I remember how it was -- JR
Friday, August 26, 2022
Key Obama Official Shreds Biden's 'Reckless' Student Debt Cancellation: 'Everyone Else Will Pay for This'
The Harvard professor who headed the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration torched President Joe Biden’s student loan debt cancellation on Wednesday, calling it “reckless.”
“Everyone else will pay for this either in the form of higher inflation or in higher taxes or lower benefits in the future,” Jason Furman tweeted as part of a long thread on the subject.
Biden announced Wednesday that Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the Department of Education are eligible for $20,000 in student loan debt cancellation, while non-Pell recipients could get $10,000 of their debt canceled.
Anyone with an income of less than $125,000 a year is eligible. Biden further said that the pause on repayment has been extended through Dec. 31.
Furman exploded about the move in a series of tweets.
“Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless. Doing it while going well beyond one campaign promise ($10K of student loan relief) and breaking another (all proposals paid for) is even worse,” he wrote.
“The White House fact sheet has sympathetic examples about a construction worker making $38K and a married nurse making $77,000 a year. But then why design a policy that would provide up to $40,000 to a married couple making $249,000? Why include law and business school students?”
“Those examples also contradict the baseline some have concocted to claim that this won’t raise inflation. The claim it won’t raise inflation is based on the construction worker going from permanently paying $0 interest to paying $31 a month at an annual cost of $372,” Furman continued.
Furman said the White House is defying rationality in touting the plan.
“You can’t use one baseline (interest payments suspended) to argue this will constrain demand & then a different baseline (interest payments restored) to describe the benefits. That is incoherent, inconsistent & indefensible cherry picking–I hope the White House doesn’t do it,” he wrote.
“There are a number of other highly problematic impacts including encouraging higher tuition in the future, encouraging more borrowing, creating expectations of future debt forgiveness, and more,” he added.
Furman also said it wasn’t clear to him that the president has the power to unilaterally forgive student loan debt.
“Even if technically legal I don’t like this amount of unilateral Presidential power,” he wrote.
Even before the plan was announced, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers had opposed the idea on Twitter.
“Every dollar spent on student loan relief is a dollar that could have gone to support those who don’t get the opportunity to go to college,” he wrote on Monday.
“Student loan debt relief is spending that raises demand and increases inflation. It consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college. It will also tend to be inflationary by raising tuitions.
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Harvard Loses Big Thanks to Woke Investments, About to Be Beat by Oil-Drilling University of Texas
Harvard is a leader in woke investing by eschewing investments in fossil fuels, gun makers and other stocks, companies and funds it feels fail the liberal litmus test, but because of this policy, its investment portfolio is losing big time.
Meanwhile, in stark contrast, the University of Texas is raking in huge profits by selling oil drilling leases on land it owns and has made so much money that it rivals the much richer and older Harvard in revenue.
In a recent report on the oil revenue being earned by the University of Texas (UT), Bloomberg noted that the school owns 2.1 million acres in the Permian Basin situated in the Lone Star State.
UT’s land, “almost the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined,” is being leased to more than 250 drilling operations, including ConocoPhillips and Continental Resources, Inc., and the drilling leases are bringing a bounty to the school.
Bloomberg reported that the land is set to “post its best-ever annual revenue in fiscal 2022.” Much of this is due to the high prices of oil, of course.
Bloomberg added that “oil reached a high of $120 a barrel earlier this year as a result of a war-induced energy crunch. The revenue is expected to help narrow the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 billion endowment and Harvard’s $53.2 billion as of June 2021.”
“The University of Texas has a cash windfall when everyone is looking at a potential cash crunch,” William Goetzmann, a professor of finance and management studies at Yale University’s School of Management, told Bloomberg. “Adjusting your portfolio for social concerns is not costless.”
Without a doubt, the millions that UT is earning from its oil drilling program will keep the school in cash for decades to come and will help the school weather any lean times, at least for a while.
In fact, UT has come close to toppling the Ivy League easterners in investments, Bloomberg wrote. Harvard’s “annualized 10-year returns as of June 2021 are among the lowest of its peers in the eight-school Ivy League, according to Bloomberg data.” But Texas is swimming in returns.
