Given the current state of American public schools, it is no wonder that teenagers are turning to the internet and emulating the outrageous “role models” they find online.
The post No Wonder Teens are Snorting Condoms—Study Shows Most 8th Graders Can’t Even Do Basic Math appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Google"s predictive search terms for education in America reveal a disturbing problem with how this country attempts to teach children how and what to learn.
The post Google Search Results for ‘School Makes Me,’ Reveal Disturbing Problem With Public Education appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Shutting down the Department of Education and returning control of the education dollar to the American people is the key to improving education. The best way to put the people in charge of education is by shutting down all unconstitutional bureaucracies, repealing the Sixteenth Amendment, and ending the Federal Reserve’s money monopoly.
Since Congress is unlikely to restore constitutional, limited government in the near future, supporters of quality education must advance policies aimed at giving Americans control over the education dollar so they can seek alternatives to the federally-controlled system. This is why I have always supported education tax credits and deductions.
When I was in Congress, I introduced legislation providing tax credits for contributions to education scholarship funds. These funds provide K-12 scholarships to low-income-family students whose parents cannot afford private schools. These scholarship funds allow these children to escape government schools that have been ruined by federal “reforms” like No Child Left Behind and Common Core, as well as mandates such as the ones dictating what can be served in school cafeterias.
Including education scholarship tax credits in the tax reform bill currently before Congress would be a major step toward creating a free market in education. In a free market, parents could select the type of education that best suits the unique needs of their children, instead of the demands of politicians and bureaucrats. Schools could compete on the basis of academics, extracurricular activities, and even lunch menus. Those with unique and innovative education ideas would be free to establish schools and prove their models’ superiority.
Moving to a free-market education system would increase the amount of money spent on educating children.
This is because in a free market resources would not be siphoned away from the classroom to support a bloated federal bureaucracy and schools would not be force to waste valuable resources proving they are complying with federal regulations.
By increasing competition, education scholarship tax credits encourage government-run schools to improve.
The threat of losing more students may even cause local school boards and state boards of education to resist federal mandates. Thus, education scholarship tax credits can improve the education of all children.
Some libertarians oppose education scholarship tax credits on the grounds that they are a form of government “subsidy.”
Since education tax credits allow people to use their own money to support education, this claim only makes sense if one believes that all income is owned by the government, so any income not taxed away is a gift from government. This is a strange position for a libertarian to take!
Other critics say that tax breaks for education (or any other item) distort the market.
They also claim that these tax breaks cause income taxes to be higher than they would be without these credits. These critics may have a point, but the answer is to force Congress to cut spending and reduce or eliminate all taxes, not to take away existing tax breaks.
Almost all Americans agree that education should be generously funded.
The only question is who should control the education dollar — the federal government or the people. Anyone looking for the answer need only consider how American education has declined as the federal government’s role has increased. Education scholarship tax credits are an important step toward restoring control of education to the American people and providing a quality education to children from low-income families. Congress should help American children and include education scholarship tax credits in the tax reform bill.
Authored by Chris Campbell via LFB.org,
Over a million kids in America six years old and under are on psychiatric drugs - mostly to treat anxiety.
Let that sink in.
I have to ask. Is the U.S. really becoming this out of touch? And I mean that literally.
Author Ray Williams, a contributor to Psychology Today, offered an important question back in 2010: “In our desire to have a politically correct and safe social environment, or an environment of instant communication, have we lost sight of the most important aspect of human development and culture — physical touch?”
The science is in: After food, water and shelter, there’s little more important to kids, especially babies, than human contact. Without simple human contact, in fact, babies can die.
This is the case, actually, to varying degrees, for all mammals.
In many litters of puppies and kittens, for example, there are sometimes one or two animals that come out enfeebled — as the “runts.”
The weakness of the runts, felt by the mother during nursing, is a sign to the mother it likely won’t survive. To make sure her genes have the best chance for survival, she must use her limited resources wisely.
As a result, the mother doesn’t lick or nurture the runt. The mother still allows the runt to feed (other species don’t even go that far), but it refuses to show the runt affection.
It’s hard to understate how catastrophic this is for the runt. A certain amount of maternal licking and nuzzling is necessary. The affection, we now know, turns on the production of a certain growth hormone in the brain. Without it, food cannot be metabolized properly and healthy growth and development is impossible. If the runt continues to be ignored, even if it still gets plenty to eat, it will eventually shrivel up and die.
It’s the same for humans. Without human contact at the earliest of age, the immune system is essentially shot. The affected becomes vulnerable to all sorts of ailments and diseases.
But it’s not just babies…
Human contact, in kids and adults, has been shown to ease pain, lift depression and may even, oddly enough, increase the odds that a team will win a game.
And it’s the simplest thing. (Plus, it’s free!)
K.I.S.S.: When the Synthetic Gets in the Way
Indeed. In our headlong rush for “progress” in all forms, this is one aspect of our existence in which we need to “make great again,” rather than mindlessly perverting or opting for more synthetic versions. (Food and most medicine can also be added to this list, among other things.)
Progress, technological and otherwise, hold incredible potential to lift humanity to new heights — yet, if not done mindfully (which is the ideal role of conservatism, preserving that which is worthy of preservation), it can, without question, push us down to new lows.
The latter is precisely what both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were warning us about.
Dystopia would come first with a smile and promises of a vast utopia. And, so enamored we would be, we wouldn’t even notice the glimmering of its fangs until, of course, it was too late.
Today, we invite Joe Jarvis of the Daily Bell to ask one unnerving question: Have we already reached dystopia?
Read on.
Would you let a five-year-old smoke a joint? I certainly hope not. Yet that would probably be less harmful than loading kids up on pharmaceuticals.
