tuition at private universities grew 11.5% more than inflation as rising demand oustripped supply, while that at public institutions, it grew 1.6% less than inflation as the government massively expanded public college systems to accommodate an exploding college-age population fueled by the Baby Boom. 

Carter created unlimited, guaranteed college demand

This bank-dominated system remained in place until 1978, when an economy in shambles and the pressures of the Baby Boom’s succeeding Baby Bust on empty college classrooms prompted President Jimmy Carter to pass the Middle Income Student Assistance Act, which eliminated income requirements for student loans.

At a time when colleges otherwise would have had to cut tuition or cohort sizes to stay full, this new bill ensured that anybody could be a full time student. 

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With this bill creating unlimited, guaranteed college demand, college tuition hikes were off to the races; from 1978-92, tuition at private universities grew 50.7% more than inflation, while that at public universities, it grew 25.4% more than inflation. Pretty dismal, right? Well, things got worse. 

RELATED: Biden Setting Up Student Loan ‘Forgiveness’ For Well-Off Borrowers, After Pelosi Said He Has No Such Power

In 1992, the Higher Education Reauthorization Act introduced direct, guaranteed loans from the Department of Education itself, and, in response to higher tuition, removed borrowing limits, which removed any last incentive for schools to keep costs down. From 1993-2006 (the endpoint of the common data set used in this analysis), tuition at private schools grew 39% more than inflation, whereas that at public schools rose 47% more than inflation.

These massive increases were a result of large cuts in state funding for public universities (who increased tuition to offset these losses) and growing room and board fees (which were used to impose higher costs on students without having to increase headline tuition as much). 

Debt forgiveness encourages rising tuitions

Without any changes to the federal student loan program, all debt forgiveness does is encourage a never-ending cycle of higher tuition, crushing debt, more bailouts, and more graduates lacking the positive equity to buy a house or even a wedding ring. A return to something more like the 1965 Higher Education Act but without federal loan guarantees — a mix of privately issued loans, low-interest capital, and strict requirements ensuring the loans would only serve lower and middle income students — would be a significant and realistic improvement.

Banks would be more careful in issuing loans, taking care to make sure students aren’t overwhelmed with debt they’d never afford to repay. 

By combining this reform with a database of student debt-to-income ratios ranked by college and by major, students would be empowered to make more informed financial decisions, and schools with unsustainable programs would find themselves either short of students or named-and-shamed into improvement.

Requiring colleges to present average pay per major at that school upon graduation would probably also do wonders for helping students choose majors that make financial sense for them. 

Purdue’s model worth considering

While politically infeasible, one could also even imagine a future where the federal government isn’t involved in issuing student loans at all, a world in which banks and schools create new financing programs on their own — and at their own risk. One school that has embraced an alternative funding model is Purdue University, a public institution ranked as one of the top 50 universities in our nation.

RELATED: Florida Gov. DeSantis Ramps Up Effort To Fight Against Woke Agenda In State Universities

Purdue has not only frozen its tuition since 2012, but it has also created a viable alternative financing model that leaves students tuition-debt free while encouraging them to make effective financial decisions. 

With Purdue’s Back a Boiler program, one can choose to pay no tuition during school, but pay a percentage of one’s earnings based on the typical Purdue graduate pay for that major over a period of 10 years.

Though the cost to the student over the program’s lifetime is slightly cheaper than private loans and slightly more expensive than federal loans, the real difference is the university, not the student or the federal government, is the one ultimately responsible for potential losses and benefits — it’s up to Purdue to invest in its students success or suffer the financial consequences. 

This alignment of risk and reward with the agent responsible for the quality and value of the product — Purdue is incentivized to produce high quality graduates to maximize their returns, while keeping administrative bloat and other bureaucratic waste down to keep costs in check. If colleges across this country were to offer this model, it’s highly likely we’d see drastic improvements in quality and reductions in the cost of higher education across the board. 

Why a bailout isn’t fair

But at the same time that we lament the cost of college, we also must remember that, once accounting for socioeconomic differences, men with bachelor’s degrees earn $655,000 more in median lifetime earnings than those with only high school diplomas, while women with bachelor’s earn $450,000 more.

With the average undergraduate student debt load at $28,400, this means the rate of return on average debt at graduation is 1,585%. A widespread bailout is hardly fair given the vast improvement in lifetime earnings that exists despite the contrivances of the federal student loan program.

Indeed, the federal student loan program has suffered the same fate of nearly every well-meaning but short-on-foresight subsidy. Modest successes from a limited-scope program drive the creation of reliant and growing constituencies who expand the program to the point of bloat and failure, ultimately doing more harm than help to the beneficiaries the program was built to serve.

RELATED: Elite Universities Are The Worst For Free Speech

In this case, the federal student loan program has financially impacted generations of Americans, leaving millions with debt and created a situation where the same government that created the problem can come in on a shining horse to save the day over and over again — politically, federal student loans are the gift that doesn’t stop giving. 

To put an end to this scheme of student suffering, bureaucratic bloat, and political ponies, we have little choice but to turn back the clock on the federal student loan program, either returning loan-origination for federally subsidized loans back to banks or replacing the federal loan system entirely.

Otherwise, like clockwork every election cycle, politicians will dangle the carrot of debt relief before desperate students all too eager to vote for their own demise, over and over again until the whole system comes crashing down.

Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.

Kenneth Schrupp is a Young Voices contributor writing on the intersection of business, politics and media. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the California Review, an independent journal.

https://thepoliticalinsider.com/heres-why-college-prices-have-spiraled-out-of-control-and-bailouts-wont-help/