I remember how it was -- JR
Republicans Should Bring Back College Debt Bankruptcy, And Here’s Why
For the last several years, Democrats have been running on wiping out student loan debt at taxpayer expense. On Aug. 24, President Biden finally bowed to the pressure and announced he will unilaterally “forgive” up to $20,000 worth of debt for some borrowers.
Republican candidates have generally had little to say on the subject other than to reject the government giveaway, but the problem of crippling debt remains for many Gen-Zers, Millennials, and Gen-Xers. Republicans may well be losing winnable votes over this issue, and if no plan is put forward, we can expect Democrats will eventually win the day.
What should Republicans do to address the student loan crisis? It is very simple: bring back bankruptcy for student debt for those who cannot repay their loans after several years of good-faith efforts and require that colleges repay half of their students’ discharged debt.
Nearly every college in the country accepts federal money, and if they wish to continue receiving this funding, colleges should be willing to assist in cleaning up the mess that so many of them helped create.
Fifty years ago, college debt was readily dischargeable in bankruptcy; but since then, Congress and the courts have made it more and more difficult to discharge student debt. It is past time to reverse course.
How big is the student debt crisis? Nearly 48 million Americans owe money on student loans; more than 45 million of them owe the federal government. A U.S. News poll from earlier this year found that 37 percent could not afford to make payments on these loans. Another 27 percent said they could barely afford to make their payments. If this poll is accurate, more than 15 million borrowers cannot repay their loans, and 9 million can barely afford their loan payments.
In addition to helping individual borrowers, bankruptcy for student debt would benefit American society. The U.S. News poll also found that 37 percent of those with student debt were putting off a home purchase, 32 percent were putting off saving for retirement, 19 percent were putting off starting a family, and 18 percent were putting off marriage.
Once freed from their debts, these college graduates would have an easier time settling down, starting and raising a family, and buying a home or starting a business. All of these outcomes benefit society at large and increase the likelihood that a person will hold conservative views.
Why should colleges be required to repay a portion of their students’ discharged debt? In addition to the fact that colleges have profited handsomely from the student debt crisis, they have also kept crucial pieces of information from students and parents. For example, most colleges do not disclose the average salary earned by graduates of the institution’s various degree programs. Furthermore, colleges routinely issue intentionally confusing financial aid award letters that make it difficult to discern how much a year of college costs and how much of the aid package consists of loans that must be repaid. So it should not be at all surprising when young people make poor choices based on incomplete data.
Allowing individuals with crushing student debt to discharge that debt in bankruptcy and holding colleges accountable for their students’ outcomes would transform higher education. If colleges knew they would be required to repay their students’ discharged debt, then colleges would change their ways in a hurry. They would likely pare back or jettison degree programs that provide few employment opportunities and focus on preparing students for the real world.
Colleges would also be incentivized to trim their bureaucracies, reduce costs, and work harder to ensure their students found suitable jobs after graduation. In other words, bankruptcy for college debt with a clawback provision would help align the financial interests of colleges and their students.
Biden’s plan, by contrast, simply rewards colleges’ greed and profligacy and decouples the cost of a college degree from its economic value. That colleges have failed to produce graduates capable of earning enough to pay back their loans is of no consequence; colleges get paid anyway.
Colleges now have no incentive to reassess their spending and lower tuition, as they would if they were on the hook for a portion of student debt in bankruptcy. Instead, colleges can continue to eagerly belly up to the federal loan trough and spend extravagantly on projects, programs, buildings, administrators, and amenities that have little or nothing to do with providing quality education. Colleges can go right on with degree programs that produce graduates who cannot pay back their loans.
Before Biden’s move, colleges and students may have only been working under the assumption the federal government would eventually forgive student debt. Now they know. The precedent is now set for the next student loan crisis — an inevitability so long as the federal government remains in the student loan business. The federal government will not reassess its lending habits as a private bank would. It will simply go on lending, same as before, until the next student loan crisis hits.
Nor will Biden’s plan give students or employers any reason to reconsider the economic value of a college education as compared to alternatives such as vocational training, on-the-job training, or starting a small business out of high school.
To help solve the student debt crisis, transform higher education, reduce tuitions, and improve conservatives’ electoral prospects, Republicans should support allowing student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy with a clawback provision that requires colleges to pay back half their alums’ discharged debt. Gambling and credit card debts run up by middle-aged adults are routinely discharged in bankruptcy. Why shouldn’t college debt be treated the same way?
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The fate of a generation of Jewish children is at stake in yeshiva debate
By Michael Steinhardt
In a surprisingly caustic Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Dovid Margolin, a senior editor at the Hasidic magazine Chabad.org, warned of a major new threat to his community’s vast network of schools, known as yeshivas. “New York’s yeshivas face a challenge with echoes of ancient persecution,” he wrote, comparing it to the shuttering of Jewish cheder schools in the Soviet Union a century ago.
He wasn’t alone in sounding the alarm. “This war on Orthodox Jews’ religious educational underpinnings,” wrote Eli Steinberg in the Daily Wire, “is as much an existential threat as the madmen who storm their grocery stores with guns and rush their homes with machetes.”