Currently, over a million American children UNDER SIX YEARS OLD are taking psychiatric drugs. Babies are literally being doped up by the pharmaceutical industry. Over 274,000 babies UNDER ONE-YEAR-OLD are given drugs, mostly for anxiety.
Anxiety drugs for babies. Have they tried motherly love? Or is that just an old fashioned, outdated concept?
You know, I like to mention society’s similarity to Orwell’s 1984. And surely the growing police state, war on drugs, and endless military campaigns – where the enemy seems to change daily – are reminiscent of the fictional dictatorship of Big Brother.
But it seems the powers that be are working tirelessly to blend together the dystopia of 1984, with that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
In that dystopia, there is no police state or war. Society has been perfectly designed by scientists, inspired by Ford’s assembly line. Babies are grown in the lab, cloned to all look alike, depending on their class. Parents are an embarrassing relic of the past. How silly to think a child needs family when they have the state!
The lower castes are deprived of oxygen as embryos to stunt their mental development. In America, they use fluoride in the drinking water instead.
In Brave New World, children listen to 24-hour propaganda in their cribs.
Betas hear:
Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.
White pride, black pride, gay pride, national pride. Pride is not meant for accidents of birth. You should be proud of accomplishments and achievements, not genetics and geography.
Perhaps someone has been whispering in these radicalized children’s ears.
And how jealous the Department of Education must be of the incubators of Brave New World! They have to sometimes wait years to indoctrinate children. But at least the government gets to drug them up at a young age! And if the TV is left on, most of the programming is done for them.
Of course, the adults are drugged up in Brave New World as well, just like in America. If anyone feels the least bit anxious, nervous, sad–or any other troublesome emotion–they get “soma.” It’s the perfect mix of drugs with only pleasant feelings and no ill side effects.
The 1 in 6 Americans on antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety medication still have to put up with side effects.
The 50 million plus Americans on psychiatric medication sometimes kill themselves, or go mad and kill others. I guess the government is still working out the kinks. Or it’s just another creative blending of 1984 and Brave New World. In the former, the proles must be properly terrified.
And there is one more thing I can remember from Brave New World that strikes eerily similar to modern America.
At what age does the public education system start teaching sex ed? Kindergarteners in some states receive “age appropriate” – according to the government – sexual education. Some studies suggest teen pregnancies rise in areas where sex ed is taught at younger ages.
How young is too young for a sex change? Kids can now choose between 43 genders, or make up a new one! It’s like Mr. Potato head, but with their own bodies. And they will be given corresponding drugs to enhance the “natural” changes.
In the classrooms of Brave New World:
“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”
The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing…
He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.
Drugging the population, programming citizens with propaganda, sexualizing children, creating class divisions.
These dystopian novels were meant to be warnings, not instruction manuals.
Would you let a five-year-old smoke a joint? I certainly hope not. Yet that would probably be less harmful than loading kids up on pharmaceuticals.
Currently, over a million American children UNDER SIX YEARS OLD are taking psychiatric drugs. Babies are literally being doped up by the pharmaceutical industry. Over 274,000 babies UNDER ONE-YEAR-OLD are given drugs, mostly for anxiety.
Anxiety drugs for babies. Have they tried motherly love? Or is that just an old fashioned, outdated concept?
You know, I like to mention society’s similarity to Orwell’s 1984. And surely the growing police state, war on drugs, and endless military campaigns–where the enemy seems to change daily–are reminiscent of the fictional dictatorship of Big Brother.
But it seems the powers that be are working tirelessly to blend together the dystopia of 1984, with that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
In that dystopia, there is no police state or war. Society has been perfectly designed by scientists, inspired by Ford’s assembly line. Babies are grown in the lab, cloned to all look alike, depending on their class. Parents are an embarrassing relic of the past. How silly to think a child needs family when they have the state!
The lower castes are deprived of oxygen as embryos to stunt their mental development. In America, they use fluoride in the drinking water instead.
In Brave New World, children listen to 24-hour propaganda in their cribs. Betas hear:
Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.
White pride, black pride, gay pride, national pride. Pride is not meant for accidents of birth. You should be proud of accomplishments and achievements, not genetics and geography. Perhaps someone has been whispering in these radicalized children’s ears.
And how jealous the Department of Education must be of the incubators of Brave New World! They have to sometimes wait years to indoctrinate children. But at least the government gets to drug them up at a young age! And if the TV is left on, most of the programming is done for them.
Of course, the adults are drugged up in Brave New World as well, just like in America. If anyone feels the least bit anxious, nervous, sad–or any other troublesome emotion–they get “soma.” It’s the perfect mix of drugs with only pleasant feelings and no ill side effects.
The 1 in 6 Americans on antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety medication still have to put up with side effects.
The 50 million plus Americans on psychiatric medication sometimes kill themselves, or go mad and kill others. I guess the government is still working out the kinks. Or it’s just another creative blending of 1984 and Brave New World. In the former, the proles must be properly terrified.
And there is one more thing I can remember from Brave New World that strikes eerily similar to modern America.
At what age does the public education system start teaching sex ed? Kindergarteners in some states receive “age appropriate”–according to the government–sexual education. Some studies suggest teen pregnancies rise in areas where sex ed is taught at younger ages.
How young is too young for a sex change? Kids can now choose between 43 genders, or make up a new one! It’s like Mr. Potato head, but with their own bodies. And they will be given corresponding drugs to enhance the “natural” changes.
In the classrooms of Brave New World:
“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”
The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing…
He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.
Drugging the population, programming citizens with propaganda, sexualizing children, creating class divisions.
These dystopian novels were meant to be warnings, not instruction manuals.
