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To the liberal administrators and Democratic politicians who try to blame skyrocketing college costs on decreases in government support, rather than administrative waste and government loans, I hate to say I told you so. But I absolutely told you so.

My first op-ed ever professionally published was in the Boston Globe, titled, Students pay the price for a culture of waste at UMass. A student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time, I took campus officials to task after yet another tuition hike, decrying the fact that only about half the school's $1.2 billion 2016 budget was spent on education or financial aid, much of the rest lost due to profligate waste and in the whirlwind of rent-seeking and cronyism known as higher education administration.

I also pointed out how administrative salaries at UMass had skyrocketed in recent years, growing far faster than the student population.

The response? Campus leadership called me a liar and threatened to sue the newspaper. This, of course, might have something to do with the fact that UMass Amhersts chancellor, Kumble Subbaswamy, earns almost $600,000 a year and that 97 out of 100 of the state of Massachusettss highest-paid employees worked for the university system. The vitriolic backlash and denial of all responsibility is par for the course.

Despite documented evidence and ample research showing the effect administrative bloat and subsidized government loans have had on the skyrocketing tuition rates, many liberals deny it all and insist that pouring more taxpayer dollars into the university system, or socializing it altogether, is the only solution. Yet new research reveals this argument for the bunk narrative it always was.

In the book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America, economist Richard Vedder reports, If the ratio of campus bureaucrats to faculty had held steady since 1976, there would be 537,317 fewer administrators, saving universities $30.5 billion per year and allowing student tuition to decrease by 20%. Per Max Edens recent review, Vedder's work also finds "colleges have bloated up on bureaucrats and spend an ever-decreasing share now about one third of their expenditures on instruction. This makes it perfectly clear once and for all that if campuses didnt waste so much on administration, higher education would be much more accessible and affordable than it is now.

Dont expect the liberal narrative to adjust in any meaningful way, though.

A sensible path to making college more affordable has always been offered up by some conservative and libertarian intellectuals, and it has even been put into practice in a few real-world examples, such as Mitch Daniels's reforms at Purdue University. Through a combination of cutting back administrative bloat, ending wasteful spending, and scaling back federal loans that cause tuition price inflation, we know how we can make college reasonably affordable again.

See the article here:
New data proves what's actually causing the spike in college tuition rates - Washington Examiner

Back in the dark ages when mandatory seat belt use was relatively new in Indiana, I had a colleague who liked to say that she never nagged people about buckling up when they were riding with her. In fact, she never mentioned it to her passengers.

Why? she was inevitably asked.

Natural selection was her answer.

I like to use that story as a good analogy for what I consider proper government. She gives people the information needed to make good choices, sometimes offers incentives for making good choices and can even provide the mechanisms to make good choices easier. But if people insist on making poor choices anyway, well, thats on them.

Of course, our government driver (to continue the analogy) seldom stops when she should. She employs various coercive tactics to get those passengers in line. (Yes, I am being deliberate in the choice of pronoun; were talking about the nanny state, after all.)

Such as, buckle up or this car isnt moving. Or, if you dont buckle up, I will harangue you mercilessly for the whole trip. Or, the penalty for not buckling up, payable at the end of the journey, will be a hefty fee that I will send collectors out to get from your childrens children into the 10th generation.

In my experience, people who advocate for government solutions, and even bigger and more expensive government when those solutions fail to materialize, seldom have to justify themselves. They are merely following the spirit of the age, no explanations required.

But those of us who advocate government restraint or, heaven forbid, limited government, are always put on the defensive. We are either insensitive to human misery to the point of heartlessness or hopelessly ignorant of the need for immediate action to avert imminent disaster.

In all the response I get to these columns (thank you very much), by far the most common form of criticism is from readers who misinterpret, either carelessly or deliberately, the libertarian thrust of my government critiques.

I always mean, in those pieces, the least government necessary, which, believe it or not, was a founding principle of this country. They always insist I really meant, no government at all, then proceed to deliver the Gotcha! they think I deserve.

What about the fire department when your house is burning down, they will ask, or the police department when youre robbed? What about that pothole you want filled in?

