It has been pointed out that in years past, employment of 18 to 25 year olds has fallen drastically in September as students returned to college and gave up their summer jobs. Not this September. Also not last
September.
I suspect three things are going on here. One is that these
last two summers, many fewer students were able to find jobs in the
summer, so the student drop in employment in September was much less due
to them returning to college. Another effect is that with college
expenses having increased much more than family incomes have for many
years and the actual loss of real family incomes over the last few
years, many more students may have very part-time work-aid assignments
at their colleges as part of their student-aid package. Finally, in the past,
the BLS was inclined to ignore these very part-time college jobs and not
count these students as employed while in college. What if they are
now very assiduously counting these work aid students as part-time
employed in the household survey? This would account for the strange
increase in employment of 18 - 25 year olds these last two Septembers
and for the huge increase in part-time jobs precisely in the month of
September.
This is a very natural way for the Obama administration to make use of the students to help save his re-election chances. The Democrats have been very assiduous in courting students by forcing their parent's health insurance to allow them to be kept on their parent's policies until they are 26, by ever more heavily subsidizing their student loans, and by carefully indoctrinating them in the beliefs of the Progressive Elitists in dominant control of virtually every college campus. These students are in turn generally very enthusiastic supporters. The Democrats are child molesters, though in this case molesters of their underdeveloped minds. They give a great deal of thought of how to take advantage of them, so it is a natural thing that they thought of using their work-aid as a means to bolster the employment numbers just prior to the election.
Update, Afternoon of 10 October 2012:
That was an interesting idea, but on looking deeper into the BLS numbers in Table A-8 and Table A-9 in the September employment report, it does not hold water. Instead, we find something very different and still disturbing. First let us look at the change in employed by age from Table A-9 in September compared to August using the Not Seasonally Adjusted Numbers:
16-17 years, -130,000
18-19 years, -455,000
20-24 years, +101,000
25-34 years, +291,000
35-44 years, +249,000
45-54 years, +238,000
55 & older, +483,000
College students are mostly 18 - 21, so it is fairly clear that there is a net decrease in employment in those ages, so the work-study part-time work is not the explanation. The explanation is found in Table A-8, where we find that the major change in employment was in government workers. Government workers increased by 934,000!!!!! The more complete story in the Not Seasonally Adjusted numbers is:
Government workers, +934,000
Self-employed workers, unincorporated, +90,000
Agriculture and related industries, -53,000
Private households, +15,000
Other Industries, -221,000
So much as one would expect given the general sorry state of the economy, industry is shedding employees in large numbers and some of the unemployed are setting up their own micro-businesses. What on Earth is going on with this massive hiring of government workers though?
Teachers are mostly government workers and they do massively become employed again in September after being off for the summer. However, any seasonal adjustment should eliminate the annual effect of re-hiring teachers in September. So, we can examine the seasonally adjusted number of government employees and should see this number wiped out to the degree that it is teachers. It turns out that the seasonally adjusted number is only 106,000 lower! Now this makes no sense, since there are clearly many times 106,000 teachers who go back to public school jobs in September. Maybe if the adjustment was formulated over many years, the fact that more teachers may have found summer jobs in the past than could now might make for a smaller adjustment projected from the past onto the present.
The federal government has not been hiring massive numbers of new employees and the state and local governments are having trouble paying the employees they already have. It would appear that there was no adequate seasonal adjustment for the annual return of government-employed teachers to public schools! Whatever the case of the surge in the numbers of government workers, this is not an indication of any sort of recovery in the economy. On the contrary, the numbers indicate a worsening of the economy with the loss of 221,000 more jobs in industry. A gain of 934,000 government workers, even if actual, would not be indicative of an improving economy.
How could the BLS fail to make a seasonal adjustment on teachers that would not make their annual return to school look like a boom in hiring? How convenient for Obama that in the last employment report prior to the election they did not make this annual correction? All of those claims that the BLS is staffed with professional and incorruptible people are hard to support now.
