July 22, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 1 Comment

Is the Internet making us stupid? We’re reading faster, but remembering less.

Fifty percent of Oregonians don’t know Oregon has two U.S. senators.*

Maybe that’s because they read all their news online.

Think about how you read on the Internet.

You see an article, Are office politics destroying your career? and click on the link to read more. While you read, you are interrupted by an Instant Message from the boss that requires an immediate response. It only takes a minute to respond, but when you come back to the article a link to a Dilbert cartoon about work draws your attention. Then some high priority e-mails require attention. You take a few seconds to check on the latest news. Among the news items you see, Check out Emily Ratajkowski’s photos in the 2014 SI Swimsuit Issue, and take a look.

Where was I, you say to yourself.

Did you even get through the above paragraph uninterrupted?

People are reading more text than ever, but recalling less of it because they’re reading online, a Victoria Business School study on reading behavior has found.

The Impact of the Internet on Reading Behaviour, by Associate Professor Val Hooper and Master’s student Channa Herath, explores the online and offline reading behavior of individuals.

In general, online reading was found to have a negative impact on people’s cognition, with concentration, comprehension, absorption and recall rates when engaging with online material all much lower, principally because people are multitasking and scanning when reading online, not focusing.

“Multitasking when reading online was common, with activities such as reading emails, checking news, exploring hyperlinks and viewing video clips providing distractions,”says Dr Hooper.

Many of the study respondents verified the results, saying they were more likely to remember material they had read offline, which was also why they frequently printed material they really wanted to read closely.

Makes you wonder whether digital readers really absorb all the political messages candidates spend so much money on.

For that matter, I wonder how many people reading this online article will finish or remember it.

*2013 Oregon Values & Beliefs Survey. Executed by DHM Research and PolicyInteractive Research; Sponsored by Oregon Health & Science University, The Oregon Community Foundation, Oregon Public Broadcasting and Oregon State University.

July 17, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

Things fall apart

I was enjoying a coffee and pastry at a Starbucks this morning when a man sitting next to me checking his smartphone and reading the paper turned and said, “It looks like the rebels or the Russians might have shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 300 people. Do you get the feeling everything is just unraveling?”

Yes.

A plan to transport three busloads of Central American families through San Diego for processing at the Murrieta Border Patrol station took an unexpected turn when scores of protesters blocked the buses from entering.

Tens of thousands of children of all ages, most unaccompanied by adults, are flowing across the U.S. Southwest border. Frustration and anger is bubbling up all over the country. Some people are arguing that President Obama has encouraged the stream of immigrants and that strong steps need to be taken to control the U.S. border and send the immigrants home. Others argue the immigrants need to be treated with compassion and welcomed to America with open arms in the spirit of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Whichever side you are on, and just about everybody seems to have taken sides, just 28% of the public approves of the way President Obama is handling the surge of children from Central America, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center or the People & the Press.

Meanwhile, violence is spreading in Gaza and Israel after the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank set off a new cycle of violence in the region.

While Hamas militants and Israel exchange rocket fire, stories multiply of civilian deaths, including a story today reporting that four boys, ages 9 to 11, were killed on a beach west of Gaza City.

A boy on a Gaza beach killed in an Israeli attack is carried away.

Of course, the only reason similar horrifying stories of civilian killings by the Hamas militants haven’t surfaced in Israel is because of its effective anti-rocket defenses.

In Ukraine, tension continues as Russia threatens the country, pro-Russian militants fight the government’s forces and, as noted earlier, rumors swirl that a Malaysian Airlines plane with 295 on board, including some Americans, that crashed in Ukraine near the Russian border was deliberately shot down. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in Kiev asserted that the “the airplane was shot down by the Russian Buk missile system.”

wreckage of Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine

In Egypt, after a popular uprising resulted in the first democratically-elected Islamic president in Egypt’s history, forces led by Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew the fledgling president and instigated an unforgiving campaign of retaliation against the Muslim Brotherhood and regime critics that continues to this day.

In Syria, after Obama insisted that use of chemical weapons by the the Assad regime would be “a red line for us,” Obama dithered and the civil war escalated, creating a country scarred with destruction and pushing out hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring counries.

In Afghanistan, scene of what Obama called “the good war” that needed to be fought, chaos has ensued since the U.S. precipitously withdrew its troops.