I like to use Audible to listen to books while doing mindless tasks like weeding the garden. Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks
The staggering inflation rates of college tuition over the past couple of decades has been a frequent topic for us. As the Wall Street Journal notes today, the cost of educating our snowflakes has soared since the early 90"s and outstripped overall inflation by nearly 4x. It seems that the liberal indoctrination of an entire generation is very expensive business.
U.S. college tuition is growing at the slowest pace in decades, following a nearly 400% rise over the past three decades that fueled middle class anxieties and a surge in student debt.
Tuition at college and graduate school—after scholarships and grants are factored in—rose 1.9% in the year through June, broadly in line with overall inflation, Labor Department figures show. By contrast from 1990 through last year, tuition grew an average 6% a year, more than double the rate of inflation. In that time, the average annual cost for a four-year private college, including living expenses, rose 161% to about $27,500, according to the College Board.
Some schools are offering more discounts and cutting prices.
Alas, there may be hope yet as for the first time in nearly 30 years college tuition rates in 2016 only increased at approximately the same rate as overall inflation...shocking.
Of course, it"s no surprise how we got here. The combination of yet another massive debt bubble in student loans, rising government subsidies and soaring demand from a generation of snowflakes programmed to believe their self-worth is directly correlated to how much money their parents drop on their anthropology degree resulted in a predictable supply/demand imbalance and massive prices increases.
So, what caused the 2016 slowdown? Among other things, Congress decided to stop arbitrarily hiking the student loan caps back in 2008.
Another factor: Congress last increased the maximum amount undergraduates could borrow from the government in 2008. Some economists have concluded schools raise prices along with increases in federal financial aid. A clampdown on aid, in turn, could limit the ability of schools to charge more.
Meanwhile, as anyone who has ever invested in commodity markets is undoubtedly aware, supply/demand gaps tend to normalize over the long-term. And, with college"s extracting massive price increases year after year, it should be little surprise that the number of colleges looking to get in on the action also soared.
Abundant supply is running up against demand constraints. The number of two-year and four-year colleges increased 33% between 1990 and 2012 to 4,726, Education Department data show. But college enrollment is down more than 4% from a peak in 2010, partly because a healthy job market means fewer people are going back to school to learn new skills.
Some of these trends may persist. The number of high-school graduates is projected to remain flat through 2023, according to an analysis by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. White graduates, the most likely among races to attend college, are expected to decline over this period.
“The competition is bigger now than it has been, and I think we have more informed consumers,” said Sarah Kottich, chief financial officer at College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Neb.
Of course, it could also be that students and their parents are finally realizing that that silly little piece of paper passed out at graduation ceremonies every year may not be worth as much as it used to be.
For now, the shakeout is hitting private schools hardest. For-profit trade schools and many private nonprofit colleges are under pressure to justify high prices, particularly because some graduates are failing to land high-paying jobs. The broad decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2010 has been concentrated mostly among small nonprofit colleges, for-profit trade schools and public community colleges, federal data show.
Izzi Moraschi, 19 years old, said she chose Rosemont College, a small private college near Philadelphia, after seeing a flier advertising a sharp tuition reduction. She wanted to reduce the burden on her parents.
Combined, she and her parents took out $15,800 in federal loans to cover her first year’s tuition. “It was just really important for me that I was able to make it so that my parents wouldn’t have to pay anything out of pocket,” said Ms. Moraschi, now a sophomore, who said she plans to pay back her parents’ portion of the loan.
Sharon Hirsh, Rosemont’s president, said her school reduced tuition to ease concerns of middle-income students, who seem more willing to choose public schools to save money.
“We are surrounded by private institutions that are openly talking about right-sizing,” Ms. Hirsh said. “Families have gotten to a point where they cannot consider a private institution with a high price.”
And, since we doubt anyone will go through the hassle of actually running the math, we decided to take a quick look at the return on invested capital of a college education.
First, according to Quora.com, attending college these days can cost anywhere from $22,500 per year for a public, in-state university to $75,000 for a private education. So, lets just assume that, on average, our snowflakes are spending $30,000 per year on a 4-year bachelor, or $120,000.
- Attend a public in-state university for four years, living on campus ($22,500 per year for four years) for $90,000
- Attend a public out-of-state college for four years: $35,000 per year for four years for a total of $140,000
- Attend a private four year college in an expensive area like Manhattan at $75,000 per year for a total of $300,000
So what do they get for that? Well, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that $120,000 degree in Anthropology will earn you roughly $464 extra dollars per week or ~$24,000 per year.
So, doing some quick math, we find that $24,000 tax-effected at a 25% tax rate equals about $18,000 of extra annual earnings for a college grad and implies a 15% return on invested capital.
Not bad...but, unfortunately, the story doesn"t end there. You see, by choosing the college route our snowflakes not only incur the cost of college, in the form of massive student loans, but also forgo 4 years of earnings, which equates to roughly $110,000 ($692*52*.75) on a tax-effected basis.
So lumping in that opportunity cost brings the true average cost of that Anthro degree up closer to $250,000, implying a roughly 7.2% ROIC.
Of course, that"s assuming that young Tripp Hollingsworth III actually graduates in 4 years and then promptly finds a job shortly thereafter rather than returning to mom"s basement.
So you decide, is a 7.2% return on invested capital sufficient to take on a life time of debt?
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Whenever you let federal bureaucrats get their hands on anything they are probably going to ruin it. During the Obama administration, the Department of Education spearheaded a transformation of American education that was absolutely breathtaking. Over a period of about five years, Common Core standards were implemented in almost every state in the entire nation. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a huge step backward for public education in this country. Common Core has been called “state-sponsored child abuse”, and it is a big reason why U.S. students are scoring so poorly on standardized tests compared to much of the rest of the world.