Showing posts with label student loans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student loans. Show all posts
20 July 2010
Krauthammer - Obama's next act
Charles Krauthammer, in his column piece called Obama's Next Act, claims that almost everyone is underestimating Obama. He says Obama has accomplished a huge part of his ideological goals. He has
I am not as pessimistic as Krauthammer is, but he is right that Obama has accomplished a plunge deep into socialism. The extraction process will be fraught with difficulties and dangers. We are on the verge of losing the very concept of America as the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave and replacing that transitionally with America, the Land of the Moocher, the Home of the Irresponsible, before it becomes permanently, America, the Land of the Slave, the Impoverished without homes. To prevent this, we must overturn each and every socialist accomplishment of Obama listed above. There is no other route to the salvation of the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must come to control the House, the Senate with a super-majority, and the presidency by the 2012 election. The consequence of not doing so is death. Or slavery, if you think there is a difference.
- "Irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy" with ObamaCare and put the country inexorably on the road to national health care in a manner to bring about one of the most massive redistributions of wealth in U.S. history.
- The financial "reform", creating 243 new regulations, will provide government control of banks, "storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, home buyers and credit bureaus," among many other economic activities.
- The Stimulus Bill was the largest spending bill ever and helped to lock in a requirement for further tax increases.
- The nationalization of student loans [gives the federal government control of who goes to college and which college they will go to --- in time.]
- The Medicare and Medicaid entitlements dominate future government budgets. ObamaCare freezes out future reductions in programs, so there is no possibility for deficit reduction except to increase taxes massively, probably with "a European-style value-added tax.
I am not as pessimistic as Krauthammer is, but he is right that Obama has accomplished a plunge deep into socialism. The extraction process will be fraught with difficulties and dangers. We are on the verge of losing the very concept of America as the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave and replacing that transitionally with America, the Land of the Moocher, the Home of the Irresponsible, before it becomes permanently, America, the Land of the Slave, the Impoverished without homes. To prevent this, we must overturn each and every socialist accomplishment of Obama listed above. There is no other route to the salvation of the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must come to control the House, the Senate with a super-majority, and the presidency by the 2012 election. The consequence of not doing so is death. Or slavery, if you think there is a difference.
11 April 2010
Nationalizing the Student Body
In the same gargantuan bill that established ObamaCare, the federal government once again used the fascist socialist model of gaining control by effectively nationalizing college students. They did this by putting all student loans under a government monopoly. The theory is the time-honored one of: "He who controls the money, controls everything." Of course in the short-run, this just means that whereas a student could approach many private lenders, he can now approach only one lender, the federal government. That lender will even allow him not to pay back the loan, if the student takes a government job after graduating. This reveals the government's bias against the private sector, which is merely tasked with the need to be productive enough that the government can suck enough of private sector blood to continue on happily in its bloated growth.
Why did this nationalization of student loans wind up in the ObamaCare bill? Of course, in part just because Obama can usually count on the young who have been indoctrinated in the socialist viewpoint throughout a public school education and then again in college and he believes in making his followers believe they have been rewarded. He knew ObamaCare was unpopular and wanted to be sure it would be popular with his loyal base of young people. But, perhaps it was also in the bill due to simple logic. ObamaCare nationalizes the bodies of every American by making all Americans dependent upon the federal government for all of their medical care. The government monopoly of student loans, in the face of extremely high college costs, nationalizes the student body of every college in America. So, the common issue of the bill was the nationalization of bodies, both student bodies and everyone else's as well.
The first great goal of socialists in America was to nationalize education. The major American socialists of the 1800s and early 1900s worked very hard to have the government take over education in America. Then, they worked very hard to enlarge school districts so that very few of the student's parents were on the school boards or would know the people personally who were on them. The socialists wanted the controlling school boards to be distant from the parents, because the parents were not a good influence on their children, since most parents were not socialists. The purpose of the schools was to engineer the students into socialists. It was to design their behavior, direct their emotions, and to fully indoctrinate the students in socialism. As the government-run schools escaped the effective control of the parents, this plan could be implemented more and more fully. One of the most important further requirements was that the professional commitment to teaching children to think for themselves on the part of true educators had to be broken. This was done with the unionization of teachers, which had the added advantage that union leaderships were full of socialists.
