05-19-2016, 05:33 PM
(05-19-2016, 04:45 PM)Odin Wrote:(05-19-2016, 12:01 PM)Galen Wrote: I am certain that it will, only the precise timing is uncertain. The only thing the Fed knows how to do is print money.
But yet the hyperinflation you ideologues claim is just about to happen mysteriously never materializes.
The troublesome debt is private debt -- not public debt.
Uncle Sucker (ultimately US taxpayers) could be stuck guaranteeing the student loans to those who attended worthless vocational schools. The bulk of the student loan debt isn't to people who went to first-rate colleges or to modest programs that teach hairdressing or clerical skills; it was to the rip-off institutions that charged students attending suspect 'career training' as if they were attending first-rate schools.
We Americans are going to pick up the tab one way or the other. The George W. Bush Administration pushed such education heavily in the belief that such schools would perform miracles. Those schools generally failed badly.
I had an extensive thread on the old T4T Forums about such schools. They were designed for 'non-traditional students', which meant the sorts of people who did not ordinarily attend traditional four-year or community colleges. These schools advertised heavily on schlock daytime television such as the Maury Povich Show and the Jerry Springer Show or the awful reality shows. This is below the washday weepers and game shows.
Here are some hints on the demographics:
1. The people watching such shows are either unemployed or have a night-time job and hate it.
2. People who watch large amounts of daytime television don't generally, and generally have not gone to or are not attending college. (It is a general pattern that well-educated people watch little television anyway). People who watch schlock television -- the sort in which chairs might fly -- are generally close to the low end in intellectual ability, anyway, and are unlikely to do well in any academic setting.
...The schools got their money up front from the federal government as loans. There was little quality control. The schools had marketing costs as a big part of their expenses. In case you wondered: Harvard University spends little on marketing. It doesn't have to. Neither does the University of Michigan, nor for that matter most state colleges. If you are a Catholic kid of above-average intelligence you know about Notre Dame University and even know what exit to take to it off the Indiana Toll Road. Corinthian Colleges, which owned several of the for-profit educational institutions that have very poor records for their students earning enough to pay off the loans, spent heavily on marketing.
The Obama Administration practically shut those schools down. That was the responsible thing to do. The regulation of college debt is now much tighter.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.