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After President Obama recently announced his plan to require that colleges and universities contain their tuition costs or face losing federal money, those heads of bastions of higher learning are all in a tizzy, citing over-involvement from the government.  But are their fears warranted?  After all, they have already been subject to severe state budget cuts in recent years.

And change isn’t that simple, according to Al Bowman of Illinois State, who feels that the deficit faced by most public schools cannot be so easily overcome.  He cited “fuzzy math” as part of Obama’s rationale for the plan, as decreases in state aid have made it a leap to tie federal support to tuition prices.  Illinois State, which has over twenty thousand students, has been forced to raise their tuition over forty five percent since 2007, from roughly $6,000 for an instate undergraduate to nearly $10,000.

Bowman’s response to Obama’s plan included his belief that the President assumes that universities should be more efficient, thereby operating with tinier state subsidies, and while more efficient states could be realized, those standards will be impossible to meet because of the loss of state financial support.

His suggestions include hiring more part-time or adjunct faculty and increasing class sizes, but that those efficient tactics would dilute the quality of education, which no one wants, especially as the U.S. has been roundly criticized as of late for lagging behind the rest of the global community, especially in the areas of math and science.

Mike Young, the president of the University of Washington, spoke out about Obama’s obvious lack of background knowledge or understanding of how the budgets at public universities function.  Universities are forced to tighten their belts, while the state is cutting subsidies and hiking up the cost of tuition to try to make up for extra efficiencies.

Obama’s plan, however, needs to be approved by Congress, which will be difficult to attain as partisan gridlock takes its toll.

During his State of the Union address, the President spoke about his many talks with university presidents who attempted to explain how technology has been helping to cut costs and spending, as well as course redesigns that are trying to get students out the door more quickly.  Obama spoke about his belief that, if more universities took these approaches, the end result would be more efficient and less expensive for everyone.

This announcement has been popular with students, however, who have complained about tuition hikes and the price of their loans for years.  Attending college has become so cost prohibitive that many Americans are questioning the value of higher education.  Of course, they may also turn to options such as applying for navy scholarships or undertaking a military education to help pay for school.  But for many, the army simply isn’t an option.

The bottom line for colleges and schools, according to President Obama, is that tuition hikes must stop, that they can’t assume that they’ll be able to make big increases every year.  Tuition prices must go down, the President said, or state funding will.

Evan Fischer is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

By Jeff

One of my favorite pastimes, when talking to liberals, is to take a current Administration news item and substitute the participants with the prior Bush Administration participants and hear them go berserk about Bush and his cronies.  Then when I tell them that I was mistaken and Obama and/or his Administration was responsible, they stammer some excuse that would not pass muster with a first grade teacher.  So think of this possibility:

President Bush agrees to have the federal government guarantee a $535 million loan to an oil company where the largest investor is one of the wealthiest Americans around.  Add to that, the  fact that this owner was a very large contributor to President Bush’s campaign.  In addition, this “company’s” auditors had released a report before this loan guarantee that stated that the company was “a going concern” (the kiss of death for most companies) and they thought the company would not survive.  One year later the company files bankruptcy and the $535 million is lost.  Tell me your reaction?  Do you see outrage and hearings and possible impeachment?  I do.

As you have already guessed, this actually happened in the Obama Administration.  The company is Solyndra (a solar panel manufacturer in Freemont, CA) and the investor is George Kaiser.  This company was the first “green” company to receive money from the stimulus.  President Obama stood in the warehouse of this company in July of 2010 to announce how this company was the “blueprint for green companies nationwide that will relieve us from the stranglehold of fossil fuels”.  What a joke.  This was a crapshoot that George Kaiser could easily have invested in further if he thought it was wise.  Even he knew this company was going down.  But, in Chicago, if you contribute enough money for a campaign you get repaid in our dollars.

Hearings are scheduled, but I doubt if anything will be done.  By the way, did you hear about this story on NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN?  I doubt it.
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By Jeff

As part of the new tax program that President Obama has proposed, he has adjusted the Estate Tax to 35% with the tax beginning at any amounts over $5 million.  This has prompted the Democrats to reject the proposal as they have now given up on the tax hikes they wanted on the wealthy and now are focusing on the Estate Tax.

The Estate Tax was started in 1914 and has been at varying levels since then.  Due to a quirk in the law the current rate for 2010 is 0% (which may lead many heirs to discuss Dad or Mom’s bedside decisions before the end of this year!) and was scheduled to go to 55% of any amounts over $1 million starting in 2011.