The need to put as many scientists as possible into the war effort in WWII, started the heavy funding of research for scientists at universities and colleges which continues to this day. Along the way, other academics drooled with envy at the funding the scientists were getting. The government realized that it had gained advantages by winning over the allegiance of many scientists to the idea of a growing federal government by controlling their funding for research. The government had long exceeded its powers as granted by the Constitution, so it would be a disaster if the learned academics in colleges and universities were to start calling the government on this usurpation of power. So, it became very clear that it would be wise for the government to provide taxpayer money to researchers in disciplines such as economics, history, sociology, psychology, and other fields to get them on board with an ever-growing government. This would happen because these academics would want more and more money and a government would have to be growing and taking more and more in taxes to give it to them. Besides, those researchers who did not praise big government, could be cut off from research funding. Academics, not normally known for their bravery, could be mostly counted upon to toe the line. They have done so.
Am I being unfair in saying that academics are not normally brave? I do not think so. First, the current crop of academics has among its older members the Baby Boomers. This is my generation. I know something about them. They protested the Vietnam War when they were in college. Now, there were valid reasons for protesting the use of the draft in the Vietnam War, but they rarely did so for the right reasons. Most college students were really, really frightened at the prospect of going to Vietnam. So much so, that they jumped right on board with the flimsy and false arguments of the organized socialists who were the organizers of almost all of the college protests of the day. Unusually large numbers of this generation hated private enterprise as part of the so-called military-industrial complex. These fearful people also felt an aversion to the risks of the free enterprise system. This in turn, drew them into the belief that there was something wrong with the profit motive, so they could claim that they were averse to Capitalism for moral reasons, rather than fear. Soon, they were largely inclined to sneer at anything to do with the private sector and sing their own praise as being more nobly engaged in the education of young people and to sing the praises of government leaders as well, provided they were not in the Defense Department. This group, due to its size and the rapid growth of colleges in that era, soon was able to determine which other faculty were hired and then which would be granted tenure. Almost every department on almost every campus was soon full of liberals and only the socialist viewpoint was ever to be heard. This proved to be of immense value to the growth of governments in America.
Further evidence of cowardice is the insistence of college faculties in silencing any real dissention on campuses. Brave academics would welcome debate, but today's academics try to shut it down and when challenged to debate, they most generally refuse to do so. They have even developed extensive speech codes to limit debate by anointing politically correct speech. A very blatant example of their cowardice was the very widespread acceptance on almost every American campus of the government-accepted theory of catastrophic man-made global warming. This has long been a hypothesis of at least dubious standing and for several years now has been clearly wrong. Any good scientist reviewing the evidence, whether a climate scientist by profession or not, can clearly see that its central theory that CO2 emissions by man have caused a uniquely large increase in temperature in the late 20th Century with catastrophic circumstances is wrong. Where have the many academic scientists been who should have vociferously put this failed hypothesis to rest? There has been hardly a peep from almost any college, but for the very occasional professor emeritus, who the socialist controlled universities had less power to intimidate.
Once the universities were well-controlled by these socialist faculty members, they could put pressure on the student bodies to become socialists in many ways. First, the faculty only presented the socialist viewpoint at most colleges. Second, it is much easier to agree with a teacher and regurgitate his line of thinking on exams and in assignments than it is to take off on your own as a student and present an opposing viewpoint. Third, opposing viewpoints were and are usually graded more harshly. Fourth, the egalitarianism of socialism resulted in huge inflation of grades so there was little in grades that could be used to distinguish students and this same grade inflation made it more risky not to agree and to be penalized with a lower grade. Fifth, scholarships and awards are made to students who are good socialists and the criteria are blatantly socialist. These awards are more important because there is no differentiation in grades.