In Iraq, after thousands of American soldiers gave their lives in an effort to create a sustainable peace, the U.S.-backed Shia-led government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki initiated a cleansing of the Sunni minority. Now we have a violent struggle going on in Iraq with mostly Sunni militants from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

A file image uploaded on June 14, 2014 on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province (AFP Photo / HO)

Meanwhile, despite a roaring stock market, economic insecurity reigns. Just 19% of those surveyed by Pew say economic conditions in the U.S. are excellent or good while 81% rate conditions as only fair or poor. About six-in-ten (62%) still say jobs are difficult to find locally.

Obama’s rating for handling the economy also has stayed negative, with 56% disapproving of the way Obama is handling the economy, according to the Pew survey. In fact, Obama’s job rating on the economy has been around 40% for most of the past five years.

Meanwhile, Obama, “a restless president weary of the obligations of the White House,” as the New York Times puts it, jets around the world for fundraisers and dinners with celebrities and wealthy supporters, taking as many breaks as he can for golf.

Unravelling? You bet.

July 15, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

Replenishing the Highway Trust Fund: more budget shenanigans

It’s not just a burst of illegal immigration and a screwed up Veterans Administration that motivates Congress to try budget slight-of-hand. Rebuilding a depleted Highway Trust Fund through dubious manipulations is being tried, too.

Facing depleted resources in the Highway Trust Fund that could hold up road and bridge construction across the country, and the jobs that would come with it, House Republicans and the Obama Administration are backing a bill that would inject up to $11 billion into the Fund by, among other things, making changes to corporate’ pension contributions.

So-called “pension smoothing” would allow companies to temporarily contribute less to their employees’ pension plans.

The theory behind this maneuver is that because pension contributions are tax-deductible, companies will pay higher federal taxes over the ten-year scoring period used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) if they put less money into their pension plans.

Senator Mr. Wyden (D – OR), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, already sees this as an opportunity to cleave off some of that new revenue. He’s proposing to use about $2.7 billion of the increased tax collections during that 10-year period to help out retired coal miners, who have underfunded pension and health benefits programs.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Wyden has expressed concern in the past about the potential burden on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation from underfunded multi-employer pension plans, in which multiple employers in the same industry contribute to a single pension fund. Of particular concern are multi-employer plans established through union contracts in contracting industries, such as coal mining. Changes in the coal industry has meant fewer employers paying into pension funds on behalf of fewer employees.

But Congress’s “solution” to the Highway Trust Fund’s shortfall is a sham because the revenues that are supposedly increased because of the pension smoothing change would be largely offset in the years after the 10-year scoring period. That’s because corporations will pay less in taxes in years after the 10 year period. In other words, no real savings are realized in the long run. But because those reduced taxes wouldn’t happen until after 10 years, they don’t count in Congress’s method for calculating budget balance.

Wyden, of all people, ought to know that the whole method of producing revenue he wants to use to bulk up the coal miners’ underfunded pension plans is bogus. But why let reality intrude.

So bizarre.

Making it even more bizarre, Republicans vehemently opposed this very same “pension smoothing” policy back in March 2014 when the Democrats proposed using it to pay for the renewal of unemployment benefits.

“When they were seeking a spending offset to the five-month extension of unemployment insurance, Democrats were happy to use a budget gimmick,” the New Republic reported. “They would have preferred to use deficit spending, but a gimmick was the next best thing. If Republicans required a spending offset, better a fake one than one that cuts spending on the social safety net or other government programs.”

You have to watch them all like a hawk, don’t you.

July 12, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

“Just put in on my tab.” Forget about budget discipline in D.C.

Forget about budget discipline in D.C. It’s an emergency.

The Obama administration was caught unprepared by the onslaught of children coming across the southern border and illegally entering the U.S., so President Obama quickly pasted together a proposed response that would cost $3.7 billion.

Not satisfied to just deal with the immigration problems, Obama tacked on a request for $615 million for emergency wildfire suppression activities for FY 2014, and a new discretionary cap adjustment for wildfire suppression operations starting in FY 2015.

But he doesn’t want to pay for any of it. He’s fine with it being added to the already obscene national debt, already over $17.5 trillion.

Obama dismisses Republicans calling for the money to be offset by spending cuts to other programs.

Don’t you understand? This is an emergency, the White House says, ignoring that it’s own policies, in tandem with cynical politicians and law-breaking businesses, have been aggravating the illegal immigration problem for quite some time.

