I Hope He's Wrong But Fear He's Right

 

But he's dead on about investment places ruining a brand.

Symptom Not Cause

IN spooked them. They thought they had Trump and MAGA contained. They thought they could ignore Trump. They thought that MAGA was weakened, split, and easily put back in the corner. They believed the fake polls. They figured their podcast bros caused more than enough…

— unseen1 (@unseen1_unseen) May 7, 2026

I keep telling the few liberal friends I still have the Trump, and MAGA, is a symptom not the cause of what's going on.

It doesn't end when he leaves office.

It started back when the TEA in Tea Party meant "taxed enough already" and before the media convinced everyone TEA meant KKK.

The media that did that no longer has that kind of power.  Especially with the SLPC involved in wire fraud charges.

Buckle up, Buttercup! 

I Did Note They Are Different Words

Unintended and unexpected are not the same word.

Most, if not all, unintended consequences from socialist "planning" seem to come with the expected consequences.

Most, if not all, unintended consequences are predicted before the "planning" can be implemented.

What's amazing is how many people are still surprised when the Gods of the Copybook Headings, with terror and slaughter, return. 

California has become the latest state to notice that upping the minimum wage to a stupidly high level doesn't result in comfortable lifestyles for the people earning that wage.

The best case was inflation eating up all the gains in income, and they are not getting the best case.  When the one-time costs of automation are cheaper than the ongoing expenses of keeping an employee, the bot gets the job.

If the cost of employing people makes a business unprofitable, then it closes.

In both cases, the minimum wage worker will be getting the true minimum wage. 

Prescient?

I wrote this over 13 years ago.

Cassandra

I knew I'd posted about Zelensky's attitude problem before.  Two years ago almost to the day.

This is not a new behavior for him at all.

It's really lending credence to the idea that the meeting going the way it did was sorta planned.

I Wish I'd Said That

Bearing Arms and David Codrea are both concerned that "common use" is excluding a lot of guns because they were made illegal before they could be acquired in sufficient numbers to attain "common use" status.

Welcome to 2014, gentlemen.

Punctuation Matters

There's a difference between:

We will not comply again.

AND

We will not comply, again.

The person who didn't notice the comma got a good head of steam going condemning the original poster before people pointed it out.

But, just in case you're in possession of a sheepskin from a midwest high school (like me)...

The first is saying that they complied once and won't be complying this time.  The second is say they didn't comply the first time and would not comply the next time either.

I won't even condemn the a person in the first case.

There were a lot of unknowns at the time and most people don't know much about the topic.

I credit the internet for getting the knowledge out and raising mistrust of institutions who've been actively working against our interests for decades.

I really feel like we on the cusp of something.

Especially when Harvey's liberal co-workers are complaining about Brandon as loud as anyone on my side of the aisle.  The only thing they got that they wanted from him is that Joe Biden is not, in fact, Donald Trump.

I can't even get mad at them for that.  George W Bush was not Al "Ozone" Gore.  George W Bush was not John Kerry.  John McCain was not Barack Obama, nor was Mitten "I did Obamacare first" Romney.  Donald Trump was not Hillary Clinton.

I get voting against someone rather than for someone.  I've literally been doing it for decades.

Still, everyone who's a graduated of the Ivy League and jealously guarding the levers of power is missing that Donald is a symptom of unrest, not the cause.

They're also missing that what they're doing the the January 6th protesters is not deterring a repeat.  It's informing them that, next time, bring guns and to not hesitate to shoot.

These are facts on the ground that need to be accounted for going forward that are being actively denied.

I can easily see if Biden gets reelected that the hotter heads will say, "well, that's it then..." then raising the black flag and start slitting throats in the most literal sense.

This Would Help A Lot Of Situations Actually

The lawyers in Congress should love this idea...  Should pass like shit through a goose.

If a contract is so complicated that a high-school graduate cannot hope to understand it and they signed without legal representation, the contract is void.

Look at the single page document that's a car loan then compare it to the pages and pages of credit card and student loan contracts...

Contract law has gotten out of hand all across the board.

It's lawyer's fault for taking cases where the simple language says their client owes, but they try to get out of it anyways.  So more complex language is added to prevent that from happening again.

