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Showing posts from August, 2012

Is College Debt Worth It?

What you study and where you study it matters, especially if you're going to be sinking into debt while completing a degree. There has been some research that illustrates this: College ROI: What We Found - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-09/college-roi-what-we-found Center on Education and the Workforce - http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff/ Wall St. Journal PayScale Database - http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html First, the notion that college graduates have a comparatively low unemployment or underemployment rate is misleading. The table below shows that "low" unemployment isn't so low among recent graduates, though people over 30 with college degrees do have lower unemployment than the national average. Second, even those with jobs are often not in jobs that require any college education. As you will read below, as many as 40 percent of graduates in the humanities are working in positions

Romney + Ryan = Real Discussion We Need

The announcement by Mitt Romney that he has chosen Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate means we will have a much needed discussion about the serious economic issues facing this nation. That Paul Krugman and other "progressives" dislike Ryan's budget proposals means the ideas deserve some consideration. You can find many articles describing the "Ryan Budget" and you can read the complete budget document. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-02/politics/house.gop.budget_1_house-gop-budget-medicare-program-voucher-program?_s=PM:POLITICS http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/paul-ryans-multiple-unicorns/ http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/conservative-house-republicans-budget-proposal/ The House Budget Committee posts its documents online: http://budget.house.gov I disagree with some of Ryan's specific proposals, but the key to me is that he admits we are in a financial quagmire that must be addressed. As opposed to the Keynesian ideali

Freedom From vs. Freedom To

Following a post on Krugman, probably because that is what he was reading, Nathan posted the following comment: In your description of yourself, you are a classical liberal defined as: "Classical liberalism embodies the original concept of liberalism: a faith in freedom to, not freedom from as a guiding principle." Yet the concept of 'freedom to,' which is positive liberty, is contained nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. The founding fathers of our country were, as far as the definition of classical liberal that I know, mostly classical liberals - hence where we get the term. Yet, the U.S. Constitution is only written in terms of negative liberty, or 'freedom from.' How do you reconcile what appears to be a modern interpretation of classical liberalism from what is most assuredly a different actual and historical definition of the term classical liberal? Check the definition with references from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy before answering

Regulatory Recklessness

Congress has a long history of ceding power to the executive branch. The arguments for this, that administration requires expertise and efficiency, do little to justify the surrender of Constitutional authority. Sadly, this surrender of power to unelected and too often unaccountable bureaucrats shows signs of accelerating. Review the administrative expansion under Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama and the number of regulations issued are depressing. President Obama has a penchant for the expensive, too. The Daily Caller In his 2012 State of the Union speech, Obama claimed, "I've approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his." Obama's statement was true, but skewed, because he's far outpacing Bush in the production of "economically significant" regulations, each of which imposes costs of more than $100 million per year, said Wayne Crews, a vice president for policy and director of