The Senate wants to jump on the “It’s an emergency” bandwagon with new Veterans Administration legislation, too.

In response to high publicity problems at VA hospitals, the Democrat-controlled Senate has passed legislation to address the problems. Part of the bill would provide funding for the VA to contract with private medical centers to help meet demand.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has warned that the contracting section would lead to an explosive growth in entitlement spending, which is already out of hand. And the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the contracting provision alone would increase federal spending by about $35 billion over the next 10 years.

“We need to resist the temptation to create more entitlements and more entitlements, which is one of the reasons we are heading recklessly toward fiscal crisis,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who voted against the bill.

The Senate wants to pay the bill’s entire tab through emergency legislation, which means the tab would be added to the federal deficit.

But the bill approved by the Republican-controlled House would require that the cost be covered by spending cuts from somewhere else in the federal budget.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has tried to cast the House Republicans as folks who want to take food out of the mouths of the needy, medical care away from the infirm and quality education away from American children.

“I hope very much that the House will agree with the Senate that we are in an emergency and that [it] is absolutely imperative we move as quickly as possible” to authorize funding, Sanders said. “I hope very much we can avoid once again having a major debate about cutting food stamps, education, roads and bridges in order to fund the VA.”

Sure, sure. Spend away. No budget discipline needed here.

As Will Rogers said, “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.”

July 6, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

Get Smart – It’s time to tighten the screws on for-profit schools

Too many for-profit schools have no good reason to exist and lots of reasons not to.

Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit chain of schools with about 72,000 students, took in $1.4 billion in federal student loans and grants last year, almost 90 percent of its total revenue. The money kept afloat the 107 campuses of Corinthian’s schools across the country, operated under the names Heald, Everest and WyoTech.

But now the entire system is collapsing under the weight of lawsuits and government action alleging fraud, excessive student debt, low completion rates, lies about student success in finding employment in their fields, and other malfeasance.

For-profit schools in the United States have become a largely government program, sucking up federal loans and grants, costing taxpayers billions and failing to deliver for students. The government should be coming down hard on a network that delivers so little value for all the federal money pouring into it.

But Congress, particularly heavily lobbied Republicans swamped in campaign contributions from the for-profit colleges industry, refuses to rein in the abuse.

Minnesota Republican Rep. John Klein tops the list of members receiving contributions from the for-profit schools industry, taking in $117,650 in the 2014 cycle. Klein just happens to be Chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Republican Rep. John Klein is a big beneficiary of contributions from the for-profit schools industry

This isn’t to say the Democrats are all on the side of the angels. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, pulled in $11,100 from for-profit schools and Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, collected $21,70 in the 2014 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

A typical concern raised by Democrats is that cracking down on the for-profit schools will hurt minorities, a cynical explanation given that minorities tend to be the ones hit the worst by for-profit schools’ abuse.

Prominent companies heavily invested in for-profit colleges include ITT Technical Institute, DeVry, Kaplan, Apollo Group / University of Phoenix, Career Education Corp. (CEC), Education Management Corp. (EDMC), and Globe University.

Just in the first three months of 2014, for-profit education companies spent at least $1.9 million on lobbying expenses, according to an Inside Higher Ed analysis. Apollo Education Group, the Association for Private Sector Colleges and Universities, Bridgepoint Education, Herzing University and Corinthian Colleges (which operates under the school names Everest, Heald, and Wyotech) were among the biggest spenders.

The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the trade group representing for-profit schools, argues on its Higher Education For All website, that “all students should be afforded the opportunity to pursue a postsecondary education regardless of their location, socioeconomic status or career choice… Government should not be in the business of restricting individual’s opportunities…”

Agreed, but that doesn’t mean the government, and taxpayers, should be subsidizing a failing system.

According to the Institute for College Access and Success, more than 600,000 federal student loan borrowers who entered repayment in 2010 defaulted on their loans by 2012. The largest share of these students – 46 percent –attended for-profit colleges, even though they enrolled just 13 percent of students nationally.

Apollo Group says it’s “Playing a vital role in educating the world”, but in 2013, the Washington Post reported that the University of Phoenix had an overall graduation rate — meaning first-time undergraduates who get a degree in six years — of about 16 percent, and the graduation rate for students in online programs was just one-fourth of that.

Particularly hard hit are veterans. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, over the past five years, the University of Phoenix campus in San Diego reaped $95 million in post 9/11 GI Bill money, more than the entire University of California system. Meanwhile, the overall graduation rate at the San Diego campus is less than 15 percent and more than 25 percent of students default on their loans within three years of leaving school.