Arent those all socialism, you self-serving hypocrite?

Actually, no, theyre not. They are legitimate government functions.

My favorite Gotcha! showing up in my email with tiresome regularity is, So, I guess youve refused your Social Security payments, huh?

No, I have not. Had I the opportunity to opt out and use the money for my own retirement investments, I would have done so. But participation was mandatory. To whom am I trying to prove what if I dont take money out of the system I was forced to put money into?

The tenet of libertarianism people seem to have the most trouble grasping, though it really should be the easiest, is that government legitimately tries to keep us from hurting each other but risks overstepping its bounds when it tries to keep us from hurting ourselves. Autonomy should be sacred.

So, I find myself having to explain that, no, I do not object to Gov. Eric Holcombs proposal to ban Hoosier motorists from using their cell phones while driving unless theyre hands-free.

There are rules for the road that are open to challenge on libertarian grounds. There is no reason to require me to use seat belts when driving or wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle except to keep me from behaving stupidly.

But there are also rules that protect me from others stupid behavior, such as the one against driving while drunk.

Mandating hands-free-only cell phone use falls into the latter category. I am the one you might run into while youre fiddling with that stupid phone.

See? Simple.

Of course, there are a couple of potholes in the road an earnest libertarian should be aware of whenever he gives in and acknowledges that, yes, OK, fine, government should do this.

One is the maxim that by the time government acts, government action is usually beside the point. Most cellphones today have Bluetooth, and most new cars have systems that sync to it, so its likely that the moment you get behind the wheel your phone automatically become hands-free.

The other is that when government is given the legitimate inch, it will go the illegitimate mile. Setting reasonable speed limits is a legitimate function, but it requires local knowledge of local conditions. But few were shocked to see a national 55 mph limit that, for a time, was the most ignored law in America.

If Holcomb gets his way with cellphones, all sorts of distracted driving will be on the endangered list, everything from playing the radio to scarfing down those fries you got from the drive-through. Then dont be surprised if there are hefty fines for talking to your in-car companions and there are calls for hands-free nose-picking.

Government will always always, always, always go too far.

I know you might not believe that. But the evidence is plentiful if you choose to ignore it, thats on you.

I respect your autonomy.

And, you know. Natural selection.

Leo Morris is a columnist for Indiana Policy Review, a magazine published by the conservative think tank Indiana Policy Review Foundation, which is headquartered in Fort Wayne. Contact him at leoedits@yahoo.com.

See the article here:
Flashpoint: Holcomb and cell phones: The inch that becomes a mile - Terre Haute Tribune Star

Thanks, Obama. Photo: Pedro Santana/AFP via Getty Images

The Obama era produced the most sweeping combination of social reforms, economic rescue, and regulation of any presidency in half a century. For that reason, the left finds it necessary to transform Obamas successes into failures if Obamas methods made the world a better place, they can be replicated, but if they failed, the only alternative is either reaction or a Sandersian political revolution. The left-wing New Republic has a new series of pieces repeating what is now a familiar indictment of Obama liberalism: The Collapse of Neoliberalism, by Ganesh Sitaraman, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure, by Alex Pareene, and The Hell That Was Health-Care Reform, by Libby Watson.

It is obviously true that Obamas success was tempered both by sometimes flawed decisions and, to a much greater degree, the systems limited ability to bear change. Many of Obamas most successful measures were designed to set the stage for expansion and improvement later on. No reforms in American history, from emancipation to the New Deal, have yielded uncomplicated triumph. Viewed up close, they are all the same grueling half-measures weighed down by compromises with odious forces, and all had to survive right-wing backlash that denied anything that felt like victory.

There are surely cautionary tales to be drawn from Obamas experience. But in its haste to bury both Obama and liberalism, TNRs authors downplay the scope of his success. (While understandably short of comprehensive, their assessment completely omits such enormous reforms as the bank rescue, auto bailout, green-energy subsidies, energy-efficiency and pollution regulations, DACA, the Iran nuclear deal, the Cuba opening, and ending the ban on gays in the military.) Most important, they barely acknowledge, and utterly refuse to grapple with, the barriers Obama and his allies had to overcome.