According to Wikipedia, at one point 46 states had adopted Common Core, but now some states are having second thoughts…
46 states initially adopted the Common Core State Standards, although implementation has not been uniform. At least 12 states have introduced legislation to repeal the standards outright,[1] and Indiana has since withdrawn from the standards.
Sadly, many parents don’t even understand how dramatically our system of education has been tampered with. In her book entitled The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids, Joy Pullmann exposes how the Gates Foundation has been one of the key players in the effort to get Common Core introduced into classrooms all over America…
Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach … not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature … but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.
But this isn’t just an issue about control. The truth is that the approach to teaching basic fundamentals such as how to add and how to subtract is fundamentally different under Common Core.
Let me share just three examples that show how much Common Core is changing the way that U.S. students learn math. All of these examples have been floating around Facebook, and if you have never seen these before they are likely to make you quite angry.
If I asked you to subtract 12 from 32, how would you do it? Well, the “new way” is much, much more complicated than how we were all taught to do it…
If that first one seemed bizarre to you, than you really aren’t going to like this one…
And this last one was so confusing that a parent with a degree in engineering decided to include his own commentary on his child’s homework…
How are kids supposed to function in the real world if this is how they are learning to do basic math?
Personally, I am going to teach my daughter that 9 + 6 equals 15. But that isn’t how it is supposed to be done under Common Core. You can watch a video of a teacher explaining the very convoluted Common Core way to solve that math equation right here.
And of course it isn’t just math that is the problem. Common Core is systematically “dumbing down” our young people, and that may help to explain why the average U.S. college freshman now reads at a seventh grade level.
So what is the answer?
The first step in fixing our education system is to repeal Common Core. But even in red states such as Idaho there is a lot of resistance…
Since their inception, the Idaho Core Standards have been enmeshed in controversy.
Some legislators and citizens have pushed for a repeal of the Idaho Core Standards, the state’s version of Common Core standards in math and English language arts. Those repeal efforts have gone nowhere in the Legislature.
I don’t know what is wrong with our legislators. The Republicans have full control in this state, and so there is absolutely no excuse for not getting something done.
As I end this article, I want to give you an idea of just how far the quality of education in America has fallen over the past 100 years. In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 made a lot of headlines when it was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. As you can see, it is doubtful whether many of our college students would be able to pass such an exam today…
On Thursday morning the CBO released a surprisingly upbeat assessment of Donald Trump"s proposed budget, calculating that it would cut the cumulative US deficit by 30% over the next decade, preventing the US debt from spiraling out of control (even further).
That however. may be an overly optimistic assessment, especially following the release of the latest monthly budget data, which showed that not only did the US deficit surge to $90 billion, far above the $38 billion consensus estimate, and a "NM" compared to the $6.3 billion budget surplus in June of last year, but the US also saw the biggest one month outlay on record, at $429 billion, 33% higher than the $323 billion in outlays one years ago.
What prompted this massive surge in outlays?
The biggest reason for the outlier print is that according to Stone McCarthy, outlays increased by roughly $60 billion in "other" items relative to baseline because the Treasury revised up its estimates of the subsidy cost of student loans, and to a lesser extent housing, it guarantees.
Here is the CBO explanation:
Outlays for the Department of Education rose by $31 billion (or 51 percent), because the department revised upward, by roughly $39 billion, the estimated net subsidy costs of loans and loan guarantees issued in prior years—a change much larger than last year’s $7 billion upward revision. If the effects of those revisions were excluded, outlays for the department for the first nine months of fiscal year 2017 would have fallen by $2 billion (or 3 percent).
Outlays for the Department of Housing and Urban Development rose by $29 billion, primarily because the department made upward revisions in June 2017, but downward revisions in April 2016, to the estimated net subsidy costs of loans and loan guarantees issued in prior years.
The cost of those loans is treated in the budget on a present value basis, not a cash basis and the Treasury periodically revises these costs. (It should be noted that the associated increase in outlays doesn"t impact Treasury borrowing or debt under the debt limit.) If not for these special factors, Treasury would have reported another small surplus for June... however it did not.
On the revenue side, things were just as bad with the US Treasury collecting only $338.7BN, just 9% higher than the $330BN in June of 2016.
What makes the surge in the deficit especially surprising is that June is often a surplus month, as the Treasury receives large corporate and non-withheld individual tax payments in that month.
One theory explaining the shortfall in revenues reflects taxpayers delaying the recognition of income in 2016, anticipating tax cuts this year. That revenue should eventually be recovered. About a third of the revision was on the outlay size, with a large chunk due to changes in the estimated subsidy costs described above. Based on the CBO revisions, it appears that the deficit for the fiscal year, which has three months left, will be in the $650 billion to $700 billion range, if not even higher, mostly due to the surge in "subsidy costs of housing and student loans" guaranteed by the Treasury.
Combining these two means that YTD, the deficit jumped to $523.1BN vs $399.2BN last year.
While many analysts had a deficit base case for fiscal 2017 at roughly
$575BN (the year ends on Sept 30), the CBO recently revised its
projection for the fiscal 2017 up by $134 billion to $693 billion. Most of the CBO revision reflects weaker than expected revenues, which means it will be even more surprised when it finds out what is going on with outlays.
To summarize: what the unexpected surge in government spending means is that quietly and mostly behind the scenes, the student debt bubble has begun to burst, and the Treasury is "provisioning" for it in real time, with all US taxpayers once again on the hook.