The for-profit college industry has been battling for years to block regulations that could shut off federal dollars flowing to programs that too often leave graduates and drop-outs with excessive debt and no good-paying job.

On Feb. 26, 2014, when Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director, Richard Cordray, filed a lawsuit against for-profit chain ITT Educational Services for misleading students, he cited the failure of for-profit schools to serve their students well.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, he said, for bachelor’s degree students starting a four-year program in 2004, just 28 percent of students attending for-profit institutions graduated within six years. This was half the rate for students at four-year public institutions.

“This is truly an American tragedy,” said Cordray, in announcing the suit against ITT. “Students may think they are climbing a ladder to success when instead they are getting knocked down, crushed by student debt that does not help them gain a better job or a better life.”

It’s time for Congress to act.

June 26, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

Forget about freedom in Ukraine; there’s money to be made

Crass. Imbecilic. Disgraceful.

It’s hard to pick a word that works when American businesses take to the Wall Street Journal today to run a full page ad arguing that confronting Russia over its invasion of Crimea in Ukraine is not in America’s best interests.

“America’s interests are at stake in Russia and Ukraine,” the ad, placed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, blares in bold print. “Sanctions hurt American interests…We are concerned about actions that would harm American manufacturers and cost American jobs…It’s time to put American jobs and growth first.”

First before what? Before respect for human dignity? Before the right of a nation’s people to choose their own government? Before support for the principle of territorial integrity as stated in the United Nations Charter?

“Democracy and respect for human rights have long been central components of U.S. foreign policy,” the U. S. Department of State says. “Supporting democracy not only promotes such fundamental American values as religious freedom and worker rights, but also helps create a more secure, stable, and prosperous global arena in which the United States can advance its national interests.”

America has been promoting democracy around the world since its founding under both Republican and Democratic presidents. Now we shouldn’t care about the rights of the Ukrainians if there are profits at stake?

How low can we go?

June 26, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

“Hard Choices” hype not paying off

Looks like Simon & Schuster made a bad choice in deciding to publish Hillary Clinton’s book.

Not that many people are buying it. That could say something about the depth of her appeal, beyond being a media celebrity and liberal icon.

The New York Times reports (http://nyti.ms/1sGoHlL) that sales of Hillary’s book declined 43.5 percent to 48,000 copies in its second week on the shelves, according to Nielsen BookScan. That followed sales of about 85,000 copies in the first week the book hit bookstores.

Simon & Schuster is widely rumored to have paid paid Hillary a $14 million advance on “Hard Choices”, $6 million more than she was paid for her last book, “Living History”, and to have spent lavishly on promotion of the book. If that’s right, Simon & Schuster may be on the way to losing a lot of money on “Hard Choices”.

And all this doesn’t take into account that a lot of people buying the book are more collectors than readers.

So far, the only attention-grabbing things to come out from all the publicity about the book are embarrassing comments Hillary has made about her family’s financial situation.

“We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Clinton said ABC’s Diane Sawyer, referring to the hefty legal fees incurred during their White House years. “We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

Commenters noted that Bill Clinton earned $200,000 a year as president and that the Clinton’s huge legal debts, largely an outgrowth of Bill Clinton’s misadventures, were paid off with public contributions. They also highlighted that Hillary and Bill immediately leaped into lucrative speaking engagements when Bill’s presidency ended.

Hillary is reported to have raked in $5 million in speaking fees since she left the State Department in early 2013, much of it from speeches billed at $200,000 a pop. Bill has been even more aggressive, pulling in $106 million from paid speeches since leaving the White House in January 2001.

Hillary found herself in more hot water when she told the Guardian she’s not “truly well off” and insisted that she and Bill “pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names…” Bloomberg News later reported, however, that the Clintons have played fast and loose to stave off hefty estate taxes on their own personal wealth. “…the two heads of the political dynasty have been seizing on legal but slippery loopholes to minimize taxes on inherited wealth…,” CBS News reported.

June 24, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

Moving to the suburbs: addiction and poverty

Linda knows poverty in the midst of plenty.

Her family was desperately poor during her childhood, but they lived in a tony Portland suburb, attending school there with kids who were much more affluent.

Her home environment growing up, however, was far from idyllic. Linda and her siblings were exposed throughout her childhood to drug and alcohol abuse as well as domestic violence.

