I don’t always agree with Peggy Noonan, but she makes a good point about why voter turnout and cable news ratings are down in this election year:

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t (sic) solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it. So let’s check out. Let’s watch the game.

As Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch point out in The Declaration of Independents, businesses that treat their customers as badly as the Republican and Democratic parties treat theirs tend to go out of business. This may be exactly what we’re seeing.

The $26 billion mortgage settlement announced yesterday is bad news for “bond investors including pension funds, according to Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Scott Simon,” notes Bloomberg News.  He says that the settlement rips off innocent investors and pension funds in order to reduce the banks’ costs of bailing out delinquent mortgage borrowers and others.  (As we noted earlier, the Justice Department, state attorneys general, and the biggest banks reached an agreement to provide $26 billion to delinquent mortgage borrowers and others, such as left-wing housing counseling similar to ACORN — in what the New York Post calls a “deadbeat bailout”).  As Simon notes,

“They’re using other people’s money to pay for a ton of this. Pension funds, 401(k)s and mutual funds are going to pick up a lot of the load.”

Asset managers are frustrated with the deal because, in addition to the debt the banks own, it gives credit to the lenders for changes to loans they hold no interest in and oversee for investors. That “treats people’s 401(k)s and pensions,” which hold mortgage securities, “like perpetrators as opposed to victims,” Simon said. The deal comes after all 50 states announced a probe into foreclosures in 2010 . . . costing bondholders as liquidations of bad debt were delayed.

“Think about this, you tell your kid, ‘You did something bad, I’m going to fine you $10, but if you can steal $22 from your mom, you can pay me with that,’ ” Simon said yesterday. . .

Laurie Goodman . . . who has advocated for mortgage forgiveness in testimony to Congress, joined him in criticizing the agreement yesterday. . .“There is a difference between principal reductions and giving banks credit for spending others’ people money.”

As we noted earlier, by ripping off mortgage investors, this deal will make investing in mortgages more risky, which will in turn drive up interest rates that homebuyers have to pay in the future.  This deal only covers borrowers at certain banks, not those borrowers who mortgages are held by the government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which (unlike the private banks) have never repaid their bailout, and are currently still being bailed out at an ever-increasing tab of $170 billion.

This deal is not the only way that federal and state officials are messing up the housing market.  The Obama administration is forcing banks to make risky loans (in the name of “fair lending”), thus planting the seeds of a future financial crisis. The Justice Department is suing banks that refuse to do so, and forcing them both to award preferential loans based on race, and to cough up money in “settlements,” some of which goes to left-wing “community” groups.

The Obama administration recently launched a multibillion dollar bailout for speculators. Bloomberg News reported that the administration is vastly expanding aid for certain “delinquent homeowners,” paying banks up to 63 cents for every dollar in principal they write off for such homeowners.  Speculators will benefit, because bailout recipients don’t even have to live in a house to get its mortgage principal reduced at taxpayer expense.

“It launched a hundred ‘anti-bullying’ initiatives at all levels of government, but much of what you think you know about” the Tyler Clementi case “is probably wrong,” notes legal commentator Walter Olson at Overlawyered, the world’s oldest law blog. Andrew Sullivan discusses this as well, linking to Ian Parker’s article in The New Yorker.

We wrote earlier about how the current panic over bullying is leading to attacks on free speech, political debate, and free association in the schools; political pandering; dishonest stretching of existing federal laws by federal officials; and violations of basic principles of federalism.

Reason’s Jacob Sullum writes about New Jersey’s massively-long “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights,” enacted after Clementi’s suicide at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, and how it infringes on free speech and imposes illegal unfunded mandates. When New Jersey passed this incredibly complicated anti-bullying law, which contains 18 pages of “required components,” that gave a huge boost to a burgeoning “anti-bullying” industry that seeks to define bullying as broadly as possible (to include things like “eye-rolling,” or always associating with the same group of friends) in order to create demand for its services. Hundreds of New Jersey schools “snapped up a $1,295 package put together by a consulting firm that includes a 100-page manual.”

