Student Loan Debt Blame

"Who is to blame for soaring U.S. student loan debt," asks Fox Business News' Elizabeth MacDonald, "that now surpasses credit card and auto-loan debt, at an estimated $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?" Could it be the colleges? Consider this:

• More than 75 colleges and universities sit on record endowments in the tens of billions of dollars from donations made by people who believe their money is going towards cutting tuition costs. ... But one estimate shows that colleges only spend an average of about 3% of their endowments on tuition.
• Census data show that, as of 2005, colleges and universities employed more than 675,000 full-time faculty members — but 756,000 administrators, counselors, accountants, alumni relations officials, and attorneys, among others. Between 1976 and 2007, the proportion of administrators to students doubled at colleges nationwide.
• As part of their collective flight from reality, too many colleges have locked themselves into a vicious cycle where "you raise tuition, so you can give out more aid, so you can raise tuition," Jacqueline E. King, director of federal policy analysis at the American Council on Education, a Washington education lobby group, has said. "Institutionally based financial aid accounts for about one-third of all the increases in tuition," David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities has said. "It's the driving force behind rising fees."

Or how about the government, "whose well-meaning student aid fuels higher tuition costs which relies on more student aid"?

• The College Board estimates more than $60 billion in financial aid—most of it from the federal government—is annually available to students as of a few years ago. But 60% of that aid was in the form of loans, up from 40% in 1980.
• Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, has said government loans and subsidies are not cost-effective for taxpayers because "universities and colleges just raise their tuition. It doesn't improve affordability and it doesn't make it easier to go to college."
• The dilemma, say economists, is a simple supply and demand problem. Colleges can "raise tuition because they can," David Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, has said. When the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can.

The danger here is taxpayers could be on the hook for belly flopping student loans," writes MacDonald, "since eight in 10 of these loans are government-issued or guaranteed, a support that increased after the government stepped in to help this market after it iced over during the financial crisis in 2008."

Obamacare: Puncturing Liberals' Self-Delusion Bubble

Liberals got a shocking dose of reality at the Supreme Court this week, to the delight of Constitution-loving Americans. Here are a few must-read articles:

Constitutional Contempt: Why the Obama Legal Team Struggled at the Supreme Court

After three days of arguments before the Supreme Court, the Obama administration and its supporters have been found in contempt. Not of the court, but of the Constitution. ... The sophistries on which the Obamaphiles relied to defend their health care power grab were perhaps best summarized by Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick: "That the law is constitutional is best illustrated by the fact that -- until recently -- the Obama administration expended almost no energy defending it."

That lack of energy came back to haunt them Tuesday when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli turned in a stammering, barely coherent performance worthy of the public defender in My Cousin Vinny as he struggled to articulate a constitutional defense of Obamacare. The arguments went only slight better for Verrilli yesterday. The administration seemed ill prepared to answer even basic, predictable questions about the law's constitutional basis. ...

A Supreme Shock for 'La-La' Libs

The panicked reception in the mainstream media of the three-day Supreme Court health-care marathon is a delightful reminder of the nearly impenetrable parochialism of American liberals.

They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so. That’s what happened this week. ...

Did Bloggers Kill the Health Care Mandate?

A handful of right-wing legal experts have changed the way Americans view the Affordable Care Act. But why did they wage this battle in the media instead of in the courtroom?

Blogs—particularly a blog of big legal ideas called Volokh Conspiracy—have been central to shifting the conversation about the mandate challenges. At Volokh, Barnett and other libertarian academics have been debating and refining their arguments against the mandate since before the ACA was signed. ...

Whatever the merits of those claims, it started a national, popular conversation about the Constitution. ... The way conservatives have framed this issue also makes the public feel more confident about discussing it in a substantive way. ... Americans today are especially excited by reasoning that makes the Constitution feel more accessible. ...

Meanwhile, Obamacare's implementation marches on in the bowels of the Executive Branch, and it promises an invasion of personal privacy that would make a proctologist wince.

IRS Gearing Up for Health-Care Crackdown

The rest of the country may be waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide the fate of President Barack Obama's health-care law, but the Internal Revenue Service is wasting no time. It wants to add new agents to hunt down tax cheats and still plans to spend $303.5 million building a system to oversee the effects of the health law even though its future is unclear.

As for the new IRS workers, the Government Accountability Office said the total will be about 4,500, with nearly 4,000 (3,997) slated for enforcement...

Although no one can predict the High Court's final decision(s), constitution-loving Americans everywhere can be at least a bit hopeful that liberals' bubble of self-delusion will be thoroughly punctured in June.

UPDATE: Add this article to the mix.

How Obamacare Derailed the Economic Recovery

Here we go again. All eyes are on the Supreme Court as it wrestles with whether or not President Obama’s healthcare bill is constitutional. The country is divided on the merits of the law, but this we can say with certainty: Obamacare profoundly gummed up our recovery from the financial crisis.

Assuming that the $800 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus, would work the magic promised by his economics team, Mr. Obama set off on his quest to guarantee healthcare for every American. The resulting food fight over the legislation – the ugly parceling out of favors in return for votes and lies told to justify passage -- permanently damaged President Obama’s reputation, divided a country desperate to heal, and distracted the White House from further efforts to build employment. It was a terrible decision, and the country continues to pay for it.

Whether or not the Supreme Court upholds the government’s mandate that every American must purchase healthcare insurance, Obamacare is a failure. ... The reality is that numerous projects and programs might have passed a less fractious Congress and been supported by a less divided country. Though rising deficits ultimately would have alarmed taxpayers, more growth would have tempered both budget and enthusiasm gaps. Instead, we have suffered the worst of all worlds – a government hobbled by political and economic constraints and a people pessimistic about the future. This is the legacy of Obamacare.