Forgive them, they know not what they do: Eleven red states — Kansas, Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas and Utah — are suing the Biden administration over its attempt to forgive student loans through the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to block President Joe Biden’s earlier, broader amnesty effort.
“The Biden administration is committed to reducing the student debt burden and giving borrowers breathing room with student loan repayment programs like the income-driven SAVE plan,” he reports Axios.
“The plan, launched in October, provides lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers and a faster path to forgiveness. It has already cleared the balances of more than 150,000 enrollees, who originally borrowed less than $12,000 and had been paying for 10 years ,” relationships The Washington Post. “The Biden administration has estimated that the Save plan will cost $156 billion over the next ten years, but the Congressional Budget Office says the figure is closer to $230 billion.”
But do college-educated borrowers need more breathing room, at taxpayer expense?
Breathing space at Vanderbilt: Not to be too cheap (pun intended), but it seems that some of our most elite universities, which saddle students with the largest bills, are leaving a lot of time for extracurricular activities, rather than essential ones.
Case in point: Vanderbilt (price: $89,590 per year), the site of the latest stunt by Israeli-Palestinian activists, in which a group of students occupied Kirkland Hall, “demanding the administration allow the student body to vote on a [student government] constitutional amendment to prevent … funds from being used to achieve the objectives of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement” according to THE The Vanderbilt Scammers. Of course, what’s notable isn’t that a small group of students occupied the dean’s office for 21 hours; it’s that they’ve made themselves the least understanding group of all time by blowing their self-imposed difficulties comically out of proportion.
“For 21 hours we were deprived of medical care, sleep, food, water, resources and at 5:30 in the morning I received a pat on the back and was told to stand up. handcuffed and escorted out of my university… It’s disgusting that this is how they treat student protesters on this campus,” an activist said, his voice cracking. “I experienced better conditions in prison than at Vanderbilt University.”
In prison, he says, “I had access to water, I had access to a bathroom, I had access to my friends and I had a chance to rest. How dare this university deprive us of basic humanity? How dare a top 15, 20, the University in this country has conditions more inhumane than those of a prison?” He later adds that the protesters demand the withdrawal of the charges and an apology.
I’m happy he was able to socialize while in prison, but enduring a three-hour stint with a dozen of your closest friends doesn’t make you Nelson Mandela. Hunger strikes, for example, convince others only if you carry your cross with humility and solemnity; if you can give some weight to your beliefs by demonstrating your commitment to your cause through abstention; if you can tolerate some legitimate discomfort in solidarity with those who are forced to live like this every day.
Otherwise you just look like a petulant child who needs a good shower.
Of course, this is a campus saga. But it’s a pattern that’s been repeating itself on elite campuses since the October 7 Hamas massacre: 30 Harvard students went on a 12-hour hunger strike last month (in solidarity with a group of 17 Brown students who in reality they made it eight full days, although two failed mid-stroke). Other students engaged in protests on campus, and counter-protesters at the University of California, Berkeley, broke down doors trying to end an event organized by Jewish students.
These are some of the same students who want amnesty for their loans. But it’s time for students to go back to work and for universities to lower their prices. What is currently happening on elite campuses is not something This the taxpayer wants to subsidize.
The main thing I learn from these stories about college campuses is that students are not given enough courses. We just need to reduce the free time they have and there will be less nonsense. https://t.co/qOAdHSo8Yo
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) March 26, 2024
Scenes from New York: Mayor Eric Adams yesterday announced two new initiatives designed to help deter criminals from the subway system: Metal detectors, designed to detect weapons, will be placed in some subway stations, and $20 million will be distributed to hire more doctors to enforce ” the Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams (SCOUT), a pilot program launched in collaboration with the State and the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] to connect people with serious untreated mental illnesses in the subways to mental health treatment and care.”
This appears to be in response to news this week that four people were killed by subway trains in just 24 hours. Tuesday morning, a train no. 7 hit a man at the 42nd Street – Bryant Park/Fifth Avenue station. Another train hit a man in Flatbush. Yet another struck a man at Grand Central-42nd Street. At least one of these three was a suicide; it is unclear whether the others were intentional or accidental. And on Tuesday night, a 16-year-old girl who was walking on the tracks with her friends was killed by an oncoming G train near the Fourth Avenue/9th St. station in Park Slope.
This adds to the current total of trains hit for 2024, bringing it to 30. There was a disturbing death on the subway on Monday night, in which a man with a long criminal record named Carlton McPherson pushed another man to his death, via train arriving, in East Harlem.
Adams’ plan seems poorly targeted, expensive and unlikely to work. Many of these deaths are not gun-related (although there was a train shooting last week, which I wrote about in this newsletter), and most of the criminals appear to be evaders who don’t use the turnstile. Additionally, the company Adams wants to contract with has a high false positive rate.
QUICK SHOTS
- Origins of the COVID-19 debate, plus a summary of the text, from Astral Code Tenworth watching/reading.
- “The people of Toronto could end up paying for rain falling on their properties,” reads a National post article that will leave you scratching your head, wondering if Canadians are okay (are they ever?).
- Former FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced yesterday to 25 years in prison for stealing many billions of dollars from unsuspecting clients. The judge also ordered Bankman-Fried to forfeit $11 billion. “While prosecutors have compared Bankman-Fried to Bernie Madoff, sentenced to 150 years for a massive Ponzi scheme, his sentence is more in line with the prison sentence former Enron Corp. CEO Jeffrey Skilling received for accounting fraud,” he reports Bloomberg. “He was sentenced to 24 years, although reduced on appeal.”
- How to build a cityfrom Pirate threads.
- Seattle landlord struggles to evict squatter, from National review. How come so many cities fail to protect property rights? Unsettling.
- Parenting trends of the past. Happy to live in the era in which we have got rid of goat nannies, however high in moral terms they may be:
In the Middle Ages, children were swaddled and hung on hooks so that they would not get into trouble and would therefore be away from wandering animals that might eat them. Morality was also thought to be transmitted through milk, so if you couldn’t find a moral wet nurse you would use a… pic.twitter.com/Ee3ELLVX3X
— Diana S. Fleischman (@sentintist) March 28, 2024