Slow day here, traveled back from Palm Desert. I never watched the show The OC, but I hope the scenery is better than what I saw on the drive back to the airport.
Where has everyone gone this weekend? Ah, this explains it, Power outages from East Coast snowstorm top 3M. The storm missed both Rhode Island and Ithaca, and pretty much went straight up the middle much like Hurricane Irene. That’s why so few people are visiting the blog this weekend, right? Right?
Glenn Reynolds of Istanpundit has a really important column in The NY Post about how the college education bubble has been inflated by government subsidies, Screw U:
That’s because when the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. College is no exception. Tuition has been increasing much faster than disposable income, and families — believing that a college education is a can’t-lose investment, much as they used to think houses were — have been making up the difference with debt. After all, we’re told, student loan debt is “good debt,” because a college degree guarantees more earnings….The problem is, “college” isn’t an undifferentiated product. Companies can’t hire enough mechanical engineers, but there’s no bidding war for majors in Fine Arts or Women’s Studies, degrees that cost just as much, but deliver a lot less in terms of employment. In an economically rational market, it would be harder to borrow money to finance fields of study that were unlikely to produce enough income to pay back the loans. But since the federal government subsidizes everything — and makes student loans un-dischargeable in bankruptcy — there’s no incentive for lenders to care, and even less incentive for colleges and universities to care.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters should be occupying their professors’ offices (or better yet, the Admissions Offices), particularly in the social “sciences,” but instead their social “sciences” professors have convinced them Wall Street is to blame. How convenient.
I didn’t get to watch Herman Cain on Face the Nation today. Good, bad, ugly?
I sense a developing “Stop Romney” campaign emerging. Bad move. Not stopping Romney, but launching such a campaign. The not-Romneys need to prove why they should be the nominee, not why Romney should not. The best way not to Stop Obama is to select a nominee just because the person is not Romney.
What else?
Added: Shared a cup of coffee tonight with Donald Douglas of American Power Blog, who lives not far from the hotel we are staying in.
Then got back and saw that it’s starting, a Politico headline article asserting that Herman Cain was accused of, well it’s not really clear, the article usese terms like “sexually suggestive” behavior in the 1990s at when he was head of the National Restaurant Association.
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