That led Linda (not her real name) to reckless behavior, including her own drug and alcohol addiction, followed by brief trips to jail. She tried to straighten out on several occasions, but slipped back, returning poverty to the forefront.

In his heart-wrenching novel, “There are No Children Here”, Alex Kotlowitz followed the lives of two young boys growing up in the projects of the near West Side of Chicago. There they were in the midst of ruinous poverty, rampant drug use, run-ins with the police and dysfunctional families.

The book resonated partly because poverty and associated ills are often seen as synonymous with big cities.

But times are changing. Linda now lives in suburban Tigard, not a rundown area of Chicago or inner city Portland.

As in her youth, she’s experiencing hardship, but this time she’s getting help through collaborative social service programs that promote self-sufficiency for homeless individuals and families. And she’s making real progress toward getting back on her feet. A big break came recently when she got a job.

The suburbs are struggling with an increasing number of residents living in poverty, including Tigard’s home, Washington County, which has a well-deserved reputation as the economic engine of Oregon with thousands of well-paying jobs.

The shift of poverty to the suburbs occurred around 2001, when data showed that more poor people lived in suburbs than in cities. The trend sped up with the Great Recession, which devastated many families.

One-fourth of poor people living in extremely poor neighborhoods in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas are in the suburbs, according to research at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. And suburbs account for four in ten poor individuals in those regions who live in areas of high poverty—a neighborhood poverty rate exceeding 20 percent.

Alan Berube, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, argues that contemporary anti-poverty strategies must recognize the different needs of poor families in both cities and suburbs. The suburbs, for example, often lack the density to deliver services in a distinct area, he says.

Poor families often spread over greater distances in the suburbs, and they face different barriers (transportation, for example) than city dwellers do. Moreover, as poverty spreads to the suburbs, it becomes less a neighborhood problem and more of a regional or sub-regional problem.

Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, say we need to recognize that growing jobs and fighting poverty are not separate initiatives. As U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski put it, the best social program is a job. In addition, we need to engage more partners, particularly the private sector, in efforts to improve outcomes for low-income people and places.

A few years into the painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession, the need remains high.

June 19, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 0 comments

Grab them by the throat, Jeff, and don’t let go.

I’m standing with you, Jeff.

How could I not after getting your letters pleading for money and using every poll-tested word in the book to convince me to make my check payable to Jeff Merkley for Oregon.

You tried to capture me with the first line, hitting me over the head by asking me if I’m “fed up with Koch-style special interests always getting their way in Washington.”

“Koch-style special interests.” Ah, yes. Always lead with a reference to the Koch brothers, the favorite bogeymen of the Democrats, denounced by MoveOn “for using your vast wealth — more than the combined wealth of the bottom 40 percent of Americans — to corrupt our democracy” and assailed by Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid for being “un-American” and leading the way to a dystopian America run by moneyed interests.

Forget about the fact the Democrats have their own moneyed interests. According to OpenSecrets.org, from 1989 to 2014 rich donors gave Democrats $1.15 billion — $416 million more than the $736 million given to the GOP. Among the top 10 donors to both parties, Democrat supporters outspent Republican supporters 2-to-1.

Then you asked if I’ve “…had it with the Republicans shilling for the wealthy and powerful.”

“Shilling.” What a great word. A shill supports something with the pretense of sincerity, when in fact he’s being paid for his services. So I guess while the Republicans shill for their wealthy patrons, the Democrats shill for theirs. In your case, principal contributors to your campaign during 2009 -2014 have been:

*Industry*	*Total raised From Individuals*		*From PACS*
lawyers/law firms	$337,313	$259,615	$77,698
Leadership PACs	$166,500	0	$166,500
Real estate interests	$146,868	$74,358	$72,510
Building trade unions	$117,000	0	$117,000

Oh, and I just loved your appealing for my money “because the Republicans and their special interests cronies are hell bent on defeating me in 2014.”

“Cronies.” Another loaded word. The Republicans don’t have supporters, backers or enthusiasts. They have despicable, contemptible, loathsome “cronies”, part of a corrupt system of trading favors.

Then you said your race against Republican Monica Wehby is “going to be an uphill battle” because you “refuse to play ball with the Washington insiders…”

Ah yes, those dreaded “Washington insiders.” But wait a minute. You’ve been back there in D.C. for almost six years now. Aren’t you an “insider”, too. Or, with all the anti-Washington sentiment going on, are you trying to make voters forget that you’re an incumbent?