Finally, since the $1.4 trillion and rising student debt bubble is expected to end up with discharges of 35% if not higher, it means that over the next several years, the budget deficit will be incrementally boosted by approximately $500 billion as America"s taxpayers are once again taken to the cleaners, this time to bail out millions of liberal arts majors who for one reason or another just can"t pay back their student loans.
h/t @SMRA
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
One thing that almost everyone can agree upon is that our system of public education is broken. We spend far more money on public education than anyone else in the world, and yet the results are depressing to say the least.
Considering how much we are putting into education, we should be producing the best students on the entire planet, but it just isn’t happening. Personally, I attended public schools from kindergarten all the way up through law school, and the quality of education that I received was extremely poor. Even on the collegiate level, most of the courses were so “dumbed down” that even the family dog could have passed them. And of course millions of other people all over the country would say the same sorts of things about their own educations. Many refer to what is happening to our society as “the dumbing down of America”, and if we don’t get things fixed the United States is on course to become a second class nation.
If you believe that I am exaggerating, I would like you to consider the following numbers. The following are 14 facts that prove that America’s absolutely pathetic system of education deserves an “F” grade…
#1 Somewhere around 50 million students attend public schools in America today.
#2 Education is the most expensive item in 41 different state budgets.
#3 The latest PISA tests show that U.S. students are below average compared to the rest of the industrialized world…
One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.
#4 A report from the Educational Testing Service found that American Millennials are way behind Millennials in most other industrialized nations…
Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.
#5 According to one very disturbing study, fewer than half of all high school graduates “are able to proficiently read or complete math problems”.
#6 According to U.S. News & World Report, “inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent.”
#7 In 2015, the percentage of students in our public schools coming from low income homes crossed the 50 percent mark. That was the first time that had happened in at least 50 years.
#8 One study found that a whopping 76 percent of all high school graduates “were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.”
#9 The following are five numbers which show how far the quality of college education has fallen in the United States…
#10 Just 36 percent of all full-time college students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years, and just 77 percent of all full-time college students have earned a bachelor’s degree by the end of six years.
#11 One survey found that nearly 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…
#12 Another survey found that 29 percent of all U.S. adults cannot name the Vice-President.
#13 And yet another survey found that only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between the years of 1850 and 1900.
#14 Perhaps worst of all, 75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East.
This is what happens when we put federal bureaucrats in charge of education.
All over the country there are calls to abolish the Department of Education. For example, the following was published on CNBC…
The DOE currently employs 5,000 government workers and has an annual budget of $73 billion, yet according to the CATO Institute, it has not affected student outcomes in any demonstrable way over its 40-year history . It has successfully created a system that requires educators to teach reams of “politically-correct” content and focus on scoring well on standardized tests.
It has created an atmosphere of testing in our schools, putting intense pressure on teachers and students to “ace the test” rather than mastering the material. This promotes a culture of teaching to the test and score tampering.
Unfortunately, abolishing the Department of Education is not going to be easy, because there is a tremendous amount of money at stake. And whenever there is a tremendous amount of money at stake, there are going to be very powerful interests that are determined to keep things just the way that they are…
The major stakeholders in K-12 public education are at an impasse. Teachers’ Unions are primarily concerned with self-preservation, maintaining extravagant perks for union administrators and exerting disproportionate political influence. A handful of publishing houses sell us $8 billion worth of warmed- over text books every year. Testing companies collectively spent tens of millions lobbying in states and on Capitol Hill from 2009 to 2014. These politically powerful, entrenched special interests are heavily invested in maintaining the failing status quo.
But even though there is going to be a lot of resistance, I am going to try to abolish the Department of Education anyway. I believe that full control over education should be returned to the state and local levels, but that is just the beginning.
Ultimately, we need to rebuild our system of education from the ground up. Instead of politically-correct indoctrination centers that endlessly pump progressive propaganda into impressionable young minds, we need to transform our public schools into institutions that focus on the essentials. We need a renewed emphasis on reading, writing, math and the skills that will enable our young people to function successfully once they get out into the real world.
At one time America’s system of education was the best in the world, and we can get there again. But of course the left is going to fight against the changes that need to be made every step of the way.
A few months ago we noted that 31% of college students in the U.S., or roughly 2.4 million kids, literally admitted to using student loan money to fund their binge drinking trips to Cancun and Daytona Beach for spring break. Now, while most of us who"ve had the opportunity to live in the real world, outside the comfort of mom and dad"s basement, would consider it a bad idea to borrow 10-20 year debt to take a vacation we couldn"t afford, many college students seem to think it"s a perfectly acceptable practice.
Now, to be clear, we have no problem with making bad decisions, sometimes those are the most fun (see pic below for evidence). We only ask that the people who make the bad decisions are also the same people who get to deal with the consequences of those bad decisions.
Unfortunately, in the Obama administration the lines between victim and perpetrator were often blurred to be point of being interchangeable. So, while we may say that a college student who borrows money to binge drink is a moron (best case) or a criminal guilty of loan fraud (worst case), Obama would describe that same person as a victim of predatory student lending practices who had no idea that his/her 2.1 GPA in Anthropology from the University of Phoenix wouldn"t automatically guarantee him/her to a "career" making $200,000 a year immediately upon completion of their 7-year Bachelor of Art degree....call it a po-tay-to, po-tah-to sort of conundrum.
Of course, faced with such a conundrum, the Obama administration did what any self-respecting liberal politician would do: it drafted new, confusing regulations to punish for-profit schools and basically made taxpayers backstop the ill-informed financial decisions of their students. The Washington Post described the resulting regulations as follows:
Under the borrower defense rules, students could have their loans erased if their college misrepresented the quality of its programs or broke a “contractual promise” with its students. The gainful employment rule was designed to ensure that graduates would be able to earn enough money to pay off their student loan debt.