Rod Dreher sees a lesson from the Clementi case about jumping to conclusions:

I too thought that Clementi had been outed after Ravi filmed him having sex. As Parker shows, Clementi was not closeted, and he wasn’t filmed having sex. And yes, Dharun Ravi [who is being prosecuted for hate crimes over the filming that allegedly caused Clementi's suicide] is an ass. But he is not facing criminal trial for being an ass. This is what moral panic does. . .It is hard for me to be fair [to the defendant] in these particular cases, but it is necessary to fight against my own instincts in this case and in every case. You too.

The Obama administration’s StopBullying.gov website defines bullying incredibly broadly in ways that conflict with freedom of speech and common sense. It defines “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.” Since “creating web sites” that “make fun of others” also is deemed “cyberbullying,” conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors like UCLA’s Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)

Anti-bullying regulations can backfire and have bad consequences for child development. As a school official noted after passage of New Jersey’s sweeping anti-bullying law, “The anti-bullying law also may not be appropriate for our youngest students, such as kindergartners who are just learning how to socialize with their peers. Previously, name-calling or shoving on the playground could be handled on the spot as a teachable moment, with the teacher reinforcing the appropriate behavior. That’s no longer the case. Now it has to be documented, reviewed and resolved by everyone from the teacher to the anti-bullying specialist, principal, superintendent and local board of education.”

Even reporters at the famously-liberal Los Angeles Times have soured on California’s $100 billion-plus rail boondoggle, whose cost will far outstrip whatever the state will get from the $800 billion stimulus package to build it.  But the paper’s editorial board, which supported the stimulus package, continues to back the project, which has ballooned in cost from $33 billion to over $100 billion.  (Managing to see the bright side of even the most pernicious government waste, the paper’s board cited other boondoggles with approval, like Boston’s disastrous Big Dig project, which resulted in motorist fatalities. It praised that infamous project for replacing “what used to be an expressway” with “a downtown park”, despite the fact that it caused “severe delays” for motorists and had a skyrocketing price tag of more than $15 billion.)

But as its own reporter, Steve Lopez, recently noted, there is no telling how much the project will ultimately cost, or when it will actually be completed:

The projected completion date has gone from 2020 to 2033. The anticipated cost has ballooned to as high as $117 billion, and no one seems to have a clue where the bulk of the money would come from. The state auditor and the state Legislative Analyst’s Office have raised serious concerns, and the rail authority’s own peer review group said the project represents “an immense financial risk” to the state. And two weeks ago, the railroad authority’s top executive resigned.To top it off, a poll last fall said nearly two-thirds of registered voters would run this train off the rails if they had a chance to vote again.

The rail project won’t even be useful or economically viable once it’s finished, since travelers will be able to travel more cheaply by road or air than by taking the train.  As syndicated columnist Amy Alkon notes, “this is a totally unnecessary train (and I say that as a train lover). It’s $59 from LA to SF on Southwest if you book in advance,” less than a train ticket will likely cost.  And although the project is misleadingly called a “high-speed” rail project, it turns out that “the train couldn’t really run high speed” after all.

As Tim Cavanaugh noted in Reason, the Los Angeles Times reporter, Steve Lopez, had

the good fortune to answer to the newsroom rather the opinion section, where bullet-train belief still reigns as supremely as it does in Gov. Jerry Brown’s rumpus room. The important thing is that one more prominent Golden State blowhard is sealing the case against the vacant and bankrupt high-speed rail project. . . . In a piece I missed earlier this month entitled “Keeping faith with California’s bullet train,” the ed board praised the High-Speed Rail project because it is similar to Boston’s notorious Big Dig and the building of the pyramids by slaves.

The Obama Administration still supports this boondoggle even though it has been criticized by other liberal newspapers like the Washington Post.  That paper, which has not endorsed a Republican for President since 1952, criticized the project in an editorial entitled “California’s High-Speed Rail System Is Going Nowhere Fast.”

