Displaying posts published in

April 2024

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Opinion Review & Outlook Biden’s Student Loan Howlers It takes a White House economist to come up with these beauties.

By on April 10th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-white-house-council-of-economic-advisers-report-ba633fa9?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

You almost have to pity the Biden Administration officials tasked with devising an economic justification for its latest student-loan forgiveness vote-buying ploy. Readers may get some laughs from their howlers.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) acknowledges in a report this week that President Biden has already provided enormous debt “relief” to borrowers through his sweetened income-based repayment plans. These plans cap borrower payments at 5% of discretionary income, waive future interest accruals, and discharge remaining balances after 20 years.

Thanks to this back-door loan forgiveness, 4.3 million borrowers don’t have to make payments. CEA’s simulations also show that “an average borrower with a bachelor’s degree could save $20,000 in loan payments.” One with an associate degree would pay roughly $11,700 less than under standard repayment plans, not adjusting for inflation.

But the White House economists say even more debt relief is needed because the wage premium for workers with degrees hasn’t increased commensurately with college sticker prices. “Rapid and unforeseeable rises in prices and declines in college wage premia have contributed to decades of ‘unlucky’ college-entry cohorts,” the report says.

So students who chose expensive degrees that haven’t led to gainful employment are merely “unlucky.” And because employers don’t appropriately value their degrees, the government must subsidize these poor graduates.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Antony Blinken’s Ahistorical Advice for Israel Raids and airstrikes can be tactically effective, but they don’t amount to a strategy for winning a war. By John Spencer and Liam Collins

By on April 10th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/antony-blinkens-ahistorical-advice-for-israel-war-strategy-7f1ed80f?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Biden administration is keeping the pressure on Israel not to invade Hamas’s final stronghold, in Rafah. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that such an assault would be “a mistake” and “not necessary.” Three months earlier he claimed that Israel could defeat Hamas by using “targeted operations with a smaller number of forces.”

But could it? A strategy dependent on raids and airstrikes alone has never been effective in defeating a large enemy. If Israel believes a military response is the only way it can defeat Hamas, it should ignore Washington and pursue a ground invasion supported by targeted raids and airstrikes.

U.S. thinking about the war is plagued by what former White House national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster called the “Zero Dark Thirty” fallacy. The term—named for the 2012 film about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden—refers to the mistaken belief that raiding alone can constitute a military strategy. Gen. McMaster described the thinking: “The capability to conduct raids against networked terrorist or insurgent organizations is portrayed as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, conventional joint force capability.” In other words, we can’t expect strategic outcomes from tactical missions.

America’s military efforts reflect that axiom. In the Iraq war, the U.S. quickly ousted Saddam Hussein’s Baath party and fought multiyear counterterror and counterinsurgency campaigns against enemy forces. The U.S. was successful through the combination of a small number of special operations using intelligence-driven raids to target terrorist leaders and a large number of conventional forces working to secure the local population, gather intelligence and help build institutions for governance.

In their new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine,” Gen. David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts argue that intelligence-driven special-ops raids aren’t enough to wage successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Such efforts must be combined with a population-centric strategy, requiring sizable conventional forces to “clear, hold, build” in insurgent sanctuaries.

The same goes for counterterrorism campaigns that involve drone strikes and precision bombing. President Obama conducted hundreds of drone strikes against terrorist networks between 2009 and 2017. In many cases, those strikes may have been the only prudent or politically viable option. The fallacy emerges, however, when policymakers believe that raids and precision attacks are the best options simply because they’re popular.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Three Pillars of Education By Peter Wood

By on April 10th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/three-pillars-of-education/

Editor’s Note: Nowhere has the group quota regime been more successful in its early years than in higher education, where the ideology of outcome equality is mandatory both as doctrine and as practice. A recent exchange in Public Discourse between Robert George and Yoram Hazony considered whether free speech is still a viable or desirable ideal in this era of the woke university. Here, Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, argues alongside Hazony that free speech cannot be the highest principle of education — that firmer groundings and loftier aims are necessary in the fight against a revolutionary enemy.

As Wood writes,“Real intellectual diversity, the hierarchy of knowledge, the integrity of the individual, civility, and the pursuit of truth have all been captured by the radical left and turned inside out. We win this war only if we realize that education itself is at stake.”

“If I had been asked a year ago about free speech on campus and the doctrine of “institutional neutrality,” I would have given an answer markedly different from what I give today. Not that I would have lined up with those who elevate “free speech” to be the highest principle—or the deepest foundation—of higher education. The intellectual heirs of John Stuart Mill say such things frequently and with firm assurance. Mill’s great essay, On Liberty, is their Mount Ararat. It towers over the landscape littered with discarded speech codes, debunked theories, and zealous enforcers of rules against bias. Just as certain religious enthusiasts believe Noah’s ark came to rest on the top of the Turkish mountain, certain free speech advocates anchor themselves on Mill’s idea that the truth can be approached by holding the doors of academe wide open to any and all views.

This is essentially the position taken by Robert George in his debate with Yoram Hazony in Public Discourse. Hazony, by contrast, cites Mill with an attitude of weary disdain. He says American universities love Mill’s idea that the “free exchange of divergent ideas will eventually lead society to truth and virtue.”  Hazony adds, “Indeed, the belief that free inquiry is the only road to truth has been promoted as the principal dogma of the postwar liberal university for nearly sixty years—since the ‘free speech’ movement of the 1960s.”  

Continue reading →