Lather, rinse, repeat, until most every contract is an indecipherable mess of legalese.

Like insurance contracts.

Prescription Med Shortage

I was reading an article about how many common medications are currently in short supply and how it's because China and India still have not bounced back from the Wu Ping Cough.

Well, by jingo!

I think it's high time we acknowledge that off-shoring all of these industries is a shitty long term plan and become industrious again.

Some judicious tinkering of minimum wage and union eligibility laws might even make such moves profitable.  We can even establish some needs based tests on welfare assistance and get some able bodied folks to working who aren't right now.

Or they can starve, I'm fine with that.

Hell, we can even incentivize these new workers with student loan carrots.  Getting these jobs and industries back home will probably more than offset the costs from forgiving the loans by getting these debtors to work and paying some taxes; and having money to spend on something besides their loan and (just perhaps) spending that money on products made by the company your boomer ass works for.

Oh, and geld the EPA bullshit for this national defense necessary industry.

It would work, that's why it will never be done.

Wrong Tack

What is needed for a decent sized chunk of student loan debtors isn't a loan discharge, but a more flexible way to get it paid back.

When the company that holds the loan insists on a 10-year repayment plan, and the loan has been in default for several, there's just no way most people can afford it.  If the lender won't take a smaller payment, what is the debtor supposed to do?

There also needs to be a system in place for when the government takes action that destroys a graduate's ability to earn an income with their degree.

The government killed several reputable schools during the Obama administration and with the exception of one tech school all of the degrees from those shut-down schools are worthless.

Imagine the government burning your house down to stop the spread of some insect and still being expected to pay the mortgage.

That's where students from these schools sit.

Why shouldn't they hold the government accountable for the waste of their time and money?

It wasn't their poor decisions that led to the schools being closed.

In fact, they were likely attending those schools because the tuition was lower than the neighboring land-grant university.  But their thrift should be punished.

It's especially unfair that these schools were shut down for the reasons they were shut down because those land-grant universities were guilty of the same crimes: but only the people directly responsible for the crimes were punished; not everyone who'd ever graduated.

And until that moment: There wasn't much difference in the degree from these schools.  After that moment, the tax supported school's degree still has value and the privately owned won doesn't.

But it's the student who took out the loan's fault?

Fuck them, you've got yours.  Lump them in with the deadbeats.

Insist they pay for that scorched patch of dirt on an empty lot and forbid them from living any where else until they do.

Here's One For You

Somewhere there's a pie chart showing the percentage of taxes paid and the income of the people paying.

Ah, here it is:

Essentially if you're making less than $150k a year, you're paying for a lot less.  That's just 19.9% of the population paying 2/3 of the taxes.

Considering how many of the rat-fuck pricks at the top end of this scale are flaming fucking liberals, you should feel good that your meager tax contribution is going to pay for student loans when they're footing almost the entire bill.

Rest easy, Citizen!

The Whining But Not The Reading

I titled my post appropriately.

The economy was going to be ruined if we forgave $400 billion in student loans, but would be (miraculously) unaffected with a different $400 billion disappearing from the economy?

It's especially obtuse of some readers on their high-horses about student loans in that they're missing that nearly all of that $400 billion isn't going to be paid.  Ever.

The debtors are simply going to default and make their way the best they can.

It's an impossible situation for many of them.

"I got a good degree!"  Great for you.  Now quit so I can take your job to pay my loan.  Oh, you're not going to quit until you retire?  That makes your degree useless for everyone else.

"I paid my loans back!"  Yes, but college was $10k then, not $75k and wages did not get 7.5 times bigger since then.

Something else you can't seem to absorb, you got your degree at the perfect time and place.  Booming economy when college was as cheap as it ever got and it stayed boomed for you to get just enough experience to keep your job and not so much seniority that you were clipped to save the company money when the boom ended.

Those high-experience people went out and took jobs below their experience and education to fill the time until they could access their retirement funds, shutting the entry level people out until then.  Then they retired and there's nobody working their way up anymore!

Cue second economic hit.

Everything is compounded by politicians "doing something" every time.

And you voted for them.  So don't shirk your responsibilities now.

It's your fault as much as anyone.