As we noted earlier, the small fraction of the stimulus package that was earmarked for transportation was devoted disproportionately to laying the groundwork for wasteful “high-speed” rail boondoggles that are not actually “high” in speed. These multibillion dollar rail boondoogles would provide work at inflated wages for politically-powerful unions. But these projects are expensive white elephants that would be used by very few travelers at an enormous cost per mile, and not enable trains to go anywhere near as fast as they do in Europe, Japan, or China. (Other union-backed provisions in the stimulus package wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)

Obama relied on exaggerated claims to push through the stimulus package, claiming it was needed to prevent an “irreversible decline” in the economy,  even though the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” Even an old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus might have been something that America could not afford at a time of record deficits. The Congressional Budget Office, ignoring various flaws in the stimulus package, argued that it would boost the economy in “the short run.” But even the CBO conceded that the stimulus would shrink economic output in “the long run” by increasing the national debt and thus crowding out private investment.

Some liberals have the unrealistic fantasy that by increasing taxes on the top one percent of the population, the government can finance a radically expanded welfare state for the bottom 99 percent. (Never mind that even if we confiscated the entire annual income of the top one percent, it wouldn’t begin to cover the record, trillion-dollar federal budget deficit.) They assume that somewhere in Europe, there is a country that does just that, without harming its economy. Alas, there is no such country, anymore than unicorns exist.

As Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center recently noted, the U.S. already has a more progressive tax code than most European countries:

The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.

Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.

Interestingly, in France, a notorious welfare-state government, only 28 percent of revenue comes from the top 10 percent of income earners. As for the top 1 percent of Americans, their share of federal taxes paid is roughly 30 percent.

And that’s before a whole host of tax increases and new taxes kick in starting in 2013, such as a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income goes into effect to pay for the 2010 healthcare law. As a leading tax law professor notes, capital gains taxes are going up.  As The Wall Street Journal notes, Obama would like to increase them even further; Obama’s proposals would give the U.S. one of the highest capital gains tax rates in the world — higher than all but one European country:

[Investment] income is taxed once at the corporate rate of 35% and again when it is passed through to the individual as a capital gain or dividend at 15%, for a highest marginal tax rate of about 44.75%.

This double taxation is one reason the U.S. has long had a differential tax rate for capital gains. Another reason is because while taxpayers must pay taxes on their gains, they aren’t allowed to deduct capital losses (beyond $3,000 a year) except against gains in the current year. Capital gains also aren’t indexed for inflation, so a lower rate is intended to offset the effect of inflated gains.

One implication of the Buffett rule is that all millionaire investment income would be taxed at the shareholder level at a minimum rate of 30%, up from 15% today. The tax rate on investment income from corporations would rise to 54.5% from 44.75%, a punitive tax on start-up or expanding businesses.

The new 30% capital gains rate would be the developed world’s third highest . …

Moreover, liberal lawmakers like Jerry McNerney want to raise tax rates even further by imposing a 90 percent tax rate on the wealthy. Liberals seized upon Mitt Romney’s tax returns to try to argue that taxes in America are too low, but it turned out that Romney would have been taxed less in other countries like Canada. (Not only does Romney pay more taxes in America than he would overseas, but Romney actually paid more in taxes than did wealthy liberal lawmakers like John Kerry who give less to charity than the millions that Romney gives.)

Far from being too low, current capital gains taxes are too high, since they tax some people based on essentially fictitious paper income even when those people have become much poorer rather than richer. As we noted earlier, a liberal economist and member of the Federal Reserve Board conceded in 1980 that “most capital gains were not gains of real purchasing power at all, but simply represented the maintenance of principal in an inflationary world.” “Between 1970 and 1980, U.S. stock prices fell by half after being adjusted for inflation. But if you sold stock in 1980, after a decade of getting poorer and poorer you would have had to pay capital gains tax, since inflation made stock prices rise in nominal terms.”

By contrast, some European countries have cut their taxes on investments over the last generation. They did so not because they suddenly developed a love for investors (or the wealthy), but because they found from experience (and the experience of neighboring countries) that doing so yielded more economic growth and investment, and (in some cases) more government revenue.