Affirmative action provided the socialists and government still more power by forcing universities to take under-qualified students, who then were beholdened to government. But, this still did not make the remainder of the student body sufficiently beholdened. Meanwhile, the costs of colleges, fed by huge sums of federal research money and the huge increase in faculty salaries and benefits that came with that, kept rising very rapidly. The colleges could not get these faculty members to teach classes without paying them enough to lure them away from their research efforts a few moments of each week. Universities had generally become cost plus operations with little need to operate efficiently. Besides, very many were run by governments and had all the customary efficiency of a government agency such as the DMV. But, this put a huge strain on students and/or their families to pay the costs. So, government-guaranteed loans from private banks came into being. The next logical step in gaining complete control of the students was for the government to create the student loan monopoly, which it just did.
Now, almost every college student will be beholdened to government. If any college graduate ever argues against socialism, the socialist opponent will yell "Hypocrite, did you not benefit from socialism by taking a student loan to graduate from college?" What is more, the ready availability of student loans will reduce what little pressure there has been on the colleges to hold down expenses, so tuition and fees for students will continue to go up much faster than costs in the private sector. This means that the government-run colleges and those private schools so beholdened to the government will become a larger and larger part of the drain on the hated private sector. The fact that graduates will be able to have their student loans forgiven if they take a government job, will ensure that many graduates will clamber for more government jobs. Why not? The pay is twice that in the private sector, the benefits are out-of-this-world, and your huge student loan debts will be forgiven. Who would go into the private sector under these conditions? So, the college-educated elite who are supposed to direct the growth of socialism and the corresponding growth of government will be pushed all the more monolithically toward socialism and bigger and bigger government.
Do not kid yourself. This is an absolutely insidious plan. It fits perfectly well on the plane with the use of the health care insurance mandate to nationalize our bodies and make us dependent upon government for the very continuance of our lives, at least once we ever have a life-threatening disease or a cause of great pain. The socialists' fascination with the control of education will be complete when they start using this monopoly on student loans as reason to assure that students are getting a good education with the money the government is committing. Yes, the government will in time evaluate the colleges and universities the students are choosing and will deny those it does not like money by not loaning money to the students who would go there. This will be the end of dissenting colleges and universities. Then, the government will also exercise choice in which students to allow to have student loans. Those who are not socialists and who view government with great distrust, will be weeded out. This is a very powerful tool for a socialist federal government to develop as time goes on. It will too. It is inevitable.
Unless we kill this voracious monster and recreate the limited government of our Constitution whose purpose was to make the sole job of the federal government the protection of the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must keep socialism from killing our very individuality and our individual rights. We must start by repealing this particularly insidious ObamaCare and Student Loan Monopoly Bill. And then, we must start dismantling the federal, state, and local government controls on the education of young Americans. We have to eliminate their indoctrination as socialists, or this fight for our individual rights will have to be desperately fought with each generation and will eventually be lost.
The only savior will be a return to private education with professional educators, rather than blue collar unionists. These teachers must be committed to teaching Americans about our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution and why they fought for the American principle that each individual has an equal, sovereign, and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They must teach about the real purpose of our Constitution. They must be knowledgeable about how Capitalism allows every individual to exercise his individuality and how it has allowed an incredible richness of life for almost every American. They must also be able to tell the sad story of the many failures of socialism, whether of communism or fascism, or any combination of the two. Then, and only then, might we be able to concentrate on living our own lives without undue concern that the monster of tyrannical government will squash us once again.
Why did this nationalization of student loans wind up in the ObamaCare bill? Of course, in part just because Obama can usually count on the young who have been indoctrinated in the socialist viewpoint throughout a public school education and then again in college and he believes in making his followers believe they have been rewarded. He knew ObamaCare was unpopular and wanted to be sure it would be popular with his loyal base of young people. But, perhaps it was also in the bill due to simple logic. ObamaCare nationalizes the bodies of every American by making all Americans dependent upon the federal government for all of their medical care. The government monopoly of student loans, in the face of extremely high college costs, nationalizes the student body of every college in America. So, the common issue of the bill was the nationalization of bodies, both student bodies and everyone else's as well.