But I Was Told It Would Destroy The Economy

The fraud on PPP and the amounts spent on Ukraine are getting close to exceeding the bottom estimate of the costs of student loan forgiveness.

Which is interesting, because I was assured that such forgiveness would devastate the economy.

But, hey, you LIKED these lies.

I'm Up For The Adult Conversation

In fact, most of the pro-liberty people want to have adult conversations exclusively when talking about stuff like freedom.

We're not going to get it because one side can't even use the word genocide correctly.

They will probably be driven into a murderous rage and kill some more innocent children and staff if you were to point out that, in fact, the adult conversation about teachers teaching this has already occurred and the ruling was in the parent's rights column.

People who are trans are about 0.1% of the population.  That number barely shifted when attitudes changed from suppression to tolerance.

When children start identifying as trans at a much higher level than the historical rate, something's afoot.

I don't like being the one to say it, but gender dysphoria is a mental illness.  Someone suffering from this condition literally isn't seeing reality correctly.

There are varying degrees of severity, but can we, perhaps, also admit that, for some people with this condition, seeing the wrong gender in the mirror might be the smallest distortion of reality they are experiencing.

Some are definitely higher functioning than others.

What appears to be going on in the schools is a conscious decision to inflict a mental illness on children where no illness existed before.

The appearance of this has been reinforced by the reaction to parents asking pointed questions about things like the contents of the library and drag-shows.

Aside: I've no problem with drag-shows, but they're adult entertainment.  I've no real problem with people who are trans and have locked horns with some you readers over how to show some basic, human, compassion towards someone suffering from the malady.

In short, the radical trans activists got busted for grooming.

Speaking of using words incorrectly, several activists tried to shift the term "grooming" to mean any teaching of a child about anything.

That screams that the parents were correct about what was going on to most people.

Even if we assume the best and that the trans-grooming was to create acceptance for the transgender (because acceptance would be better than tolerance) and not making children more vulnerable to pederasts, increasing the number of people with gender dysphoria means we're also increasing the pool of people who are very likely to kill themselves.

Either from an inability to find a groove where they can exist with themselves or from the condition clearing up later and seeing they can never return to being as they were; people with gender dysphoria kill themselves at a tragically high rate.

But, as I said, the argument was already settled in favor of the parents.

Public schools cannot teach religion in a manner which proselytizes.

Teaching acceptance of transgender norms is attacking firmly held religious beliefs and public schools are already barred from such education.  The rulings, to date, have been primarily used to stop the teaching of religious dogma, but they are clear that they apply to secular positions as well.  Read a couple, it's enlightening.

At the core, a parent has the right to decide what the state exposes their children to.

Exposing children to adult entertainment without regard to these parents wishes is wrong.

The retort that some parents DO expose their children to such things is irrelevant.  That parent is exercising their right to decide, not having the decision made for them.

Having books with adult content in a library where children can gain unsupervised access to it is not censorship.  Nor is taking those books out of the library "book burning."  I am starting to think the real problem here is language dysphoria, look how many words are being used incorrectly here.

The reason all this is so damned important is that children do not have the capacity to truly Grok many of these topics.  That comes with age and experience and the information has to be rationed out in small amounts as they prove they are capable of understanding.

It's why the answer to "where do babies come from" involves storks or cabbage leafs and not firing up PornHub when the kids are too young to understand.

Forcing someone to learn something they cannot understand creates its own mental illness as their brain attempts to assert coherence to something they, literally, cannot put into coherent context.  During this, you can sure as fuck steer them into giving you a desired response.

When you combine that with how easily children were manipulated on the witness stand and the pure fantasy of "recovered memories" the scope of the problem becomes clear.

Doing this to a child is wrong and should stop.

I've heard from a couple of trans people that they've "always known" they are trans.  Sadly, while they do believe it, it's most likely not true.

They're retroactively changing their memories to "realize" they've "always" been like this when, in fact, it didn't actually manifest until puberty started to creep in.

Aside: "But I've always wanted to wear girl's clothes!  You're mistaken, McThag!"  Prepubescent transvestitism is a separate thing and doesn't seem to have a real correlation to later dysphoria.  That both things can be present in one person doesn't prove a causal relationship.