Syndicated columnist Steve Chapman is criticizing President Obama’s proposal in the State of the Union address to require students to attend high school longer before being allowed to leave. As I noted earlier, the president would like to require students to attend school until they are at least 18, and the National Education Association, one of his biggest supporters, wants to require students to stay in school until age 21.

As Chapman notes, “Most states now allow students to drop out at 16 or 17.” The reason for this is that while most students benefit greatly from staying in high school, “the youngsters who are most likely to drop out are the ones who are least likely to learn if they stay. If they are 1) struggling to pass, 2) unwilling to apply themselves, 3) chronically tardy and absent, or 4) simply not very bright, they won’t learn much from being [in] a classroom—for two extra years.” As Chapman points out, experts are skeptical of Obama’s proposal (skepticism echoed by analysts quoted in the Washington Examiner):

James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago who specializes in education, is skeptical of the proposal. At the college level, he told me, “The returns to people who are not very able or not very motivated are typically quite low.” There is evidence that kids may get some benefit from being required to stay in high school until 16 instead of 15, he says, but “it’s a weak reed to lean on.”

Let’s also not forget that the highest dropout rates are in the worst schools. Even the kids who want an education often graduate from these schools barely able to read. Where does Obama get the idea that the reluctant students, compelled to remain, will reap a rich harvest of learning?

It might be argued that even if there is no benefit from keeping these students around till they turn 18, there can’t be any harm. But think again.

The presence of disruptive, unmotivated kids in a class is a drain on teachers, a distraction to other students, and a daily obstacle to learning. One of the best things you can do for students who want to do the right thing is to remove those who would rather goof off or make trouble.

It’s not clear that laws like this will even work. A 2010 Johns Hopkins University study found that when six states raised the mandatory attendance age, three saw no increase in graduation rates—and one saw a decline. . .

If you want to keep unwilling students in school, you can spend money on truancy enforcement, which means taking money away from the willing students. It would be more rational to use the funds on education improvements so more kids will choose to stay.

A private company—or a private school—whose customers are fleeing has to come up with ways to keep them around. In Obama’s public sector, there is a quicker solution: Lock the exits.

As I noted earlier, requiring schools to warehouse increasing numbers of would-be dropouts could harm school discipline, and result in increased disorder and violence in inner-city schools with high crime and dropout rates. (The Obama administration has also undermined school discipline in some school systems by interfering with their ability to discipline even violent students; it has investigated school districts, and threatened them with lawsuits and the cut-off of federal funds, because their suspension rates did not satisfy a racial quota.  Former educator Edmund Janko explains here how he used to discipline white students more than black students in order to avoid a discrimination investigation by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (where I used to work.) Janko would suspend whites for offenses that earned black students only a reprimand. That way, he could meet an informal racial quota in school suspensions. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals says such racial quotas are unconstitutional. As I explained, the Obama administration is relying on an interpretation of federal civil-rights laws that appears to conflict with the Supreme Court’s Alexander v. Sandoval decision.)

In his State of the Union address, the president also decried skyrocketing college tuition. But as I explained earlier, Obama administration policies, and recent Education Department rules, have helped drive up college tuition and accelerate cost increases at previously-inexpensive colleges. Thus, Obama helped cause the very college tuition increases that he complained about in his speech.

As a Bloomberg News commentary notes, large numbers of people who are not poor are getting food stamps, due to perverse incentives that encourage states to deliberately classify people as eligible in order to draw federal money to their state.  People are eligible in some states even if they are not poor at all, but merely received an “informational brochure” for welfare, or a tiny amount of state money that the state deliberately gave them that they didn’t even need, in order to qualify them for food stamps:

As the article notes, food stamp rolls have risen by 29 million people in recent years:

[A] troubling reason for the increase is that state governments have found it easy to get their constituents federal money — that is, money mostly raised from current and future taxpayers in other states — by making more people eligible for food stamps. According to a mid-2010 report from the Government Accountability Office, 35 states have no limit on the amount of assets a food-stamp recipient can possess. More and more states — the count was 36 at the time of the report — are providing “categorical eligibility” for food stamps to anyone who receives welfare services. Merely getting an informational brochure from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program counts as receiving a service.