The Obama administration had led a crackdown on for-profit colleges accused of misconduct. The Corinthian Colleges chain was under heavy pressure from the Education Department when it shut down in 2015. In that case, more than 15,000 student claims for loan discharge because of fraud have been approved, totaling $247 million in loans.
Last year, the ITT Technical Institute, one of the nation’s largest chains of for-profit colleges, shut down, saying it couldn’t survive sanctions by the department. The chain had been accused of misleading students about the success of its graduates and was at risk of losing its academic accreditation.
But, apparently the Trump administration isn"t susceptible to the same visual impairment when it comes to deciphering between "victims" and adult-aged students capable of making logical financial decisions, should they so choose. So they"re tossing out the Obama rules and writing new ones...
The Education Department announced Wednesday that it will change two key Obama-era rules governing student loan forgiveness in cases involving fraud and misconduct by universities.
The department said it will convene special committees to rewrite Borrower Defense to Repayment and Gainful Employment regulations.
DeVos said in a statement Wednesday that the regulations were “overly burdensome and confusing” and need to be streamlined.
“The result is a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools, and puts taxpayers on the hook for significant costs,” DeVos said.
She said many colleges have complained that the definition of misrepresentation and breach of contract is too broad and that institutions lacked meaningful due process. The Education Department will conduct hearings on the regulations in July.
“It is the department’s aim, and this administration’s commitment, to protect students from predatory practices while also providing clear, fair and balanced rules for colleges and universities to follow,” DeVos said.
...which has left some Attorneys General in snowflake states severely "triggered."
Eight states and the District of Columbia filed a motion in federal court Tuesday seeking to retain the rules.
“The borrower defense regulations provide critical protections for borrowers who were subjected to misleading and predatory practices by their postsecondary institutions,” the motion says. It was filed in the case California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools v. Betsy DeVos.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey added that she plans to sue the Education Department “to defend these critical regulations and the rights of our students and taxpayers.”
“This is a betrayal of students and families across the country who are drowning in unaffordable debt,” Healey said in a statement.
Sorry snowflakes, you may have to repay for those Cancun trips all by yourselves...and, no, "I do not recall" the trip is not a valid excuse whether it"s true or not...that only works for Hillary and email scandals.
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
What would America look like today if the dream of our Founding Fathers of a limited central government had actually been realized? We have become so accustomed to big government that many of us simply assume that this is the only way that things can be done. But the truth is that things don’t have to be this way. We can have the kind of very limited federal government that our forefathers originally intended, but it is going to take a great deal of education and an enormous amount of political engagement in order to get there. On this Memorial Day, we will remember those that have died for our country, but let it also be a call to action. In every generation, Americans have had to stand up to defend the cause of liberty and freedom, and it will be no different in our generation. Just like during the Revolutionary War, there is no guarantee that we will be able to save America from the forces that are trying to destroy it, but if we sit back and do nothing they will win by default.
Just because there is no war to fight does not mean that the threat that we are facing is any less serious than what other generations of Americans have had to face. Over the last several decades, the U.S. Constitution has essentially been shredded, and at this point our republic is basically hanging by a thread. If we surrender to the left in this generation, the country that our forefathers envisioned may be gone for good.
Today I would like to share with you an excerpt from my upcoming book. It will be released about halfway through 2017, and when it is out you will be able to find it on my author page. As you will see, limited government is something that I am quite passionate about…
* * *
“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” (George Washington)
Big government tends to suck the life out of everything. If you doubt this, just look around the globe. In nations where a central government dominates every aspect of society, the people seem quite lifeless. Of course an extreme example of this is North Korea. Their entire culture is centered around a philosophy known as “Juche”, and in this philosophy the “leader” essentially becomes an object of worship. Literally everything in North Korea revolves around the state and the “leader”, and as a result most of the population resembles a horde of mindless zombies.
On the other hand, the most dynamic societies throughout human history have always been the ones where people have had a tremendous amount of freedom to express their passions and creativity. There is a reason why we saw an unprecedented explosion of remarkable inventions in early America, and there is a reason why so many millions of immigrants have risked their lives to get here. Liberty has always been such a rare commodity in our world, and almost all governments eventually become tyrannical. That is why it is so imperative that we defend the liberty that we still have in this nation.
Our Founding Fathers envisioned a country where freedom and liberty would be maximized. Of course there always must be some sort of government, because otherwise you would have total anarchy. We want potential thieves and murderers to be frightened of the power of the law, and we are thankful for those that protect us from them. But way too often it is government that becomes the greatest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that is the sort of tyranny that we desperately wish to avoid.
Today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of statutes, rules and regulations on the federal level, and when you throw in the state and local levels you get a total that is in the millions. Virtually every aspect of our lives is very tightly regulated and controlled these days, and this has been going on for so long that most people have begun to accept it as normal.
But the way our society works today is definitely not “normal”. Let me share with you an example from the state of California that makes my blood boil. If you can believe it, government officials actually fined one farmer 2.8 million dollars for plowing his own field…
The California farmer who became the poster child for EPA reform under President Donald Trump is being fined $2.8 million by state and federal regulators for plowing his own field in Tehama County.
According to a story in the Redding Record Searchlight:
“The case is the first time that we’re aware of that says you need to get a (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) permit to plow to grow crops,” said Anthony Francois, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation.
“We’re not going to produce much food under those kinds of regulations,” he said.
However, U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller agreed with the Army Corps in a judgment issued in June 2016. A penalty trial, in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office asks for $2.8 million in civil penalties, is set for August.
In early America, they would have howled with laughter if someone would have suggested that farmers should be required to get permission from the government in order to plow a field and grow food.
