huffington post

The College Diploma Fraud and Its Consequences

by Hans Bader on December 30, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment

Retired professor Robert Weissberg has a fascinating article at The American Thinker called “The College Diploma Fraud.”  It describes how worthless many college degrees have become in an age of “credential-mania” (President Obama wants to double education spending to increase the number of college graduates by an additional 5 million, although there is already such a surplus of college graduates that many of them now have low-paying, unskilled jobs.)

It also chronicles how college administrators pressure professors not to fail even students who cheat or are grossly incompetent, in order to artificially inflate attendance and graduation rates: they absolve even “blatant cheating,” allow “failing grades to be expunged” even “after a final exam,” and create “special, unadvertised minority-only courses” that give failing students “As and Bs to eradicate Ds and Fs elsewhere.”

Michael Snyder has an article called “16 Shocking Facts About Student Debt and the Great College Education Scam.” As he notes, the Obama administration “has encouraged students to load up on college loans,” even though students can end up with crippling debt and a lousy job, and even though “our economy is facing the biggest student loan debt bubble in the history of the world.”

At Huffington Post, an article discusses the subject of suicide and student loan debt, and a student loan debtor who confesses, “I think about jumping out the 27th floor window of my office building” because of huge law-school debts that never led to a decent job, much less a job as a lawyer. This is not an anomaly: Kelli Space graduated with $200,000 in student loans for a sociology degree and a low-paying job.

A chart from the international agency OECD shows that education spending is higher per pupil in the U.S. than any other country in the world except for one, at the K-12 level. Lou Minatti notes an irony about blind support for exploding education spending:

We spend more money on education than any other country on the planet. Curiously, the same people who say that education spending is sacrosanct and cuts are bad also complain about the high cost of medical care and say that they’re spending a lot less money in places like France, with better results. So why are cuts in education spending bad, but cuts in medical spending good? Someone clear this up for me.

There is actually a strong argument for trimming America’s bloated education spending, as a recent commentary in the The Chronicle of Higher Education notes.

The college debt bubble dwarfs the recent housing bubble in terms of its price-to-earning ratio growth.  One hundred colleges now charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09. College tuition has surged along with federal financial-aid spending, which effectively rewards colleges for increasing tuition.

I earlier discussed the uselessness of elite law school educations (based on my experiences at Harvard).  (I once worked at the Education Department.)

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

The Huffington Post Report on Tax Liens and Banks May Miss the Point

by Lee Doren on October 18, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy

The Huffington Post is reporting that banks are purchasing tax liens from local governments to collect when people fail to pay their property taxes. Supposedly, the banks charge additional fees and require the homeowner to pay the entire lump-sum up front. This often leads to people having to sell their homes to pay the tax. You can see the entire video below:

The video is puzzling because it is difficult to understand what The Huffington Post is arguing. The easy solution would be to avoid using property taxes as a means to fund local governments; this does not appear to be addressed. Although all taxes have negative consequences, a consumption tax would be preferable to a property tax and would not require a tax lien in the first place.

While those on the Left argue that a consumption tax is inherently regressive, the example that The Huffington Post cites in the video certainly demonstrates that property taxes harm the poor just as easily.

However, if the Left argues in favor of a property tax to fund local governments, isn’t an efficient means of collecting the tax necessary? The reason why local governments sell the tax liens to banks is because they don’t have the necessary funds to enforce the liens. If they wanted more funds to accomplish that goal, they would need to tax people more, which is the problem in the first place. Is it not?

The Huffington Post seems to be concerned about the fees that the banks charge on top of the original tax. Again, this misses the point. The local governments created a tax scheme that was so burdensome on citizens that people could not even pay the tax. Worse yet, the local governments did not have the resources to enforce payment. Therefore, to solve the self-imposed problem, the local government needed to create an incentive for banks to enforce the tax lien by offering them an additional fee. When it is all over, The Huffington Post turns around and blames the banks.

It seems that The Huffington Post missed the point: The government created a mess with an unworkable tax structure that harms the poor, and needs a bailout from the banks to fix their problem. This isn’t the fault of the banks, but the fault of local governments.

Lots of vituperative comments to Palin’s WaPo op-ed

by Fran Smith on December 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Environment, Global Warming, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony

Sarah Palin’s op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday on ClimateGate and the Copenhagen conference has spawned a blizzard of comments from Post readers.  Almost 4,000 comments as of this morning.  Many of them – no friends of free speech — attack the newspaper for publishing Palin’s article at all. Huffington Post sycophants are similarly energized in their hatred for Palin and for free speech.  Their comments on a cross-posting of Palin’s article number 5,750. Here’s an example:

“someone like palin who does not even understand the difference between climate and weather should not be allowed to do the forecast on a local tv news station, let alone write an op-ed piece for a once respected newspaper like the washington post. . . .”

Interesting that instead of commenting on the substance of the article, detractors are more interested in ad hominems.  May sound familiar to skeptics of catastrophic global warming or the “deniers” as they’re often referred to.

Franken Uses Inflammatory Rape Claim to Destroy Arbitration of Employment Disputes, Including Disputes Totally Unrelated to Rape

by Hans Bader on October 20, 2009 · 1 comment

in Employment, Labor, Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Recently, the Senate voted to ban defense contractors — that is, much of American business — from contractually mandating arbitration of employment discrimination disputes.  The bill’s sponsor, Al Franken (D-Minn.), pushed the bill by claiming that arbitration provisions in an employment contract kept Jamie Leigh Jones from suing her alleged rapists.  But they didn’t: a federal appeals court ruled the arbitration provisions didn’t apply to Jones’ case, leaving her free to sue in court.

Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors from requiring arbitration of employment discrimination disputes and sexual assault cases, including “arbitration” of “any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment.”  The language about sexual assault was irrelevant to most employers: Lawsuits against employers for employment discrimination vastly outnumber lawsuits over sexual assault, which are a tiny fraction of all court cases, so the bill’s real purpose was to ban arbitration of discrimination cases, not to do anything for rape victims.  Few rapes occur in the workplace, as opposed to private settings like homes; and even rapes that do occur in the workplace often fall outside the scope of arbitration clauses.  (Arbitration does not, of course, prevent criminal prosecution.)

Liberal trial lawyers have long objected to Supreme Court decisions like its 7-to-2 Gilmer decision upholding contractual provisions that require binding arbitration of employment discrimination cases, even though arbitrators often rule in favor of employees and consumers, and award them substantial monetary damages (although they do permit plaintiffs less discovery than courts do; on the other hand, arbitration typically results in “lower litigation costs and expenses“).   Franken’s amendment largely fulfills their fantasy of banning arbitration in discrimination cases.

Although Franken’s amendment has a big effect on discrimination cases — and no effect at all on most rape cases — it has been falsely described ever since as an “anti-rape amendment,” and the 30 senators who voted against the amendment have been depicted ever since by liberal sites such as Huffington Post as the “Republicans for Rape“  — even though the Defense Department opposed Franken’s amendment, and even though Senators like Bob Corker said they might have voted for the amendment had it merely covered rape and violence claims, rather than a vast array of unrelated employment disputes.

Jon Stewart, for example, depicted the amendment as being all about rape, asking his viewers “How is ANYONE against this?” and suggesting that only a nut or a misogynist could do so.  (This is the same Jon Stewart who selectively edits taped interviews to make conservatives look stupid, or make them appear to say the opposite of what they actually said).  But the liberal Stewart has aimed this criticism only at conservative lawmakers, not at the Obama Defense Department (or the liberal Supreme Court justices who voted with their conservative colleagues to allow all employment disputes, including those involving sexual assault, to be governed by contractual arbitration provisions in the Gilmer case).  So has Huffington Post, whose first inflammatory article on the vote generated over 2000 comments, many of them angry and vituperative.  The inflammatory coverage has resulted in Senators who voted against the amendment receiving hate mail and angry and hateful messages.

Liberal journalists and bloggers complain a lot about the use of so-called “wedge issues,” but they themselves are the ones who typically use inflammatory wedge issues, as the Franken amendment illustrates.

Another example is the many false claims made by liberal journalists and Obama about the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, a subject I addressed at length here.  In the Ledbetter case, the press claimed that the Supreme Court had created a rigid 180 day deadline for suing over pay discrimination — when in fact it did no such thing.

By the way, studies show that Jon Stewart’s viewers aren’t any smarter than Bill O’Reilly’s — contrary to what liberal journalists believe.

LibertyWeek 34: Michelle Minton Conquers the World

by Richard Morrison on March 17, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Your regular hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist are joined by special guest co-host Michelle Minton for Episode 34 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin by finding that Twitter has conquered every aspect of society, the White House is waging war on the economy and New Yorkers are defending themselves against beer taxes. We next investigate the questionable management of the AIG bailout in Scandal Watch and handicap Chicago’s chances for snagging the 2016 summer games in Olympic News.

Congratulations to FreeStateNH (The Free State Project) for winning the honor of Tweet of the Week™!

Fraud in More Ways Than One

by Iain Murray on February 19, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, International, Legal, Regulation, Sanctimony

The news of the federal fraud charges against billionaire Texan financier Sir Allen Stanford (he got the knighthood from his dual citizenship from Antigua) has been greeted with glee by pro-regulatory forces because he dared to lobby against financial regulations in the early part of the decade. The Huffington Post huffs and puffs:

Though tough anti-money-laundering legislation overwhelmingly sailed through the House Banking Committee in 2000, it had difficulty getting to another vote as powerful GOP lawmakers — then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and then-Senate Banking Committee chair Phil Gramm stymied its future.

DeLay was among the largest recipients of Stanford’s largesse. And “DeLay’s committees paid for flights on Stanford’s jets at least 16 times since 2003, including on Oct. 20, the day the former House majority leader was booked in a Houston courthouse on money-laundering charges,” according to Bloomberg News.

There are a few problems with this black-and-white evil-GOP-lawmakers-stand-in-way of-good-regulation narrative. First, as Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen relates (Case Study #3 here), it was actually Democrats who controlled the Senate at the time, and Majority leader Tom Daschle was a prime recipient of Stanford’s cash:

Stanford became the single largest contributor between July 1, 2000 and June 30, 2001 to the 527 groups of Daschle and Frost. (Public Citizen’s efforts to discuss these contributions were rebuffed by a Stanford Financial Group spokesperson.)

Stanford also contributed the maximum allowed to Daschle’s 527, given Daschle’s self-imposed limit of $10,000 per donor per year. Stanford contributed $10,000 from his company and $10,000 from himself in both 2000 and 2001.

Why? What was Stanford trying to get from Daschle, the highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, and Frost, the third-highest ranking Democrat in the House?

We should also note that the bills Stanford appears to have lobbied against were also opposed by that strongly conservative body, the ACLU (see quote from Greg Nojeim, legislative counsel, here).

Finally, as Public Citizen notes, the legislation Stanford lobbied against passed through Congress, with Daschle as a prime mover, after 9/11. It appears to have done nothing to prevent his alleged fraud.

Oh, and look who he’s been palling around with lately.

The only lesson from Stanford’s lobbying appears to be that lobbying is an equal-opportunity employment opportunity, and that the only way to get less government corruption is to have less government, not more.