You also warned me that your record “…will be twisted into as many smears as special interest Super PACS can jam into a 30-second TV ad.”

So the TV ad you have up now asserting that Wehby will vote in favor of measures to “gut the middle class”, isn’t a smear? I mean, you know that the growth in Medicare costs, for example, jus unsustainable. And when a researcher hired by the Democratic Party of Oregon got ahold of a police report on Wehby’s alleged harassment of an ex-suitor and it somehow became public, wasn’t that a smear?

All candidates rely on catchphrases to define themselves and their opponents, as well as establish the framework of the campaign. Part of the reason is because, even though candidates sometimes talk about issues, “The unspoken reality…is that the vast majority of Americans don’t vote based on particular issues at all,” Dr. Frank Luntz wrote in Words that Work. “The fabled issue voter is a rare specimen indeed. ‘Agrees with me on the issues’ is inevitably one of the least important candidate attributes in determining public support.”

Instead, Americans decide who to vote for more on a candidate’s image or vibe, Luntz says.

You know that. You know most voters don’t really know that much about the substance behind issues and don’t deal well with complexity or intricacy. So you’re trying to poison the well with negative sounding buzzwords about the opposition. Smart.

June 18, 2014 by whmacken2013 - 1 Comment

Want to skip out on paying back all your student loans?

Now that you’re out of college, want to skip out on making those pesky student loan payments until all your debts are paid off? No problem.

Under a program that reverses John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, loan forgiveness is available under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program created by Congress in 2007. Under this law, signed by President George W. Bush, once people holding full-time public jobs have completed 120 payments on their federal direct loans, the remaining balance can be forgiven, with no cap.

No longer in vogue?

The list of qualifying public sector jobs is longer than my arm.

That’s because qualifying employment is “any employment with a federal, state, or local government agency, entity, or organization…”, including work for a qualifying not-for-profit employer “if it provides certain public services, such as emergency management, military service, public safety, or law enforcement services; public health services; public education or public library services; school library and other school-based services; public interest law services; early childhood education; public service for individuals with disabilities and the elderly.”

Good grief. Who isn’t qualified?

What supporters of loan forgiveness conveniently forget is that forgiving loans costs money, something that can’t be ignored when the the national debt exceeds $17 trillion.

Forgiving college loans also likely makes students less sensitive to tuition costs and schools more likely to encourage students to borrow for increasing college costs national debt, rather than pushing schools to figure out how to become more affordable.

The rationale for the creation of the program was that people in public service jobs make less money than those in the private sector, so government needs to add perks to make public service jobs more appealing to the well-educated.

The problem is that government salaries are not all necessarily lower than those in the private sector for comparable jobs, people in the public sector tend to have more generous retirement benefits and attempting to drive educated people to public sector jobs may not be the best use of American talent. At its root, the loan forgiveness program assumes that public sector jobs are inherently more valuable to the country, justifying foisting the unpaid portion of student loans on the American taxpayer.

Another argument made for this loan forgiveness program is that it stimulates the economy because it puts more money in American’s pockets instead of in loan repayment.

A Freakonomics post made hash of that argument, noting:

If we are going to give money away, why on earth would we give it to college grads? This is the one group who we know typically have high incomes, and who have enjoyed income growth over the past four decades. The group who has been hurt over the past few decades is high school dropouts.
If you want stimulus, you get more bang-for-your-buck if you give extra dollars to folks who are most likely to spend each dollar, like poor people.
People who support this are a bunch of kids who don’t want to pay their loans back. And worse: Do this once, and what will happen in the next recession? More lobbying for free money…?
Much of the rhetoric in support of loan forgiveness is, “Give free money to us, rather than corporations, millionaires and billionaires.” Why give money to college grads rather than the 15% of the population in poverty?

Finally, a good case can be made that we have too many people in the public sector and that the last thing we need to do is incentivize adding more.

Congress should abolish this loan forgiveness program, not expand it.

	whmacken2013 on Jacuzzi Bath Remodeling and Co…
	Sheila Anderson on Jacuzzi Bath Remodeling and Co…
	pauloedgar1940 on Local News: The Times They Are…
	Don Bellairs on Oregon’s Failing Public…
	pauloedgar1940 on As Time Goes By: The Intrepid…

ThinkingOregon

Author Archives: whmacken2013