Not a single thing I've said should be taken to mean that we should discriminate against transgender people.  I'm still in the compassion camp because what cannot be cured, must be endured.  There's no reliable and universal cure.  What works well for one person might be catastrophic for another.

The question remains about what age a child should be exposed to adult topics.

The answer is individual, and mostly private.

It is, also, certainly NOT the government's decision to make for a parent.  Nor is it the purview of any group who happens to be in fashion with the teacher's unions at the moment.

Nobody Will Listen

I keep trying to tell people where their shit is leading.

But, because I'm Cassandra, nobody will listen.

There's a megapost in drafts that isn't going to be published because I know that nobody will listen.

The people who want a fight are too eager to square off to stop now.

One side has utterly failed to read the situation and is going to lose in an epic fashion.

The other side is going to think their victory is from widespread support of their politics, but it's more an "enemy of my enemy" situation than actual allegiance.

They will be surprised to find they're not victorious in the end as the larger part of their alliance kicks them to the curb when the fight's over.

It will be far better to not have this get to a fight rather than an argument.

It Does Occur

I really think that if we were to pare government back down to just what's authorized in the constitution then we wouldn't have near the problems we have.

But even if we did, we'd be able to deal with them rather than being forced to sit and watch while government prevents us from acting.

Take student loans, for example.

This is a problem caused by government interference in the marketplace.

It's probably not going to be solved by the government DOING something.

It's also not going to be solved by "fuck those people".

You're not helping.

It's not going to be solved if you cannot comprehend that the conditions when your boomer ass got your degree do not, and have not, existed for a while now.

But remember what I said about the government fucking around in the marketplace?

It was their policies that drove many places to require a degree, ANY degree, in jobs that don't really require any formal education.  All because the bell curve is real and too many people of a politically protected class couldn't a pre-employment aptitude test.

The degree, ANY degree, became a proxy for such testing.

A bachelor's in underwater basket weaving became as valuable as a doctorate in advanced mathematics to land one of these jobs and was a lot easier to get.

Have you noticed that you need to get a master's today to land a job that needed a bachelor's 30 years ago?

I noticed that my associate's stopped being good enough to get mechanical design jobs 20 years ago, despite ten years experience doing the job.  Now that job requires a bachelor's in mechanical engineering where the engineer will never use most of what they learned.

Real engineering jobs are needing master's and getting ever more demanding of narrow specializations...

At least that was the trend when I got laid off when the ham-fisted response to 9/11 killed the contracts keeping the doors open were cancelled.

But the point is the market is distorted and requires active work to unfuck it.

I would also like to point out that while this slow motion education train-wreck was unfolding, the loudest voices opposed to any action to alleviate student loan debts said nothing.

The internet is forever.  Your blog is old enough to have made mention of when it started.

You.  Said.  Nothing.

You were blind sided as hard as the kid who just realized that a degree in anything doesn't land a job they couldn't get before getting the degree (but without the debt).

Admit it.

The actual solution is the oldest one.

Bankruptcy.

I know why this is unthinkable, do you?

Hindsight Is The Best

Lacking an accurate crystal ball, one can only bet on what seems likely at the time.

Had I known that I'd have to become a stay at home dad regardless of if I graduated I'd have skipped college altogether.

In the heady days of 2000 it seemed like a good plan.

The economy around here was doing decently, I had a decent job doing mechanical design; Harvey's career prospects were looking up as her degree had landed an entry level job as a financial aid representative for a small for-profit college.

I took classes at night and early Saturday mornings on a part-time basis at the same college that employed Harvey.  Tuition discounts made it so we didn't have to borrow at this point.

Then some religious nut-bag plowed a plane into the World Trade Center.

The company I worked for went under.

The Boy hit some glandular change and became impossible to place at all of the local care centers which we could afford.

So, thinking this was temporary, we borrowed to get Harvey the MBA they said she needed for promotion and I kept at the night classes full-time.

Things still looked positive at this point that the thing with The Boy was a phase and would be over by the time I graduated and got a job.

Wrong.

Had I known then what I know now I would not have fallen for the sunk-cost fallacy and completed my degree.

My school had been sold, twice.  Going from an independent college to part of Everest Colleges to being part of Corinthian Colleges.  With each sale, the reputation of the school suffered.