Margolin and Steinberg aren’t talking about violence or state-sponsored persecution, however. The looming horror they describe is nothing more than a set of proposals the state Board of Regents is considering to help these schools provide children a basic education.
Upwards of 65,000 Hasidic children statewide do not receive the education they deserve. Most of them are boys attending yeshivas whose language of instruction is Yiddish: Children are not even taught to read and write in English. Similar neglect is found in math, science and other key subjects.
The lack of a basic secular education contributes to a cycle of poverty that prevails across the Hasidic community — one that will only get worse as its population grows.
Such schools are not simply neglectful: They fail to meet New York’s legal requirements for education.
True, the 1895 state law mandating compulsory education allows for the creation of nonpublic schools, including religious ones like yeshivas. But such schools must still offer a secular education “substantially equivalent” to nearby public schools’.
And public schools are constitutionally obligated to provide, per a 1995 ruling, a “sound basic education” — including reading, writing, math and other skills necessary for productive civic engagement.
This month, the Board of Regents will consider a series of regulations aimed at helping nonpublic schools, including yeshivas, fill the needs — and rights guaranteed by the state Constitution — of their students. They flow from a 2015 complaint that offered detailed accounts of educational neglect. After a few years of court battles, the proposals on the table offer no fewer than four different pathways to compliance.
Contrary to opponents’ claims, the proposals do not interfere with yeshivas’ religious freedoms or management. They come from a genuine desire to help them follow the law while protecting their community’s way of life.
There is nothing inherent in Jewish tradition that forecloses a basic secular education. For many centuries until very recently, most traditional rabbis learned how to earn a living alongside their religious studies. Today, Modern Orthodox day schools provide a rigorous secular education alongside their religious one — and some are among the nation’s top private schools. Indeed, some Orthodox communities in America compete favorably against almost every other ethno-religious category, Jewish or otherwise, for academic excellence.
Efforts like those of Margolin, Steinberg and others to paint their opponents as closet Cossacks are beyond outrageous. Many behind the campaign to make Hasidic schools follow the law, such as Young Advocates for Fair Education, which filed the 2015 complaint, are themselves committed Jews worried about the fate of the children who attend these schools.
As am I. For more than three decades, I’ve invested heavily in programs like Birthright Israel, which strengthen Jewish identity in the Diaspora. Central to my identity has always been a concern for the success of all Jewish communities — including the ultra-Orthodox. They are my people as much as any other group of Jews.
So it troubles me deeply that so many Hasidic leaders have chosen a path that rejects the Jewish tradition of educational excellence and instead leads to poverty, dependence and an inability to contribute meaningfully to the world. This is most sharply expressed in the education their children, especially their boys, receive.
For that reason, I’ve always looked for ways to help ultra-Orthodox communities become more economically self-sufficient and build excellence through education. I’ve also been a supporter of YAFFED’s efforts to enforce New York law.
But in the American Jewish community, only a small number of philanthropists, and none of the major institutions, have taken up the fight. The Jewish establishment has been surprisingly silent.
American Jews must understand what is truly at stake in the debate over New York Hasidic schools: nothing less than the fate of a generation of Jewish children. Organized American Jewry should stand up to the voices opposing the proposed regulations and strongly show their support.
And the Board of Regents, as well as the state’s Education Department, should stand firm in enforcing the law and not hesitate to pass and implement the proposals.
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Team Biden’s shameless bid to dodge blame for school closure damage
Team Biden’s comment on news that school lockdowns cost America’s kids years of progress boils down to “Don’t blame us!”
Seriously: President Joe Biden’s Education Department late last week issued this absurdity: “When President Biden took office, most schools in America remained closed. President Biden got to work. He put teachers at the front of the vaccine line and got Congress to provide aid to improve ventilation and spacing in schools. This plan produced results: A few weeks after President Biden put these measures in place, a majority of schools were open for the first time since the pandemic started.”
What bull: The Biden administration without question slowed down school reopenings, in concert with Democrats nationwide who were rushing to please teachers unions that fought them.
It’s a known fact that schools reopened far sooner in Republican-led “red” states and cities than in Democratic-controlled “blue” ones. Teachers unions in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities kept schools closed far longer than in, say, Florida — which had in fact reopened well before Biden took office.
In February 2021, the White House pushed the Centers for Disease Control to accept the input of American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, which led the CDC to adopt “advisory” language delaying reopenings.
The fact that most schools reopened after Biden took office had nothing to with him. In fact, local leaders had to ignore the Bidenites’ advice to realize that 1) kids were never actually at significant COVID risk, and 2) school shutdowns did enormous damage to children.
America’s children, particularly minority kids in major cities, needlessly suffered immense learning loss thanks to Democrats’ eagerness to satisfy a selfish special interest.
Now that the damage is obvious, all the villains from Weingarten to the White House are pretending they worked hard to reopen schools. It’s a shameful, self-serving lie.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/05/team-bidens-shameless-bid-to-dodge-blame-for-school-closure-damage/
***********************************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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