Another way that states and localities can get federal money flowing to them is by providing token amounts of assistance with home heating bills. Even a dollar of energy subsidies can make someone eligible for food stamps, or increase the benefit level for someone already on SNAP. Vermont, for example, sends $5 checks to public-housing residents, even though their subsidized rent already covers heating, to qualify them for food stamps. Liberal activists call this strategy for getting federal money “heat and eat.”

The Obama administration didn’t create these perverse incentives, but it did magnify them (in legislation such as the $800 billion stimulus package, which largely repealed the 1996 welfare-reform law, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted). The Obama administration is busy cracking down on states that attempt to reduce food stamp fraud, as James Bovard noted in The Wall Street Journal. Food stamp fraud costs America billions of dollars. This is remarkable, since eligibility requirements are so lax that no fraud is even needed for many undeserving people to collect food stamps. As Bovard noted in the Journal, the Obama administration has encouraged states to abolish asset tests for food stamps, leaving even unemployed millionaires able to qualify: “Millionaires are now legally entitled to collect food stamps as long as they have little or no monthly income. Thirty-five states have abolished asset tests for most food-stamp recipients. These and similar ‘paperwork reduction’ reforms advocated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) are turning the food-stamp program into a magnet for abuses and absurdities.” There are now a record 47 million people on food stamps.

As the Bloomberg article notes, some Republican lawmakers want able-bodied adult food stamp recipients “to abide by work requirements,” “but the Obama administration hasn’t been interested.”

If food stamp handouts were low in dollar value — just enough to avoid hunger — middle-class people who don’t need them wouldn’t find it worthwhile to apply for them. But food stamps are not stingy, which is why growing numbers of people who are in no danger of ever going hungry have applied for them, and now receive them. Recently, “The average food stamp benefit was $133.80 per person” — which is more than I spent on food as a bachelor — “and $283.65 per household”  — which is more than my family typically spends on food in a month.

Earlier, I wrote about how it is not difficult to live on a food stamps budget. The Washington Post ran a story in its health section about how various people, such as the chef for a law firm and a natural foods store owner, were able to live quite well on a food stamps budget. For example, Rick Hindle, executive chef for the Skadden, Arps law firm “showed recently that you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen to prepare healthful food for $1 or less per meal.”

To divert attention from this fact, liberal groups have created something called the “Food Stamp Challenge.” This “challenge” is a misleading PR exercise where a wealthy liberal like a high-paid bureaucrat or congressman who is used to spending huge amounts on food, lives for a week on a food stamp budget and stupidly buys junk food (or nothing but bread or pasta) rather than cheaper nutritious foods (like potatoes) in order to falsely make it seem like it is hard to eat on a food stamps budget (even though, as Warren Kozak notes in the Wall Street Journal, hunger is virtually non-existent in America). The only thing this bogus “food stamp challenge” actually shows is that privileged people who eat out in restaurants all the time are often unaware of what nutritious foods are cheapest; or they stupidly think that cheap  nutritious foods, like baked potatoes, are unhealthy, or not as good as white bread or pasta, even though baked potatoes, unlike white bread or pasta, have all 8 essential amino acids, and lots of vitamins and minerals, like 40 percent of your day’s supply of vitamin C, potassium, and B vitamins. This ignorance about food is shared by the Obama administration:  So great is its nutritional ignorance that it banned white potatoes from the WIC program, even as it permitted food stamps to be used for sugary sodas, and used tax dollars to subsidize junk food and fatty and sugary foods.

Meanwhile, the cost of the food stamp program has exploded.  As Bovard pointed out, the costs of the food stamp program have more than doubled since 2007 to $77 billion from $33 billion even as fraud has soared:

Wisconsin food-stamp recipients routinely sell their benefit cards on Facebook . . . ‘nearly 2,000 recipients claimed they lost their card six or more times in 2010 and requested replacements.’ USDA rules require that lost cards be speedily replaced . . . Thirty percent of the inmates in the Polk County, Iowa, jail were collecting food stamps that were being sent to their non-jail mailing addresses in 2009 . . . The Obama administration is responding by cracking down on state governments’ antifraud measures. The administration is seeking to compel California, New York and Texas to cease requiring food-stamp applicants to provide finger images. The food-stamp poster boy of 2011 is 59-year-old Leroy Fick. After Mr. Fick won a $2 million lottery jackpot, the Michigan Department of Human Services ruled he could continue receiving food stamps . . . ‘the winnings were considered ‘assets’ [rather than income] and aren’t counted in determining food stamp eligibility.’