This is just one example that shows why I am proposing that the Environmental Protection Agency should be completely shut down. I am very much in favor of protecting the environment, but I believe that the citizens of each state should decide how their own natural resources are managed.
And at this point it has become exceedingly clear that the EPA is wildly out of control. Prior to the Trump administration, the EPA had been operating under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama for 16 of the previous 24 years, and it is absolutely packed with radical leftists that are obsessed with promoting their own political agendas. Instead of trying to fire everyone, the easiest thing would be to just end the agency and start completely over.
If you are not with me yet, perhaps another outrageous example will persuade you. The following comes from Fox News…
A Wyoming man threatened with $16 million in fines over the building of a stock pond reached a settlement with the Environment Protection Agency, allowing him to keep the pond without a federal permit or hefty fine.
Andy Johnson, of Fort Bridger, Wyoming obtained a state permit before building the stock pond in 2012 on his sprawling nine-acre farm for a small herd of livestock.
Not long after contruction, the EPA threatened Johnson with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $37,500-a-day fine — claiming he needed the agency’s permission before building the 40-by-300 foot pond, which is filled by a natural stream.
Could you imagine being threatened with 16 million dollars in fines for constructing a pond on your own property?
This isn’t how America is supposed to operate.
I really don’t understand how we can still claim to be “the land of the free” when we allow leftist control freaks to dominate our lives down to the minutest detail.
The left always wants government to become bigger and bigger and to get more and more control. They want a government that is going to guide them safely through life and that will give them everything that they need. But every time government grows, liberty and freedom are diminished.
Yes, liberty and freedom can be dangerous and messy sometimes. But living free sure beats being told what to do every single moment of every single day.
One of the things that greatly troubles me is that progressives almost completely dominate our system of public education. Our public schools have now become liberal indoctrination centers, and survey after survey has shown that each successive generation has moved to the left compared to the preceding generation.
That is why it is so imperative that we end federal interference in education and return control of our schools back to the local level. I would shut down the Department of Education and I would cut off every penny of funding for Common Core.
Even though we spend far more on education than anyone else in the world, we are producing absolutely disastrous results. The following comes from a CBS News report…
Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency.
Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers.
That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-millennials-well-educated-but-unskilled/)
Our public schools are failing badly, and we need to get them fixed. But we also need to greatly support parents that are pursuing other educational avenues such as homeschooling and private schools. At this point I completely understand why any parent would want to keep their kids out of our horrific public schools, and ultimately our entire system of education needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.
Big government sucks the life out of the economy as well. Over the past ten years, the U.S. economy has grown at an average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent, and the only other era in U.S. history when economic growth was so bad was during the 1930s.
The business community is being absolutely strangled by rules, regulations, red tape and excessive taxes, but the Democrats always want to pile on more. Big corporations can hire lots of people to comply with all of the demands that government places on them, but small businesses and entrepreneurs are rapidly becoming an endangered species.
Today, there are less Americans that are self-employed than there were 27 years ago. In April 1990, 8.7 million Americans worked for themselves, but in April 2017 only 8.4 million Americans were working for themselves.
That may not sound that bad until you realize how much our population grew over that time frame. In 1990, the population of the United States was 249 million, but today the population is 321 million.
So the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has gone way, way down.
The solution is to get the government off of our backs. The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was between the Civil War and 1913. During this era there was no income tax, no IRS and no Federal Reserve. Many on the left would consider that to be a recipe for disaster, but instead there was an explosion of innovation and industry that was absolutely unprecedented. The following is how Wikipedia describes the economic conditions during this period of time…
In the last third of the 19th century the United States entered a phase of rapid economic growth which doubled per capita income over the period. By 1895, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.[175] For the first time, exports of machinery and consumer goods became important. For example, Standard Oil led the way in exporting kerosene; Russia was its main rival in international trade.[176]Singer Corporation led the way in developing a global marketing strategy for its sewing machines.[177]
The greatly expanded railroad network, using inexpensive steel rails produced by new steel making processes, dramatically lowered transportation cost to areas without access to navigable waterways. Low freight rates allowed large manufacturing facilities with great economies of scale. Machinery became a large industry and many types of machines were developed. Businesses were able to operate over wide areas and chain stores arose. Mail order companies started operating.[119]Rural Free Delivery began being implemented in the early 1890s, but it was not widely implemented for a decade.[178]
Companies created a new management systems to carry out their operations on a large scale. Companies integrated processes to eliminate unnecessary steps and to eliminate middlemen.[119]
An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the Second Industrial Revolution. The electric light, telephone, steam turbine, internal combustion engine, automobile, phonograph, typewriter and tabulating machine were some of the many inventions of the period. New processes for making steel and chemicals such as dyes and explosives were invented. The pneumatic tire, improved ball bearings, machine tools and newly developed metal stamping techniques enabled the large scale production of bicycles in the 1890s. Another significant development was the widespread introduction of electric street railways (trams, trolleys or streetcars) in the 1890s.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_States#Late_19th_century)
But the progressives couldn’t leave a good thing alone, and in 1913 the Federal Reserve was established and a federal income tax was instituted.
Since that time there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions, and now we are entering another one.
We are always asking our politicians to “fix the economy”, but the truth is that the best thing that they can do is to get out of the way.
If you take the shackles off, free enterprise works exceptionally well.
Those that follow my work on a regular basis already know that I believe that the Federal Reserve should be shut down, that the IRS should be phased out, and that the federal income tax should be reduced as much as possible with the eventual goal of eliminating it completely.
It has been said that nothing is inevitable except for death and taxes, but there is nothing that says that we must have an income tax.