I discovered that I could not transfer out to a different university because of the Byzantine number of rules about accreditation, the same rules that kept me from transferring credits from Iowa State to my school.  Rules that the Department of Education issues and maintains via accrediting bodies which are as independent of the government as The Fed...

Every sale changed the policies about discounts, scholarships, tuition and loans.

Tuition increased every semester.  My last credit cost a lot more than my first.  So we had to borrow more to stay in school and not lose the progress already made.

Every sale affected the accreditation and what classes I needed.  Redundant math and English classes were paid for and taken.

Then I graduated in '05.  B average.

Even if the economy was robust, I was still stuck at home with The Boy. 

Harvey, on the other hand, appeared to be advancing well.  She'd gotten the MBA and was the head of the financial aid department and was Everest's go-to-girl to fly in and fix ailing departments and get them up to code.

Corinthians didn't want someone like her.

So they cut her.

And my mom died.

Just in time because what she left me paid the bills while Harvey looked for another job.

We still had hope!  We hadn't lost that much time.

But Harvey had to start over with a new company.  Twice.

Congress and the Department of Education keep changing the rules to favor the taxpayer supported state universities at the expense of cheaper privately owned colleges and academies.  (Where's the bitching about your tax money going to support those?)

It's affected her career.

But it's important to note that we're not standing here with our hands out demanding that the government come save us.  Though it would be nice if the genuine crimes committed by the owners of Corinthians had resulted in the acknowledgement that none of those degrees were worth the paper they were printed on and told those owners that THEY owed the loans they predatorily issued to unsuspecting students.

Technically I could have my debt wiped.  If can, somehow, come up with the lump sum to pay the IRS.  If your school is closed by the DoE for cause, you too can have your loans cancelled.  For a gigantic tax bill.

The IRS doesn't do the, "but I don't have it game."  They decide you owe, you pay, or get your shit seized and you go to jail if that's not enough.

That make us 50-something olds with nothing and a disabled kid on our hands with no place to live.  Yeah, sign me up for that!

So we sit with a not insubstantial amount garnished from every check until the end of time.  We want to pay these off, but the repayment terms are asinine once you get so far underwater.  We're never getting out. 

Fuck You Too

Thank you all for the sanctimonious responses and universal blanket condemnation to anyone with a student loan who might benefit from the idiotic decision of President Biden.

You know it wasn't ME who did this to you, right?

But you sure are angry with me, aren't you?

I should have picked a better school?

I should have picked a cheaper school?

I should have worked more jobs so I could skip the loans?

I should have gotten better and more jobs when I graduated?

Please explain how any of those choices keeps President Biden from doing this.

Go on.

Nothing?

For the record:

I picked a good school with an excellent reputation.  It was cheaper than the land-grant university AND had better placement.

I went to college because I did not have the skills to get more than the job I had, it wasn't a matter of not working hard enough it was a case of there not being enough hours in the day to gather the funds.

I started college when the great expansion in government aid and exponential increase in tuition happened.  If I had managed to save a bundle for tuition, it would no longer have been enough to make it to graduation.

Especially hard since I no longer had the hours from before because I was now a full time student.

But graduated I did.

I needn't have bothered.

You see, while I was attending a solid school when I started, it wasn't when I left.

The Department of Education allowed investment places to purchase and consolidate independent colleges.  So my school was purchased by one of those and then resold and then resold.

You might have beard of Corinthian Colleges?  It was in the news.

Because it was in the news, my degree is radioactive.

Thanks!

The DoE offers forgiveness for people in my plight, we just have to pay the taxes on the "profit" from the forgiveness.  All at once.

If I could shit that wad of money I would never have wanted a degree to get a better job!

Being a victim of timing matters.

Graduating at a moment when my son took a turn for the worse and needed someone to be here full time meant that I couldn't get job experience before the degree became completely worthless and by the time I had time...  The economy was in recession and my degree was radioactive.

Are you aware that there's a short window to get a job in your degree before the time since graduation and having no experience keeps you from talking to someone you can explain WHY you've been graduated so long without a job?

In a buyer's market for labor, that means you don't get interviews.

Extra bonus round!  My previous career was now either extra work for a degreed engineer or simply offshored.