Sitaramans account leans heavily on the neoliberal epithet, so that the bitter struggle between Obamas liberalism and Paul Ryans conservatism is erased, and the two sides retroactively transformed into capitalist allies. In Sitaramans account of the economic-rescue effort, the stimulus created itself and Obamas contribution was to chafe at its size and scale it back. After the Great Crash of 2008, neoliberals chafed at attempts to push forward aggressive Keynesian spending programs to spark demand, he writes. President Barack Obamas advisers shrank the size of the post-crash stimulus package for fear it would seem too large to the neoliberal consensus of the era and on top of that, they compromised on its content.

Reading this bizarre account, one would have no idea Obama actually fought to enact what he believed was the largest stimulus Congress was willing to pass and that the compromises were demanded by senators who supplied the pivotal votes. One might argue, as I have, that Obama could have coaxed even more stimulus out of Congress with a more clever strategy. Instead, Obama liberalism is retconned as somehow working to shrink the stimulus.

Their account of Obamacares creation likewise erases the staggering array of forces upholding the status quo. Generations of liberal health-care experts have concluded that, in a perverse path of dependency, the employer health-insurance deduction has turned the 160 million Americans with employer-provided insurance into advocates for the status quo. After literally decades of failure, from Truman to Johnson to Clinton, Obama & Co. built around the employer system by creating regulated, subsidized markets for those trapped in a dysfunctional individual market.

Pareene asserts they should have simply put everybody on a government plan: By far the most effective part of the Affordable Care Act, in terms of helping Americans get care, was simply expanding Medicaid, he writes. And a decade into the ACA, it has become more apparent than ever that the best way to reduce Americas absurd health-care costs would simply be a single-payer program. Of course, simply making everybody in the individual market eligible for Medicaid would have required enormous tax increases and caused tens of millions of Americans to be dumped off their employer coverage. The political difficulty of doing so can be seen by Elizabeth Warrens frantic race to distance herself from a single-payer plan she endorsed in an effort to woo the Bernie Sanders vote. That this simple solution is not even apparent to a progressive like Warren after a couple months of having to defend it ought to indicate that the Obama administration had sensible reasons for taking the course it did.

Watson, for her part, will grudgingly credit Obama only for failing spectacularly so that the sainted Sanders could succeed where he failed:

The complete shift in how we talk about health care going from Democratic institutions describing how uninsured people game the system for free health care to even moderate Democrats acknowledging the gap in the ACA by proposing a public option, and a majority of the country supporting a single government insurance plan is remarkable. This is thanks, in large part, to a grumpy old socialist from Vermont, who took on the partys anointed establishment hacks to champion Medicare for All, pushing this more radical policy idea toward the mainstream. But none of this would have been possible without the ACAs failure to achieve its goal of making health care either affordable or universal. Thanks, Obama.

Does a majority of the country favor single payer? Earlier people did express support for it, but opposition has grown and now slightly exceeds support. Even earlier polls that did show support relied on omitting several concrete elements, all of which are toxically unpopular: moving people off employer-sponsored insurance and covering undocumented immigrants. The only plan the left has come up with to surmount these obstacles is pretend they dont exist and, perhaps, accuse people who acknowledge them of being profiteers, ghouls, neoliberals, and so on.

Sitaraman asserts that Obamas ideology has collapsed, and people around the world have recognized that the world of the 1980s has changed and that it is time for a new approach to politics. Yet somehow Obama left office with a 60 percent approval rating, and Jeremy Corbyn received less than one-third of the popular vote while being trounced, so perhaps it is just a little more complicated.

