Ya know, about fortysome years ago the gymmint changed its approach to college finance from scholarships to loans, and a whole bunch of us boomers looked at the way they structured the new approach and predicted as loudly and as long as we could that they had just guaranteed that within our lifetimes 1. Almost everyone would go to college and 2. almost everyone would get out owing more than any honest man can pay. Our protests on this were met with a warm round of indifference. Now that we turn out to have been right, it is all our fault somehow? It wasn't yet us that controlled things when the change was made, it was just us that protested what was going to happen...
Seems Millenials aren't quite as sharp as they think they are...and possibly they inherited more Boomer tendencies than they are comfortable/able admitting.
That happened literally over my undergrad years. It was pretty much a Reagan thing. And which two different, two-term Democratic adminstrations did little to reverse. In fact, one might argue that the "college for everyone" idea pushed by the Obama administration made it worse.
Being in an area of education which promoted job training, we heard that and head how that part of his proposal massively fell on deaf ears. And by job training, I mean tech schools/community colleges.
The WSJ article doesn't load without me signing up for something, but per Wiki, Exum is a McCallie School grad and a Sigma Nu from Penn. Is there anyone in this forum who hasn't been to college?
They don't spend pennies on the paywall to learn what is up, then they give away $$$$ at the voting booth by letting Republicans get elected and take stuff from the young to give to the old.
For sure, principally Social security and Medicare. Those are the 2 biggest wealth transfers from the young to the old ever created.
Right. Republicans don't take stuff from the young and give it to the old, that's the Democrats. Republicans 1. take stuff from everybody and give it to themselves and 2. take steps to ensure that the young will never have much of anything in the first place...
Ha! Fair enough. I withdraw my general comment. These are GOP policies that hurt the young - 1) Lower minimum wage 2) Lower educational funding 3) Denying climate change -- OK, environmental policies in general 4) Increased defense spending, at the expense of social programs And so forth, I could name several others. But yeah, Social Security at least (I don't know about Medicare) is improperly funded, and that's on the Dems as much as anybody.
So somewhat related to this thread, but the United Autoworkers union is on strike. GM made $8.1 billion last year and the UAW is insisting the wealth be shared. GM argues that they need to save it for a rainy day. UAW calls shenanigans. And now there's a strike. The first one since 2007. There's been an uptick in strikes in the last year, and at some point, the dam will break. I sat through a meeting at my employers a few weeks ago and had to hear a VP ramble about share prices and profits being up. It did not help that there were people getting laid off that had to hear this.
Wasn't part of the deal of the Government bail out, that the GM unions took ownership of a percentage of GM? wouldn't a dividend payment then flow to the coffers of the union, who could distribute it to its members?
Nick Hanauer's TEDTalk on The Dirty Secret of Capitalism https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hana...f_capitalism_and_a_new_way_forward/transcript
And the not so secret about Scandinavian socialism. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffre...dic-countries-are-not-socialist/#5f5aa16b74ad Now one thing that Forbes and the people that they quote will be that Scandinavian unions are very powerful and the countries have high level of union membership (in the 80% in many). So the credit for not needing minimum wages laws is thanks to something that Forbes and the republicans have been trying to destroy for a very long time. So their second point is very hypocritical.
Quoth Forbes First, it is worth noting that the Nordic counties were economic successes before they built their welfare states. Those productive economies, generating good incomes for their workers, allowed the governments to raise the tax revenue needed to pay for the social benefits. It was not the government benefits that created wealth, but wealth that allowed the luxury of such generous government programs. That whole "economic success" that must come first is actually straight out of Marx, who wrote somewhere that you can't have socialism in a poor country because you would be socializing poverty.
It does seem that historically socialism has had much more success in poor countries than rich countries. So seems like most revolutionaries do not follow Marx advise. But the trick of having a successful "democratic socialist" government is to have a successful capitalist (free market) system. And all Democratic party candidates (Sanders is iffy) would agree with that. I know one of Warrens lines is that she is pro capitalist, she wants to save capitalism from it self. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/elizabeth-warrens-theory-of-capitalism/568573/
1) well, if bu "success" you mean "taking power," yes. But if you mean actually running the country for the benefit of large swaths of the people, not so much (obligatory acknowledgment of covert (usually) US intervention in such places making it hard if not impossible). 1a) Pol Pot is only the worst among many. 2) Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialists of America acknowledges this (while pointing out that the free market is a myth) in his final book. Socialism, Past and Future. I'm not sure how many people who've joined DSA because of Bernie know this, but it's there in black and white.
Ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs. The socialism debate is not just about redistributing income and wealth; it's about how much of the economy gov't should monopolize. Gov't should incentivize and regulate but not displace the private sector. When it does, you get the VA for health care and NY's NYCHA for housing.— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) September 16, 2019
So the U.S. military is a crap organization and should be privatized? Go for it, Lloyd. Go right on ahead and follow your argument to its logical conclusion. I want to hear that part. Yeah, I thought not. You fraud.
A few weeks ago, my division had an all hands meeting with the VP of said division. Earlier this year, layoffs were announced. During said meeting, the VP was boasting about the share price going up and how well things were in front of those getting laid off. It's things like this that have execs looking like assholes and they wonder why they're hated. After firing hundreds of staff, the WeWork CEO held a somber all-hands meeting explaining why it was a necessary move, but then trays of tequila were handed out and DMC from Run-DMC burst into the room and performed "It's Tricky" https://t.co/t9oGq8ebTb pic.twitter.com/cuq0aM1Tqi— Tom Gara (@tomgara) September 18, 2019
Me - could explain why I am so slow to read this thread and didn't notice this question until two days later (I rarely keep up with every page of a P&CE thread). Ironically I now work for a company whose main purpose is making sure college is available to more people It's always a surprise in meetings when I mention I never went, don't have a great opinion of them in general, and don't think anyone is automatically any better for having been to one.
Forget the military. I wanna hear him defend the "goodness" of the private market's development of swapped up mortgage backed securities.