Some signs of the times:
35 public educators indicted in a massive cheating scandal. Are they unionized, by any chance? Why, yes they are.
Obama pushes banks to make subprime loans. It was a big part of the earlier housing bubble, folks, that government wanted the banks to abandon prudent lending practices. But lefties don’t need to learn from the past. When our new housing bubble bursts, they’ll just blame the banks’ alleged “greed” again.[1]
Stockton, CA bankruptcy moves forward. Old news, but worth noting. Why Stockton? Picture the busted housing bubble, combined with California-style public employee unions / pensions, mismanagement and unemployment.
Government-funded researchers wanted to prove that whites do more mass shootings – and they fluffed it. As Bob Owens notes, Asians (both Far Eastern and Middle Eastern), Hispanics and blacks are all over-represented in mass shootings, meaning that whites are kind of under-represented. But the white ones get more media coverage, for some reason.
Gun control news:
- Obama will sign a U.N. small-arms treaty, even though the Democrat Senate rejects it. “Constitution, shmonstitution” as the saying goes.
- Biden admits to wanting the whole enchilada.
- Holding Hollywood to account for gun violence still seems like a weird thing to do. In other words, lefties haven’t been doing it.
- Democrats try for indirect gun bans, that is, burdening gun ownership to the point where it will become impractical for many. The proposed mandatory gun insurance would be anti-poor (i.e., regressive).
UPDATE: A guy got a sub-prime auto loan, by giving up his gun. Sub-prime lending as gun control, a leftie wet dream! 🙂
([1] Actual greed would be if the bank wanted to be paid back, when it made a loan. Also known as stringent lending. It’s a good thing.)
The thing that makes me bitter about subprime?
I got into the market in a bad time (right before the bubble burst) and have a non-Fannie loan. I’ve paid my mortgage payments on time, and a little extra each month.
Because of these things, I can’t re-finance. So it punishes people who are responsible, while rewarding those who aren’t.
And that’s with Ohio’s market finally bottoming out.
TL – Well, you’re not alone.
I mean that both literally, and in a broader sense. These housing-bubble policies transfer real economic value to both the borrowers (who get a bigger, nicer house than they can afford) and the lenders (who have more loan “assets” on their balance sheets, assets that they can sell for good money to the Fannie/Freddie/FHA complex, and now to the Fed).
Where does that real economic value come from? It doesn’t come from thin air. Ultimately, it’s financed by cheap money: the Fed’s policies of 0% interest rates and QE. And those policies, in turn, skim real economic value from people’s paychecks, savings and investments, and the balance sheets of successful companies. (Hidden tax)
In other words: all prudent/productive people are being raped, in various ways, to pay for these bubbles.
The Atlanta cheating scandal would never have happened were it not for No Child Left Behind, forcing educators to focus on test-based assessment. Didn’t you know it’s Bush’s fault?
Iggy, good one. It’s interesting on several levels.
First, we see that lefties (as in the AFT/GFT statement, which I linked) are quite happy to blame The System which government set up, rather than the greed of the players, when it suits them. In the case of subprime (or the housing bubble), though, it didn’t suit them and they did the opposite: they emphasized the greed of the players, and carefully avoided blaming The System which
Barney Frankgovernment had set up.Second, I’ve always heard that NCLB was largely written by Ted Kennedy’s staff. (Bush was, of course, wrong to have promoted & signed it. I like to say that Bush’s party label doesn’t matter; in domestic policy he was still a Big Government guy, influenced by left-wing *philosophy*.) So, if standardized testing is bad – if it is partly the culprit here, as the AFT/GFT statement suggests – then lefties still aren’t off the hook.
Not that I have any great regard for modern day banks or bankers, but it’s very close to becoming, if it has not already become, a ‘lose-lose’ situation in mortgage lending.
If lenders abandon the application of all sound and time-tested criteria for issuing mortgages, they (and the institutions they work for) can be charged with ‘discrimination’.
On the other hand, if they issue mortgages to bad risk customers, and the loans go belly up, then they can be charged with predatory lending.
Nice, huh?
Very! To have private actors be in the wrong no matter what they do, is the true bureaucrat’s dream.
The Atlanta cheating scandal is what it is… but look at it through the school system’s eyes for a minute: school systems are commanded to make smart students out of dumb kids. If you don’t have too many dumb kids, the tests are no problem. But…
I know it’s not PC to believe that all people are not equal in ability but I just can’t help my self. I’m not gifted in doublethink.
I’m no fan of teachers’ unions but blaming teachers for illiterate high-school kids is a cop out. If some kid gets to high school unable to read, the fault lies with the kid and the parent(s).
I know a couple of teachers – my niece for one – and they are both smart and dedicated people. But the horror stories they tell… most of us have no clue (and these folks teach in suburban schools).
SCR – I agree, to a large extent. What you had was:
(1) government intervention creating a system where teachers would be incented to submit higher scores, followed by
(2) a bunch of teachers ‘creatively’ submitting higher scores.
“Surprise, surprise.” Now, whose fault is it? Since these 35 teachers knowingly broke rules, they must be assigned some fault. But maybe the system is also at fault; maybe the government set up a bad system.
Finally, maybe this is a stretch, but I draw the parallel to subprime – or to financial regulation in general – where bankers and mortgage brokers mostly follow the rules that the government sets up (cases of them knowingly breaking rules happen less often than people think) and are then faulted as “greedy” no matter what the results, and no matter how badly-designed was the government rule-system that pushed them.