In his State of the Union address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble. This was ironic, since his own administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions.

For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to comply with a new federal regulation requiring them to charge enough over federal financial aid so that at least 10 percent of education costs don’t come from financial aid. For example, Corinthian College had diploma programs in health care and other fields that can be completed in a year or less. Until 2011, many of those programs had a total cost of about $15,000, which meant that federal grants and loans could cover nearly 100 percent of their cost. In response to the Education Department’s rule, the college raised tuition to comply with the 90/10 rule. The net result of the Obama Education Department’s rule was to “create a perverse, no-win ‘Catch-22’ that could prevent low-income students from attending college,” by encouraging such colleges to raise tuition to outstrip rising financial aid by more than ten percent. Administration allies like Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) are now pushing a new rule, the 85-15 rule, that would require low-cost institutions to further raise tuition so that at least 15 percent of education costs aren’t covered by financial aid. (With this kind of mentality, it is no wonder that college graduation rates have actually “fallen somewhat since the 1970s” “among poor and working-class students.”)

As George Leef of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy notes, “Obama’s talk about getting tough with colleges over tuition is pure political blather. One reason costs keep going up, thus necessitating tuition increases, is that schools keep adding administrative positions like Chief Diversity Officer. College spending is responsible for the jobs of a great many of Obama’s most zealous supporters. It’s easy to demagogue college costs, but this is nothing more than theatrics.” There are now more college administrators than faculty at California State University, and colleges, partly to comply with bureaucratic mandates, are creating new positions for liberal bureaucrats even as they raise student tuition to record levels:

The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

Other colleges raised spending on administrators as much as 600 percent in recent years.

As a result of increasing federal financial aid, colleges have been able to increase tuition faster than inflation, year after year, secure in the knowledge that they can rake in ever-rising government subsidies and skyrocketing tuition. College students are learning less and less even as higher education spending explodes.

Students have little choice but to pay inflated tuition bills into the education industrial-complex, as they vie with each other for scarce entry-level jobs by acquiring ever more degrees that show their ability to jump through hoops and master difficult (but largely useless) skills. The net result is an educational arms race in which people compete to see who can acquire the most paper credentials. There are now 8,000 waiters and 5,057 janitors with PhD’s or other advanced degrees, and millions of Americans have useless college degrees.

Obama’s State of the Union address also contained false claims about outsourcing and corporate taxes, as well as a misguided proposal that could undermine discipline and order in inner-city schools that have high drop-out rates, and another proposal that could shrink Americans’ 401(k)s and increase the cost of mortgage financing in the future.

The Education Department recently made college officials’ lives more difficult by trying to alter the burden of proof long used by many colleges in sexual harassment cases (despite the lack of any legal basis for doing so), and by seeking to discourage procedures such as cross-examination that safeguard accuracy and due process in campus disciplinary proceedings.

Our friends over at Cato have a video with spot-on analysis of last night’s State of the Union address. I particularly enjoyed Dan Ikenson’s remarks on the GM bailouts and the state of manufacturing. The auto industry in America was never in danger, as the president claimed they were. A few firms like GM and Chrysler were in danger, because they made bad decisions. The other American car companies — Ford, Toyota, Honda — were and are quite healthy.

Neal McCluskey also offers a valuable insight on why college tuition has skyrocketed — massive federal subsidies. If someone else is paying most of the bill, students and parents don’t have as much incentive to be thrifty. That allows colleges to raise prices with impunity, which they certainly have.

Welcome to CEI’s coverage of this year’s State of the Union address. Live coverage will begin at about 8:30 EST, so please check in then. If there’s an issue you’d like us to pay special attention to, please let us know in the comments.