Putting my job prospects in the minimum wage range.

Yes, we made decisions, but luck is a factor to consider.  Neutral decisions become bad choices when bad luck happens.

If you think you can completely avoid bad luck by making only good choices, you're a fucking fool.

Worse, you're a fool without compassion.

Even more fun is listen to the people who nattily talk about doing things to get their job because they had the freedom to do it when they were single, young and the economy was going gangbusters.

What did we do with the time and bad luck with my worthless degree?

We kept a roof over our heads.  We ate.  We did without.

AND IT TOOK EVERY SINGLE DIME WE HAD! 

There wasn't a penny left over for those loans for years.

And we've been paying on them, not ever going to pay them off, the interest took over and they're simply unserviceable with any conceivable wage we could hope to earn.

But it's MY fault that President Biden put some of my loan on your ass?

Actually OUR ass because we're paying taxes too.  I get to make my insufficient payment AND have my taxes pay for the forgiveness!  I think I should be more pissed off than you are!

It's not even much compared to the other sops they hand out that you don't mention.  What makes this so much worse for you?

Weak

You are already paying for student loan forgiveness and you don't even know it.

Did you know that if you make your payments for 10 years, regardless of the remaining principle, your loan gets discharged?

Forgiven, in other words.

Did you make ten years of payments?

Was the balance zero?

Did you even check?

Did you even notice that your mortgage sized student loan was getting paid back in 1/3 the time with 1/4 the payment?  That didn't seem odd to you?

But people who got fucked by the government are stealing from YOU and YOUR taxes?  YOU'RE paying for something you didn't receive?

You're ignorant of how things have been for a long time and lashing out at the wrong people.

But thanks for the anon comment that got deleted for being a dick about your reply anyways.

Some Call It Fraud

I am dead sick of the over generalization that anyone who has defaulted on their student loans is just refusing to pay for them or got a degree that would never lead to a job with an income sufficient to repay them.

Especially from people who borrowed before the massive increase in Federally guaranteed money that caused tuition prices to explode.

Case in point.  My dad got an engineering degree from Iowa State University without taking out loans and the equivalent to a minimum wage job doing dishes and odd jobs at a restaurant was enough for rent, food, entertainment, books and tuition.  In just four years.

Go on, try that today.

First thing you need to acknowledge is wages are stagnant and education is getting more expensive.  It literally costs more for everything that it did back when and by the time you've paid for a roof over your head and food in your belly... there might not be enough for the minimum loan payment with your entry level salary.

A salary that the self-righteous lecturers found sufficient 30 years ago to make loan payments, and live well.

20 years ago and live OK.

10 year ago and live at all.

And this assumes that your degree is worth something.

But what if your degree would be worth something if the people who owned the school had not been convicted of fraud and predatory lending practices?

People who didn't run the place or control daily operations, the school was literally the same as it was for decades when it built a strong reputation for graduating students who knew how to do what was expected right out of their gowns?

The fraudsters bought that good school with government approval, because you cannot make such a purchase without the Department of Education's sign-off.

DoE allowed the sale in spite of an ongoing investigation into their loan practices at other schools.

But it's the student's fault that nobody calls back with that school on their degree?

Never mind that there's no place that an employer can call to confirm they were ever a student let alone a graduate?

A degree that cannot be used to get into a different school to further their education and perhaps earn a way to service that loan.

And it's not underwater basket weaving.

Business Administration and Accounting degrees from this school going back decades became valueless overnight when the government concluded its case and closed the schools.

Leaving borrowers with a pile of debt and no realistic way of ever paying it back.

A lot of borrowers.

I hope that Brandon forgives the billions and billions of student loan debt.

The government has been handing out money to every worthless piece of shit in the world; why not people with college educations who could actually be worth something once freed of a problem that government caused in the first fucking place. 

By the way, oh high and mighty arbiters of whom is of value and whom is worthless, you'd better be able to show that you've been actually lobbying your congress creatures to eliminate DoE, Federal student loans and welfare recipients getting free college.  Because if not, you're part of the people what let this happen and are angry that you are now caught up in the avalanche now that the pebbles no longer get a vote?

How about you take a nice big sip of go fuck yourself.