The Soundtrack of Progressive Destruction

"2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism," writes Daren Jonescu in an American Thinker piece so delicious that it's impossible to stop quoting.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it." This is a perfect iteration of the basic lie that has fueled modernity's "progress" down the drain of history -- or History, as progressive thinkers would have it. [snip]

You have heard this lie, and witnessed the tyrannical dialectic it sets in motion, your whole life, as have your parents and grandparents. Variations on this theme have become the soundtrack of late modernity's decline. The theme remains the same; only the melodic details are changed to suit the collectivist totalitarian agenda item of the moment.

"If you like your current healthcare arrangements, you can keep them" -- except that our intention is to delegitimize, denigrate, and finally outlaw all private healthcare arrangements.

"If you like your 'negative rights,' you can keep them" -- except that the new positive rights we are gradually introducing into the political lexicon will necessarily override your life, liberty, and property, not to mention trumping all the secondary rights derived from those initial three, such as speech, association, and religion.

College Students Should be Angry

Today's college students have a right to be angry. Many pay exorbitant prices — that burdens them with deep debt — for a degree of questionable worth with decreasing prospects of a good career and positive return on investment. That anger should be channeled toward liberal con artists who routinely sell them a pack of lies, starting with their colleges and universities.

From Investor's Business Daily, Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies:

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.

"Until 2011," she noted, "students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

"Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the 'empire,' UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a course each in gender, race, ethnicity, disability or sexuality studies, imperial, transnational or post-colonial studies, and critical theory." [snip]

UCLA is far from alone, "but the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the English Department there was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature uncorrupted by ideological overlay," Mac Donald noted.

IBD argues that "for parents who assume a degree from a famous college with a long-established reputation gives the wisdom of the ages to their kids, a closer look might reveal they're paying a lot of money for ideology, not edification."

Sadly it's the college students—not their parents—who pay the greatest price for higher ed's con job, and they are likely to be the last ones to discover how very badly they have been short-changed.

Hook-up Culture Hurts Boys Too

"An entire generation of parents has spent years panicking about the effects of hookup culture on girls. But what about boys?" asks Ryan Sager @ Time magazine. "That’s the question Rosalind Wiseman takes on in this week’s issue of TIME."

For her new book, Masterminds and Wingmen, she delves into the world of boys. As the mother of two boys, she was eager to make sure that their side of the story was not left out. During two years of research, she interviewed hundreds of boys across the country — individually, in groups, over the course of extended e-mail correspondences — and their stories are really quite striking.

As Wiseman writes, we assume that boys are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of hookup culture — and thus we tend to ignore its effects on them. But those effects, it turns out, can be rather rough.

Boys and young men are much more complicated than our popular culture acknowledges. Here, then, are nine surprising things Wiseman discovered about boys, drawn both from her book and from her piece in this week’s magazine.

Rosalind Wiseman's full article, What Boys Want, is behind Time's paywall, but Sager's preview article, 9 Reasons 'Hookup Culture' Hurts Boys Too, is online, and the reasons he lists may surprise the ladies.

OCare: Progressives Pick Winners & Losers

"Unlike drug addicts, alcoholics, or the obese — all of whom represent higher-than-average medical costs — smokers are the only such group with a pre-existing condition that ObamaCare penalizes," reports William La Jeunesse at Fox News.

It allows insurance companies to charge smokers up to 50 percent more than non-smokers for an identical policy, depending on the state and any subsidies the person might qualify for. [snip]

A study by nonpartisan Institute for Health Policy Solutions found some smokers could pay as much as 33 percent of their income in health care premiums, well in excess of what ObamaCare considers "affordable" health care.

The study presented three scenarios:

1. The premium for a young, non-smoker earning roughly the minimum wage will cost $708. The same policy for a smoker would cost $3,308, or up to 400 percent more.
2. Before subsidies, a non-smoker who is 59 or older would also pay $708 for a "silver" or mid-level policy. However, a smoker of the same age would pay $5,908.
3. In a worst-case scenario, an older couple who smokes could be "literally impoverished" by ObamaCare premiums, said the report. That couple could pay an $11,352 health care premium, or one-half their annual income of $23,000. By comparison, a non-smoking person over 59 years old would pay 90 percent less, or just $952 after federal subsidies.

It seems that Progressives have an insatiable appetite for controlling other peoples' lives and choices, whether it's the amount of salt they eat or the size of the soft drinks they buy. Remember that Progressives were the primary drivers of the Prohibition of alcohol in the early 1900s, too. 

"Redistribution is a loaded word"

In a Sunday New York Times article, reporter John Harwood quotes William Daley (then Obama's chief of staff) saying that "redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people's minds. It's a word that, in the political world, you just don't use." Headlined "White House Memo: Don't Dare Call The Health Care Law 'Redistribution'," the article continues:

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall. [snip]

Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.

The law, for example, banned rate discrimination against women, which insurance companies called “gender rating” to account for their higher health costs. But that raised the relative burden borne by men. The law also limited how much more insurers can charge older Americans, who use more health care over all. But that raised the relative burden on younger people.

And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.

Study: Plan B Pill Useless for Women over 176 Pounds

"In a major blow to birth control proponents, the European equivalent of Plan B - known as the 'morning after pill' - now includes a warning that the contraceptive is not effective for women over 165 pounds and does not work at all for women over 176 pounds," writes Nicole Bailey. "The implications are staggering: according to the Centers for Disease Control, the average weight of an American woman over 20 is 166.2 pounds."

Feminist outlet Jezebel pointed out that the saga began with a 2011 study:

...a 2011 study out of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland that found that "the risk of pregnancy was more than threefold greater for obese women compared with women with normal body mass index, whichever EC [Emergency Contraception] was taken." They also found that the risk of pregnancy was particularly high if that emergency contraception was made of levonorgestrel, the hormone found in many of the major over-the-counter morning after pills sold in the United States, like Plan B One-Step. The study recommended that overweight women use IUDs.

HRA Pharma, the European manufacturer of a drug essentially identical to America's Plan B, has followed up on the findings of that study and concluded that it is time to warn women that "the drug is completely ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds and begins to lose effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds," reports Mother Jones.

Feds Profit Mightily from Student Loans

The Left once railed against "big banks" for the profits they made on student loans. Now look who's raking in all those profits. Reports education reporter David Jess of the Detroit Free Press:

The federal government made enough money on student loans over the last year that, if it wanted, it could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students.

The $41.3-billion profit for the 2013 fiscal year is down $3.6 billion from the previous year but still enough to pay for one year of tuition at the University of Michigan for 2,955,426 Michigan residents.

It’s a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.

It's an even rosier picture for the greedy federal government over the next decade:

This summer, Congress passed a law tying interest rates on loans to the market. The law set rates for all the loans at different levels, but based them all on the 10-year U.S. Treasury rate and allowed rates to change each year.

For Stafford loans, both the subsidized and unsubsidized, the interest rate is the Treasury rate plus 2.05%, with a cap of 8.25%. Graduate student loan rates are the Treasury rate plus 3.6%, with a cap of 9.5%, and the parent loans are the Treasury rate, plus 4.6%, with a cap of 10.5%.

While offering immediate relief to students, those rates are expected to rise in coming years and give the federal government $175 billion in profits from student loans over the next decade.

That’s got students who are paying steamed.

“Instead of making a profit on student loans, why doesn't the government try to help out the millions of students who are struggling financially and at the very least, lower the interest rates?” Wilk said “I don’t understand how the government expects this generation to support themselves after graduation, starting out with a mound of debt and in a lot of areas, no job.”