Let me see if I understand the current situation:

1. Tuition has risen dramatically in recent years, pretty much everywhere, and at a rate far higher than can be explained by an increase in the cost of providing the services.
2. Many degrees can never produce income sufficient to keep up payments on the loans required to get them, even at relatively cheap public universities.
3. The loan companies have successfully lobbied to stack the deck against students, making it very easy to accrue penalties that can double the principal of the loan, and offering no way out, not even death or bankruptcy. If you ever fall behind after your deferment ends, you're screwed.
4. There is immense social pressure to go to college and do something, to the point that you're considered a failure if you don't, and many allegedly-intelligent adults insist that college is a right.
5. Many employers require Bachelors/Masters degrees as checkbox items that are completely unrelated to job duties ("you must be this tall to ride the roller coaster"), as an alternative to the sort of applicant testing that gets them sued.
6. Self-esteem-based public-school education has resulted in millions of teenagers who believe that "following your dream" is a valid career plan.
7. A lot of 18-year-olds are signing off on $30,000/year loans to major in Underwater Basketweaving, etc, despite the demonstrated lack of demand for such skills.
8. The percentage of students defaulting on their loans is going up fast.
9. The loans in question are a mix of federal, state, and private, making it very difficult for any single goverment agency to simply "fix" them (or even find them), very much like bad mortgages.

A lot of people are writing to Obama begging him to solve this problem. “Cut the interest rate to 1%”, “abolish the penalties”, “let us declare bankruptcy”, or simply “forgive all student loans, period”. They look at the massive bailouts of mismanaged corporations, and ask where their bailout is.

I can sympathize with a laid-off engineer struggling to make payments on $30,000 in loans, or a single mom who got an accounting degree in night school and fell behind on payments because her kid had a big medical bill. I have no sympathy at all for someone who racked up over $100,000 in loans in order to get a low-paying “dream job” in Manhattan:

"I chose to go to a private school and I chose to work in a field where the starting salaries are low. Does that mean that I chose to live a life of struggle, wondering how I am going to pay my rent, afford the basics of living and still stay in my chosen career field…all while putting up with high interest rates and an amount of debt that brings me to tears?"

The above list includes some serious problems, and taken together they’ve created an awful mess, but it’s not one that can be wished away with a stroke of the presidential pen, even if Obama were interested. Solving the student-loan problem has a lot in common with trying to manage health-care costs and resolve the mortgage crisis, including the mis-regulation that created the problems and the mis-regulation that failed to solve them.

…at least, that’s what the usual suspects are screaming about Arizona at the moment, for having the temerity to claim that existing laws governing illegal immigration should be treated as if they were, well, laws.

There are people making careful, reasoned arguments about the constitutionality of duplicating federal laws at the state level, some quite cogent, but they’re not driving the argument. Indeed, they’re not even allowed onto the bus, as the headlines shriek “racist!” and “police state!”, pretending that border control is a Republican invention not practiced anywhere else in the world.

It reminds me a great deal of the hysteria over shall-issue concealed-carry legislation. There, it was “gun-nuts blowing away anyone who cuts in line at the grocery!”; here, it’s “racist nazi cops going after everyone brown!”. I expect the long-term results to be pretty much the same: little or no abuse of the new laws, less crime, no loss of civil rights, and more states jumping on the bandwagon as they observe the results.

The hysterics labeled Florida “the gunshine state” for passing CCW reform. It didn’t happen. Now they’re calling Arizona the new Nazi Germany, and that’s not going to happen, either.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Arizona, which has always had open carry with no need for a license, and which quickly adopted shall-issue carry with reciprocity, recently went to concealed carry with no need for a license. Allowing any adult to carry a concealed handgun doesn’t square up with the “papers, please” future promised by the pro-illegal pundits, not that they’ll notice.

[Note: any comments attempting to equate “immigration” and “illegal immigration” will be deleted unread; they’re quite different things, and opposition to one has nothing whatsoever to do with opinions on the other]

Senator Chris Dodd (D-Corrupt) has proposed a 120-day waiting period on investing in brand-new startup companies. This is not an April Fool’s joke.

Problem: a few students at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, are upset that the date on the school’s diplomas is written as In the Year of Our Lord…. Seriously.

Refund their money and send them back to grade school; I don’t think a college has any courses remedial enough for this crew.

"Congress interprets democracy as damage and routes around it."

(with vaguely-sincere apologies to John Gilmore)

It was nice knowing you. If you wonder why you’re empty now, Nancy and Harry and Barry took it all for their big-pig friends.

This little piggy has no market,
This little piggy has no home,
This little piggy eats dog food,
This little piggy lost a job.
And Big Nancy Piggy says "let them eat pork", all the way home.

Oh, and if you see Nancy, could you ask her what’s in the bill? She promised to tell us once it passed, and I’m simply dying to know how much my taxes will go up while I start paying more for worse health care.

Update! A performance artist on the streets of Mumbai has done an excellent impression of the future of the US economy and health-care system.

more...

Jenny McCarthy, outspoken anti-vaccination activist, is now furiously beck-pedaling thanks to the discovery that her child is not autistic, and likely never was.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled herd immunity.

…unless Jenny and the gang already killed you, of course.

This story about the “Cambridge Climate Congress” would be hilarious satire if it weren’t dead-serious social engineering. Click through to read the PDF about the “climate emergency” and the quest for “environmental justice”. Count the fluff-headed buzzwords scattered throughout. Picture their future, and when you’re through throwing up, bitch-slap a socialist.