The question I have for you is:  Is the Estate Tax fair?  In most cases these dollars have already been taxed and will be taxed again.  Most of the objections come from owners of small businesses or farms that want to pass the business to their children.  Since the Estate is based on values of the assets, not just cash accumulated the Estate may have a value of $10 million and have no cash to pay the tax.  There have been many cases where children have had to sell the farm to pay the tax.

I believe the Estate Tax is unfair.  If you accumulate $10 million from your own efforts and you have paid tax on those dollars already, why should the government tax these dollars again in order to redistribute the wealth?

How do you feel?

Yesterday while we were watching Sunday football with a small group of family and friends, a discussion ensued about Jon Stewart calling President Obama “dude” during an interview on The Daily Show last week. Our group was diverse in both age and race. Although the discussion was not heated, people were very passionate in their views. Opinions in the end came down to the older crowd agreeing it was wrong and disrespectful and the younger crowd seeing nothing wrong with it. They felt it was funny and appropriate due to the type of show The Daily Show is. Political alignment and race did not appear to factor into this discussion.

President Obama went on Jon Stewart’s show in effort to reach out to young people about the elections. Jon Stewart is a comedian and a TV satirist. I understand that and I enjoy Jon Stewart and his talent. Jon Stewart was friendly and respectful in his interview and actually appeared more of a serious political critic than I have noticed previously.  He did ask a few tough questions. I also understand that Stewart was responding to the history behind the phrase the President used, “heck of a job.”

All that being said, I still believe Stewart was wrong in referring to President Obama as “dude.”  He is the President of the United States and respect should be shown for both President Obama and the Office during an interview on national TV. I know there are people out there that would think that this is a “no big deal” situation and that I am being uptight. However, I have worked in a system where high school students now call their teachers by their first names and at times “dude.”  From what I have observed, that doesn’t really appear to be helping out our educational system.

In Thursday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Stewart calling the 44th president “dude”. Gibbs said it could have been much worse. “If the president took offense at somebody calling him dude, given the names that are hurled around this town, I hazard to guess he’d rarely leave the top floor of the residence every day,” the press secretary said.

That is ok, Mr Gibbs. I took offense for him, dude.

By Jeff

President Obama loves to tell the story of how President Bush, the Republicans and the Fat Cat Wall Street Bankers drove the car (the Economy) into the ditch and he (Obama) is just getting it out (with TARP and Stimulus) and now the Republicans want the keys back.  Clever story, well told, but factually incorrect.

In doing research for this article I read several books (Meltdown by Thomas Woods and anything written by Peter Schiff, who predicted the collapse back in 2007, are both excellent resources ) and I discovered the article linked here.

This article was published in the New York Times in September of 1999 and outlines the cause of the 2008 meltdown that plagues us even today.  It states that the Clinton Administration was putting pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the private companies funded and backed by the Federal Government who set lending parameters) to lower their lending standards so more people may have the ability to own homes.    Despite several economists warning Clinton this could have severe consequences, Clinton pushed ahead and all hell broke loose.  (In all fairness, President Bush did not stop this practice when he took office, although he tried but was repeatedly pushed back by Congress led by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd)

New lenders popped up everywhere starting in 2000.  Old lenders (small banks and existing lending facilities) hired new people to push loans.  Why not?  The Feds were backing the loans so there was little risk.  All of a sudden demand exceeded supply so home prices skyrocketed.  Loans were given to people without jobs, without down payments as brokers got commissions, banks got fees and homeownership increased by 10% across the nation.

Enter Wall Street.  They saw an opportunity to package these loans that were backed by the Feds and sell them to investors.  The new lenders and small banks had made their money on the fees, knew that many of the loans were iffy and were happy to bundle up these loans and sell them to Bear Stearns, Goldman, JP Morgan and a myriad of Wall Street firms.  Wall Street, in turn, packaged, repackaged, came up with swaps, derivatives and other ways to sell these loans and made a tremendous amount of money on commissions and fees.  Then came the problem.  The majority of these new loans were not being paid by these new homeowners.  The meltdown began.

While it is easy to blame Wall Street for this problem, it is a fact that if these loans were good loans, given to homeowners with the former, proper credit criteria, the recession of 2008 would not have happened.  The real estate lending caused Wall Street to fail, not the other way around.

So the next time you hear Obama, or one of his lackeys, talk about the car being in the ditch, remember that while Bush, the Republicans, and Wall Street may have been in the car, it was Bill Clinton that was driving, with his foot firmly planted on the accelerator when the car left the road and started its long descent into that ditch.  Clinton may have vacated the car before it settled into that ditch, but his DNA was all over that steering wheel.