The next Democratic president probably wont be burdened with an economy undergoing the most rapid free fall since the Great Depression. But he or she will have to grapple with a Senate that massively overrepresents Republicans, courts stacked with right-wing judicial activists, and thermostatic public opinion that turns skeptical of government when Democrats hold the presidency. It would be edifying for the left to work out its own strategies nothing would be more helpful to liberals than a powerful left that could reposition its ideas in the center. But that kind of work is difficult. Choosing to reside in a fantasy world, in which all the problems have simple solutions that we need but grasp hold of, is so much more pleasant.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

The rest is here:
Does the Left Have Any Better Ideas Than Obamas? - New York Magazine

When Donald Trump was running for president in 2015 and 2016, he spent a lot of time criticizing President Barack Obama for playing so much golf insisting that Obama could have been more productive if he had spent more time in the White House. But Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), reported in a Friday morning tweet that Trump has now surpassed Obama in the amount of time spent golfing as president. And Maguire illustrates his point by posting a hilarious video in which candidate Trump railed against Obamas golf habit in 2015 and 2016.

Maguire, in his Friday morning tweet, writes that in December 2015, candidate Trump criticized Obama for having played 250 rounds of golf during his seven years as president. But Maguire quickly adds, Trump is making his 251st taxpayer-funded visit to one of the golf resorts he still profits from and said he wouldnt visit if elected.

Maguine also tweets, In less than three years in office, Trump has almost surpassed Obamas eight-year golf tally, which Trump relentlessly criticized on the campaign trail in 2016 (as the video shows).

In Dec 2015, candidate Trump criticized Obama, who had been president for 7yrs, saying Obama had played 250 rounds of golf

Today, Trump is making his 251st taxpayer-funded visit to one of the golf resorts he still profits from and said he wouldnt visit if elected. pic.twitter.com/qB1CwDASCE

Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) December 27, 2019

In the video, one sees clips of Trump repeatedly swearing that as president, he would be way too busy in the White House to play golf. In a February 4, 2016 speech, for example, Trump insists, I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off, make great deals.

In a February 19 speech in South Carolina, Trump vows, Im not going to play much golf, because theres a lot of work to be done. And at a February 8, 2016 event in New Hampshire, Trump asks, When youre in the White House, who the hell wants to play golf?

It's that time of year when we all give thanks and look back on the year, and here at AlterNet we give thanks to you. All of us are honored by your readership and support. We hope you and your family enjoy a joyful holiday season.

AlterNets journalists work tirelessly to counter the traditional corporate media narrative. Were here seven days a week, 365 days a year. And were proud to say that weve been bringing you the real, unfiltered news for 20 yearslonger than any other progressive news site on the Internet.

Its through the generosity of our supporters that were able to share with you all the underreported news you need to know. Independent journalism is increasingly imperiled; ads alone cant pay our bills. AlterNet counts on readers like you to support our coverage. Did you enjoy content from David Cay Johnston, Common Dreams, Raw Story and Robert Reich? Opinion from Salon and Jim Hightower? Analysis by The Conversation? Then join the hundreds of readers who have supported AlterNet this year.

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The rest is here:
Watch: Trump tore into Obama in 2016 for playing golf but now those attacks have blown up in his face - AlterNet

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) Few states have changed politically with the head-snapping speed of Iowa. Heading into 2020, the question is whether its going to change again.

In 2008, its voters propelled Barack Obama to the White House, as an overwhelmingly white state validated the candidacy of the first black president. A year later, Iowas Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage, adding a voice of Midwestern sensibility to a national shift in public sentiment. In 2012, Iowa backed Obama again.

All that change proved too much, too fast, and it came as the Great Recession punished agricultural areas, shook the foundations of rural life and stoked a roiling sense of grievance.

By 2016, Donald Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Republicans were in control of the governors mansion and state legislature and held all but one U.S. House seat. For the first time since 1980, both U.S. Senate seats were in GOP hands.

What happened? Voters were slow to embrace Obamas signature health care law. The recession depleted college-educated voters as a share of the rural population, and Republicans successfully painted Democrats as the party of coastal elites.

Those forces combined for a swift Republican resurgence and helped create a wide lane for Trump.

The self-proclaimed billionaire populist ended up carrying Iowa by a larger percentage of the vote than in Texas, winning 93 of Iowas 99 counties, including places like working-class Dubuque and Wapello counties, where no Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower had won.