“The University of Texas System last overtook Yale’s endowment in 2018 as the second-richest US university because of rising oil prices,” Bloomberg reported, adding that UT has topped Harvard’s fellow Ivy League school, Yale.
UT is not banking solely on revenue from its vast oil fields, granted. It also has heavy investments in wind and solar power facilities. But right now, oil is bringing in dividends.
Naturally, being a left-wing outlet, Bloomberg did its best to undermine UT by blaming it for helping fuel the climate crisis with its investments.
Bloomberg gave space in its UT story to the climate change alarmist group named Environment Texas, whose representative told Bloomberg, “This is money that’s helping to fuel the climate crisis. I think that many students and faculty don’t know where the money is coming from. And when they find out, I think they will be shocked and very much opposed to this dirty money. It’s not something we should be celebrating.”
Whatever it is or isn’t, UT’s oil concerns are bringing millions in dividends.
Ultra-rich Harvard, on the other hand, has not been so fortunate. Its $53.2 billion endowment as of last year may seem massive, but it could have been so much more if not for its woke investing policy.
In June, the Harvard Crimson newspaper said that 41 of the 44 companies that Harvard’s investment arm, the Harvard Management Co., has thrown the school’s cash at have lost money in the first quarter of 2022. As a result, the IBL News reported, Harvard saw a decline of 43 percent in its stock portfolio during that quarter.
Worse, that first quarter decline is no outlier. In a report from last year, the Crimson told its readers that Harvard Management Co. has underperformed for the last 12 years in a row, and its investment policies left millions unearned. So, despite the outrageous base of over $50,000 a year for tuition, and its humongous $53 billion endowment, the school’s investment policies have actually hurt it.
Harvard is certainly not “broke” by any means. However, its policies prove the veracity to the idea that going woke eventually means going broke.
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Welcome mat for Indian students in Australian universities
The higher education sector is pushing Labor to lure thousands more Indian students with cheaper visas and easier working arrangements to secure the nation’s stake in a market set to produce 500 million graduates and undergraduates by 2035.
Education Minister Jason Clare is holding rolling talks this week with his Indian counterpart Dharmendra Pradhan to tick off on key parts of the interim free-trade deal struck between the two countries in April, boost research collaboration and get more Indian students enrolled in Australian universities.
As universities try to diversify their foreign student intake and wean themselves off a decade-long overreliance on the Chinese market, the number of Indian students granted a visa almost doubled between June and July, from just over 3000 to close to 6000 as visa backlogs were worked through by the Home Affairs Department following a boost to staff under Labor.
Mr Clare said on Monday a “relatively small number of Indian students” studied in Australia, with 59,000 currently enrolled – 5500 of whom were offshore. “India has a challenge of another magnitude … the sheer scale of training half a billion young Indian students is enormous,” he said.
“I think I can confidently speak for Australian universities … that we’re keen to work with (India) to help implement that bold agenda.”
Mr Pradhan said his government wanted to “take the best practice of higher education of Australia to India”.
“A lot of Indian-origin students are coming to Australia for higher education … India is thankful to you for that,” he said.
While pushing for Australia to take up the “opportunity” of attracting more Indian students, Mr Clare said there were only so many places available.
“There’s a lot more we can do to help in the implementation of India’s education plan in India itself, either universities setting up campuses in India like the University of Wollongong is intending to do, or also the opportunity to provide courses online,” he said. But chief executive of the powerful Group of Eight, Vicki Thomson, warned fewer Indian students had taken up studying online during Covid compared to cohorts in China.
Ms Thomson said Australia was facing “stiff competition” in the international education market from Britain, the US and Canada, and raised the need for a high potential visa that would target graduates in areas of workforce need and encourage them into employment once they graduated.
“Our engagement with India, the world’s fastest-growing economy, is critical to the future success of our sector,” she said. “Building on our strong bilateral relationship with India in the higher education and research sector will be mutually beneficial to both nations.”
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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