The first great goal of socialists in America was to nationalize education. The major American socialists of the 1800s and early 1900s worked very hard to have the government take over education in America. Then, they worked very hard to enlarge school districts so that very few of the student's parents were on the school boards or would know the people personally who were on them. The socialists wanted the controlling school boards to be distant from the parents, because the parents were not a good influence on their children, since most parents were not socialists. The purpose of the schools was to engineer the students into socialists. It was to design their behavior, direct their emotions, and to fully indoctrinate the students in socialism. As the government-run schools escaped the effective control of the parents, this plan could be implemented more and more fully. One of the most important further requirements was that the professional commitment to teaching children to think for themselves on the part of true educators had to be broken. This was done with the unionization of teachers, which had the added advantage that union leaderships were full of socialists.
The need to put as many scientists as possible into the war effort in WWII, started the heavy funding of research for scientists at universities and colleges which continues to this day. Along the way, other academics drooled with envy at the funding the scientists were getting. The government realized that it had gained advantages by winning over the allegiance of many scientists to the idea of a growing federal government by controlling their funding for research. The government had long exceeded its powers as granted by the Constitution, so it would be a disaster if the learned academics in colleges and universities were to start calling the government on this usurpation of power. So, it became very clear that it would be wise for the government to provide taxpayer money to researchers in disciplines such as economics, history, sociology, psychology, and other fields to get them on board with an ever-growing government. This would happen because these academics would want more and more money and a government would have to be growing and taking more and more in taxes to give it to them. Besides, those researchers who did not praise big government, could be cut off from research funding. Academics, not normally known for their bravery, could be mostly counted upon to toe the line. They have done so.
Am I being unfair in saying that academics are not normally brave? I do not think so. First, the current crop of academics has among its older members the Baby Boomers. This is my generation. I know something about them. They protested the Vietnam War when they were in college. Now, there were valid reasons for protesting the use of the draft in the Vietnam War, but they rarely did so for the right reasons. Most college students were really, really frightened at the prospect of going to Vietnam. So much so, that they jumped right on board with the flimsy and false arguments of the organized socialists who were the organizers of almost all of the college protests of the day. Unusually large numbers of this generation hated private enterprise as part of the so-called military-industrial complex. These fearful people also felt an aversion to the risks of the free enterprise system. This in turn, drew them into the belief that there was something wrong with the profit motive, so they could claim that they were averse to Capitalism for moral reasons, rather than fear. Soon, they were largely inclined to sneer at anything to do with the private sector and sing their own praise as being more nobly engaged in the education of young people and to sing the praises of government leaders as well, provided they were not in the Defense Department. This group, due to its size and the rapid growth of colleges in that era, soon was able to determine which other faculty were hired and then which would be granted tenure. Almost every department on almost every campus was soon full of liberals and only the socialist viewpoint was ever to be heard. This proved to be of immense value to the growth of governments in America.
Further evidence of cowardice is the insistence of college faculties in silencing any real dissention on campuses. Brave academics would welcome debate, but today's academics try to shut it down and when challenged to debate, they most generally refuse to do so. They have even developed extensive speech codes to limit debate by anointing politically correct speech. A very blatant example of their cowardice was the very widespread acceptance on almost every American campus of the government-accepted theory of catastrophic man-made global warming. This has long been a hypothesis of at least dubious standing and for several years now has been clearly wrong. Any good scientist reviewing the evidence, whether a climate scientist by profession or not, can clearly see that its central theory that CO2 emissions by man have caused a uniquely large increase in temperature in the late 20th Century with catastrophic circumstances is wrong. Where have the many academic scientists been who should have vociferously put this failed hypothesis to rest? There has been hardly a peep from almost any college, but for the very occasional professor emeritus, who the socialist controlled universities had less power to intimidate.