We have had an income tax for so long that most people could not imagine life without one. But the United States absolutely thrived without one during the decades prior to 1913, and today states such as Texas and Florida are doing quite nicely without a state income tax.
There are lots of other ways to fund the government that do not involve an income tax. And actually only 46.2 percent of all federal revenue is brought in through taxing individual incomes. If we cut the size of government in half, we might even have some money to spare.
Of course considering the fact that we are 20 trillion dollars in debt, the truth is that we don’t have a single penny to spare, but I think that you get my point.
I just hope that you are able to see that life is generally better when government is reduced to the proper size and scope.
We should be able to say what we want to say without fear of retribution.
We should be able to live out our convictions and worship as we please.
We should be able to protect our own homes and do what we want with our own property.
We should be able to raise our own children and make our own health decisions.
We should be able to be free from the fear that the government is watching, tracking and monitoring all of our electronic communications.
In every human heart there is a hunger to live free, and big government is the enemy of freedom.
The dreams that our forefathers once had for this nation may have faded, but they aren’t dead just yet.
A new generation of patriots is rising, and we are determined to take our country back.
Your government at work with your tax dollars.
Loan billions to brain dead teenagers so they can pretend to get smart in college. When they fail miserably due to the fact after twelve years of public school government indoctrination they can’t read, write or add, the government pays slimy collection agencies to get these unemployed dolts to pay up.
Not only has $600 billion of your tax dollars been pissed down the drain on loans to dumbasses, you now get to spend billions trying to collect the billions that will never be collected.
Clusterfuck is too kind of a word to use for this program Obama initiated to pump money into the economy and fake the true unemployment rate.
I bet you can’t wait until the government has full control of your healthcare.
While Congress originally approved the IDR plans in the 1990s and 2000s, Obama used executive actions, starting in 2010, to extend the most-generous terms to millions of borrowers which is precisely when loan volumes under the program started to skyrocket.
Congrats, taxpayers...you"ll soon have the privilege of repaying $137 billion worth of debt spent by entitled millennials on binge-drinking trips Cancun and drugs...life, after all, is just a little bit better when we spread the wealth around...
As Bloomberg"s Shahien Nasiripour reports, the federal government has, in recent years, paid debt collectors close to $1 billion annually to help distressed borrowers climb out of default and scrounge up regular monthly payments. New government figures suggest much of that money may have been wasted.
Nearly half of defaulted student-loan borrowers who worked with debt collectors to return to good standing on their loans defaulted again within three years, according to an analysis by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For their work, debt collectors receive up to $1,710 in payment from the U.S. Department of Education each time a borrower makes good on soured debt through a process known as rehabilitation. They keep those funds even if borrowers subsequently default again, contracts show. The department has earmarked more than $4.2 billion for payments to its debt collectors since the start of the 2013 fiscal year, federal spending data show.
The findings, gleaned from the bureau’s analysis of about 600,000 borrower accounts, come as the Trump administration weighs a shakeup of the government’s student loan program. For years, defaults have mounted despite the improving U.S. economy and the money invested in collecting education debt. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pledged earlier this year to “do a better job” than the Obama administration at managing the department’s loan contractors. Last week, DeVos suggested that the feds should “start afresh.”
Officials at the CFPB say the government should reexamine whether the loan program, and the lucrative contracts it bestows on private firms, is working for the millions of Americans struggling to repay their taxpayer-backed student debt.
“When student loan companies know that nearly half of their highest-risk customers will quickly fail, it’s time to fix the broken system that makes this possible,” said Seth Frotman, the consumer bureau’s top student-loan official.
Debt collectors aggressively angle for new business from the Education Department because the contracts are among the most lucrative in the industry. The government values the latest round at $2.8 billion.
The government often pays debt collectors nearly 40 times what they bring in, federal records show. Take the government’s rehabilitation program, which targets people who have defaulted on their debt—meaning they missed nine months of payments. If a borrower subsequently makes nine on-time monthly payments of as little as $5 during a 10-month period, their loans are returned to good standing and the default is supposed to be wiped from their credit reports. But the CFPB found that more than 40 percent of these borrowers defaulted again within three years.
Even when borrowers don’t default, debt collection efforts often yield little. Close to 80 percent of borrowers who rehabilitate their debt make the minimum $5 monthly payment, according to a 2015 estimate by the National Council of Higher Education Resources, a lobbying group that represents student debt collectors and servicers. That means the Education Department is paying its debt collectors up to $1,710 per borrower to collect around $45, regardless of whether the borrower continues to make her payments.
The arrangement means that debt collectors “have no ‘skin in the game,’” Frotman wrote in an October report.
The consumer bureau estimates that the vast majority of borrowers who rehabilitate their defaulted debt with $5 monthly payments are eligible for $0 payments after they exit default, under an income-based repayment plan. But about 90 percent of debtors who rehabilitated their debt failed to enroll in these programs, according to the CFPB’s analysis. All that’s needed to enroll is some paperwork that enables contracted loan servicers to confirm borrowers’ annual earnings, but experts inside and outside the government say they don’t know why this step isn’t completed, and distressed borrowers are left stuck in debt collectors’ sights. The Education Department, which rewards its loan servicers with more business if the loans they service remain in good standing, excludes rehabilitated loans when grading its servicers’ performance.
The consumer bureau says slipshod loan servicing—the business of counseling borrowers on their options and sending them monthly bills—is largely to blame. NCHER President James Bergeron said the feds need to simplify the various repayment plans they offer and “do a better job” helping previously defaulted borrowers get into repayment plans. Calls and emails to the Education Department weren’t returned.
“I don’t see how anyone wins from this system other than the collection industry,” said Adam S. Minsky, a Boston-based lawyer who represents student debtors.