But now, as Democrats turn their focus to Iowas kickoff caucuses that begin the process of selecting Trumps challenger, could the state be showing furtive signs of swinging back? Caucus turnout will provide some early measures of Democratic enthusiasm, and of what kind of candidate Iowas Democratic voters who have a good record of picking the Democratic nominee believe has the best chance against Trump.

If Iowas rightward swing has stalled, it could be a foreboding sign for Trump in other upper Midwestern states he carried by much smaller margins and would need to win again.

Theyve gone too far to the right and there is the slow movement back, Tom Vilsack, the only two-term Democratic governor in the past 50 years, said of Republicans. This is an actual correction.

Iowans unseated two Republican U.S. House members and nearly a third in 2018 during midterm elections where more Iowa voters in the aggregate chose a Democrat for federal office for the first time in a decade.

In doing so, Iowans sent the states first Democratic women to Congress: Cindy Axne, who dominated Des Moines and its suburbs, and Abby Finkenauer, who won in several working-class counties Trump carried.

Democrats won 14 of the 31 Iowa counties that Trump won in 2016 but Obama won in 2008, though Trumps return to the ballot in 2020 could change all that.

We won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent Republicans, veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link said. I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next year.

Theres more going on in Iowa that simply a merely cyclical swing.

Iowas metropolitan areas, some of the fastest growing in the country over the past two decades, have given birth to a new political front where Democrats saw gains in 2018.

The once-GOP-leaning suburbs and exurbs, especially to the north and west of Des Moines and the corridor linking Cedar Rapids and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, swelled with college-educated adults in the past decade, giving rise to a new class of rising Democratic leaders.

I dont believe it was temporary, Iowa State University economist David Swenson said of Democrats 2018 gains in suburban Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. I think it is the inexorable outcome of demographic and educational shifts that have been going on.

The Democratic caucuses will provide a test of how broad the change may be.

I think it would be folly to say Iowa is not a competitive state, said John Stineman, a veteran Iowa GOP campaign operative and political data analyst who is unaffiliated with the Trump campaign but has advised presidential and congressional campaigns over the past 25 years. I believe Iowa is a swing state in 2020.

For now, that is not a widely held view, as Iowa has shown signs of losing its swing state status.

In the 1980s, it gave rise to a populist movement in rural areas from the left, the ascent of the religious right as a political force and the start of an enduring rural-urban balance embodied by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.

Now, after a decade-long Republican trend, there are signs of shifting alliances in people like Jenny OToole.

The 48-year-old insurance industry employee from suburban Cedar Rapids stood on the edge of the scrum surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden last spring, trying to get a glimpse as he shook hands and posed for pictures.

I was a Republican. Not any more, OToole said. Im socially liberal, but economically conservative. Thats what Im looking for.

OToole is among those current and new former Republicans who dot Democratic presidential events, from Iowa farm hubs to working-class river towns to booming suburbs.

Janet Cosgrove, a 75-year-old Episcopal minister from Atlantic, in western Iowa, and Judy Hoakison, a 65-year-old farmer from rural southwest Iowa, are Republicans who caught Mayor Pete Buttigiegs recent trip.

If such voters are a quiet warning to Trump in Iowa, similar symptoms in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats also made 2018 gains, could be even more problematic.

Vilsack has seen the stage change dramatically. After 30 years of Republican dominance in Iowas governors mansion, he was elected in 1998 as a former small-city mayor and pragmatic state senator.

An era of partisan balance in Iowa took hold, punctuated by Democratic presidential nominee Al Gores 4,144-vote victory in Iowa in 2000, and George W. Bushs 10,059-vote re-election in 2004.

After the 2006 national wave swept Democrats into total Statehouse control for the first time in 50 years, the stage was set for Obamas combination of generational change, his appeal to anti-Iraq War sentiment and the historic opportunity to elect the first African American president.

We were like a conquering army, prepared to negotiate terms of surrender, said Cedar Rapids Democrat Dale Todd, an early Obama supporter and adviser.

Todd was one of a collection of Iowa Democratic activists who gathered at a downtown Des Moines sports bar last year to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Obamas historic caucus campaign.