Once the universities were well-controlled by these socialist faculty members, they could put pressure on the student bodies to become socialists in many ways. First, the faculty only presented the socialist viewpoint at most colleges. Second, it is much easier to agree with a teacher and regurgitate his line of thinking on exams and in assignments than it is to take off on your own as a student and present an opposing viewpoint. Third, opposing viewpoints were and are usually graded more harshly. Fourth, the egalitarianism of socialism resulted in huge inflation of grades so there was little in grades that could be used to distinguish students and this same grade inflation made it more risky not to agree and to be penalized with a lower grade. Fifth, scholarships and awards are made to students who are good socialists and the criteria are blatantly socialist. These awards are more important because there is no differentiation in grades.
Affirmative action provided the socialists and government still more power by forcing universities to take under-qualified students, who then were beholdened to government. But, this still did not make the remainder of the student body sufficiently beholdened. Meanwhile, the costs of colleges, fed by huge sums of federal research money and the huge increase in faculty salaries and benefits that came with that, kept rising very rapidly. The colleges could not get these faculty members to teach classes without paying them enough to lure them away from their research efforts a few moments of each week. Universities had generally become cost plus operations with little need to operate efficiently. Besides, very many were run by governments and had all the customary efficiency of a government agency such as the DMV. But, this put a huge strain on students and/or their families to pay the costs. So, government-guaranteed loans from private banks came into being. The next logical step in gaining complete control of the students was for the government to create the student loan monopoly, which it just did.
Now, almost every college student will be beholdened to government. If any college graduate ever argues against socialism, the socialist opponent will yell "Hypocrite, did you not benefit from socialism by taking a student loan to graduate from college?" What is more, the ready availability of student loans will reduce what little pressure there has been on the colleges to hold down expenses, so tuition and fees for students will continue to go up much faster than costs in the private sector. This means that the government-run colleges and those private schools so beholdened to the government will become a larger and larger part of the drain on the hated private sector. The fact that graduates will be able to have their student loans forgiven if they take a government job, will ensure that many graduates will clamber for more government jobs. Why not? The pay is twice that in the private sector, the benefits are out-of-this-world, and your huge student loan debts will be forgiven. Who would go into the private sector under these conditions? So, the college-educated elite who are supposed to direct the growth of socialism and the corresponding growth of government will be pushed all the more monolithically toward socialism and bigger and bigger government.
Do not kid yourself. This is an absolutely insidious plan. It fits perfectly well on the plane with the use of the health care insurance mandate to nationalize our bodies and make us dependent upon government for the very continuance of our lives, at least once we ever have a life-threatening disease or a cause of great pain. The socialists' fascination with the control of education will be complete when they start using this monopoly on student loans as reason to assure that students are getting a good education with the money the government is committing. Yes, the government will in time evaluate the colleges and universities the students are choosing and will deny those it does not like money by not loaning money to the students who would go there. This will be the end of dissenting colleges and universities. Then, the government will also exercise choice in which students to allow to have student loans. Those who are not socialists and who view government with great distrust, will be weeded out. This is a very powerful tool for a socialist federal government to develop as time goes on. It will too. It is inevitable.
Unless we kill this voracious monster and recreate the limited government of our Constitution whose purpose was to make the sole job of the federal government the protection of the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We must keep socialism from killing our very individuality and our individual rights. We must start by repealing this particularly insidious ObamaCare and Student Loan Monopoly Bill. And then, we must start dismantling the federal, state, and local government controls on the education of young Americans. We have to eliminate their indoctrination as socialists, or this fight for our individual rights will have to be desperately fought with each generation and will eventually be lost.
The only savior will be a return to private education with professional educators, rather than blue collar unionists. These teachers must be committed to teaching Americans about our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution and why they fought for the American principle that each individual has an equal, sovereign, and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They must teach about the real purpose of our Constitution. They must be knowledgeable about how Capitalism allows every individual to exercise his individuality and how it has allowed an incredible richness of life for almost every American. They must also be able to tell the sad story of the many failures of socialism, whether of communism or fascism, or any combination of the two. Then, and only then, might we be able to concentrate on living our own lives without undue concern that the monster of tyrannical government will squash us once again.
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