I’d like to see statistics of violent crime offenders as broken down by political party.
Hey, has anyone else notice the tendency of PPP Polling to use ‘Romney Voter’ in place of ‘Republican’ when they’re trying to push a point? Results are listed as; ‘Democrat’, ‘Independent’, and “Romeny Voter”.
ILC – I suspect we’re on the same page but the test score scandal is a symptom (as you point out – the incentives are there) and, yes, the people that “corrected” the tests must be punished. The cheating is more egregious than the more common “teach to the test” lesson plans.
We are awash in perverse incentive (e.g. as you pointed out, recent noises from BHO that mortgage lenders address “underserved” borrower – what could go wrong?). Employers are encouraged to cut employees and work hours in the interest of “affordable” health care – the list is endless.
ILC,
I am a little fuzzy on something you can likely clear up. FHA loans normally carry an insurance component until the borrower reaches the 20% (?) equity level. I think the “insurance” is just another phony-baloney government unfunded program and the premiums slop over into the general revenues category and are backed by FICA-style bonded security.
I do not recall that the Freddie/Fannie fiasco included any secondary government “insurance” scheme. Housing Bubble #1 (HB-1) was a cynical/sinister program in which Freddie/Fannie gave an equity loan based on an inflated value to cover the down-payment requirement (20%) of the home being purchased so that the “buyer” was loaned the downpayment and got the home with no money out of pocket and then the mortgage on the home and the “equity loan” were wrapped together in an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) with the ARM set at zero for a few years and the equity payment (20%) also set at low rate with a balloon which was typically five years out. (Is this basically correct?)
Please check my homework on this.
If I am correct, what I see happening with the FHA scheme is a silent creation of a whole new entitlement program in which the government seeks out the home recipients and then issues full “collision” insurance at a rate that is set by political priorities rather than by any actuary tables based upon experience.
I don’t mean to drag this issue into the weeds. Your superior skills at explaining the actions of those “who practice to deceive” is what I am after.
One point of clarification: As I understand “HB-1”, the banks did not make “sub-prime loans.” The banks followed federal guidelines and took the “finder’s fee” for generating crappy Freddie/Fannie loans and immediately “dumped” the “valid” (according to Freddie/Fannie rules) loans into the Wall Street firms (Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., etc.) who gobbled them up and it was they who bundled them into derivatives made up of a package of quality, typical and junk loans. The “junk” was the Freddie/Fannie crap that was “sub-prime” to the extent that it was all ARM loans based on no history with the borrower and included an equity loan for the down payment which was based on the implied (tacit?) assumption that the borrower would be able to pay a future fixed mortgage rate plus a fixed or adjustable equity loan rate.
Lehman, Goldman Sachs, etc. took this “crap” from Freddie/Fannie based on the US Treasury (taxpayers) backing of the loans from the United States of America. The United States of America had to pay up because so many of these derivatives were sold to pension funds and foreign governments based on the “full faith and credit” of the United States of America.
As I see it, the FHA loans are more of the same with the “borrower” paying a small premium for junk insurance. I call it “junk insurance” as it is no different than buying insurance from a private market company that is in Chapter 11 or 13.
SCR, it just never occurs to the mushy-brained do-gooders in society that some kids are gonna get left behind no matter how many dumptrucks of money you dump on the public education system.
The biggest problem with the public education mess is the increasing tendency to federalize the system. Most everyone knows about No Child Left Behind, but before that was “Goals 2000”, promoted by the George HW Bush administration. Every election cycle, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or Democrat running for national office, almost every candidate lists “education” as one of their top priorities. (How many times have we heard candidates who want to be The Education President?)
Yet historically in the US, education policy has always been directed and implemented on a local level. Even Catholic schools are governed locally—not by the Vatican. So it seems a complete folly to have these massive top-down federal programs which end up creating more problems than they solve just in order to make national politicians feel good (and effective).
Signs? Make that billboards.
Let’s not forget ‘well connected, wealthy and powerful’, on taxpayer dollars, as they are the ones sitting at the ‘top’.
That’s all they’re really in it for.
heliotrope – I have to do some homework myself, to be sure I have the details right – let me get back to you.
Columbus has its own school scnadal they’re trying to bury.
I think there is too much Federal control of education.
I find our public schools very frustrating right now (I work in them and my kids attend them). Way too much testing (and it isn’t just the big test for NCLB but constant testing-with this idiotic computer program where the tests meannothing for the students but the school finds them useful-I have seen too many kids just click whatever to get it over with and my daughter has complained multiple times that she hates them because they take away from instruction time).
As for the cheating scandal-overlooked for some-is that the cheating allowed for lots of attention and the admin and teachers involved got big bonuses but the fake high test scores too funding away from the students who really needed more support and weren’t performing anywhere near proficient.
Teachers enriched their reputations and pocketbooks at the expense of the students they were teaching.
Use Vince as a model. What does he want the public schools to teach?
Would it be critical thinking, the rules of grammar and math and logic, the benchmarks of history, geography, the sciences?
Or, would it be a place where fairness, justice, equality, love, freedom, happiness, hope, compassion, and a whole bucketload of abstract concepts are nailed down in politically correct agenda form?