Just across the Des Moines River in the state Capitol, there was a reminder of how much the ground had shifted since those heady days.

Republicans control all of state government for the first time in 20 years. Part of their wholesale conservative agenda has included stripping public employee unions of nearly all bargaining rights, establishing new voter restrictions and outlawing abortion six weeks into a pregnancy.

It was in line with Republican takeovers in states such as Wisconsin that were completed earlier, but traced their beginnings to the same turbulent summer of 2009.

On a Wednesday in August that year, throngs flocked to Grassleys typically quiet annual county visits to protest his work with Democrats on health care legislation.

Thousands representing the emerging Tea Party forced Grassleys last event from a community center in the small town of Adel to the town park, where some booed the typically popular senator and held signs stating, Grassley, youre fired.

The events became a national symbol for uneasiness about the new presidents signature policy goal.

The previous April, Iowas nine-member Supreme Court Democratic and Republican appointees had unanimously declared same-sex marriage legal in the state. A year later, Christian conservatives successfully campaigned to oust the three Supreme Court justices facing retention, waving the marriage decision as their cause.

Four years later, Democrats had high expectations of holding the retiring Harkins Senate seat. But Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley lacked Harkins populist appeal, and was beaten by state Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iraq War veteran from rural Iowa who painted Braley as an elitist lawyer.

By 2016, Republicans had completed their long-sought statehouse takeover, in part by beating longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal.

We tried in many cases to win suburbia, but we just couldnt lay a glove on it, Gronstal said. We just could not figure out how to crack it in Iowa.

The answer for Democrats in Iowa is much the same as the rest of the country: growing, vote-rich suburbs.

Dallas County, west of Des Moines, has grown by 121% since 2000, converting from a checkerboard of farms into miles of car dealerships, strip malls, megachurches and waves of similarly styled housing developments.

It had been a Republican county. However, last year, long-held Republican Iowa House districts in Des Moines western suburbs fell to Democrats.

It was the culmination of two decades of shifting educational attainment with political implications.

Since 2000, the number of Iowans with at least a college degree in urban and suburban areas grew by twice the rate of rural areas, according to U.S. Census data and an Iowa State University study.

Last year, a third of urban and suburban Iowans had a college diploma, up from 25% at the dawn of the metropolitan boom in 2000. Rural Iowans had inched up to just 20% from 16% during that period.

The more that occurs, the more you get voter participation leaning toward Democratic outcomes than has historically been in the past, Swenson said, noting the higher likelihood of college-educated voters to lean Democratic.

Since 2016 alone, registered Democrats in Dallas County have increased 15%, to Republicans 2%. Republicans still outnumber Democrats in the county, but independent voters have leaped by 20% and for the first time outnumber Republicans.

There is now a third front, Gronstal said. We can fight in those toss-up rural areas, hold our urban base, but now compete in those quintessentially suburban districts.

Though Trumps return to the ballot in 2020 shakes up the calculus, his approval in Iowa has remained around 45% or lower. A sub-50 rating is typically problematic for an incumbent.

Another warning for Trump, GOP operative Stineman noted, is The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Polls November finding that only 76% of self-identified Republicans said they would definitely vote to re-elect him next year.

With no challenger and 10 months until the election, a lot can change.

Still, thats one in four of your family thats not locked down, Stineman said.

There are also signs Iowa Democrats have shaken some of the apathy that helped Trump and hobbled Clinton in Iowa in 2016.

Democratic turnout in 2018 leaped from the previous midterm in 2014 from 57% to 68%, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. Republican turnout, which is typically higher, also rose, but by a smaller margin.

Overall turnout in Iowa, as in more reliably Democratic-voting presidential states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, was down in 2016, due mostly to a downturn in Democratic participation.

The trend was down, across the board, said Ann Selzer, who has conducted The Des Moines Registers Iowa Poll for more than 25 years. So it doesnt take much to create a Democratic victory in these upper Midwestern states.

I think the success in the midterms kind of made people on the Democratic side believe that we can do it, Selzer said.

Perhaps, but Trump has his believers, too.

Read more:
Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020? - The Associated Press