Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

Damn straight.. When those revenooers come to take my still, I'm ready.

 

 

For comic relief: I was in the bank recently to cash a check. Two windows are open, a customer at each of them, I.m waiting to be next at one, another guy is waiting at the other. The bank has this video screen, or whatever, with revolving comments/ads.

"When in Rome, do like the Romans" "Pay in Euros" .

The guy waiting at the other window loudly addresses me.

"Who wants to pay in Euros?"

"Well, if you are in Europe..."

"I'm not a globalist, I'm a nationalist".

 

Ah yes, how did Trump get elected? I'm beginning to see some clues.

Sounds like a typical exchange on this thread.

[Al_U_Card]

There seems to be an unspoken assumption in the last few pages of this thread that people need the State to tell them what they can and cannot do, and to protect them from themselves.

 

It shouldn't work that way.

FYP :) Babies need their nannies...

[Winstonm]

I have a question for those who support Trump: How does restricting illegal immigration and restricting travel from some Muslim countries solve the problems of the U.S.?

 

In other words, assuming that Trump's policies are right, what is the endgame - the goal - and how will those policies attain that goal?

[ldrews]

I have a question for those who support Trump: How does restricting illegal immigration and restricting travel from some Muslim countries solve the problems of the U.S.?

 

In other words, assuming that Trump's policies are right, what is the endgame - the goal - and how will those policies attain that goal?

 

Gee, I don't know. What is your solution?

[Winstonm]

Gee, I don't know. What is your solution?

 

Gee, Wally. Do you think maybe dad is right?

[ldrews]

Gee, Wally. Do you think maybe dad is right?

 

So you don't have one.

[Winstonm]

So you don't have one.

Et tu, Brute?

[Al_U_Card]

Trump, master plan? The art of the (free-wheeling) deal. Seat of the pants because fluid situations require flexibility. Amorality tends to appear as indecisive or incomplete but it is just a work in progress.

In business, as long as you are "right" often enough to "win" (make a profit) 51% of the time then you are a "success" and your methods are justified and acceptable.

Prince Machiavelli is spinning in his literary grave...;)

[ldrews]

Et tu, Brute?

 

Yeah, but I am not criticizing other's attempts to address the problem. You are.

[ldrews]

Trump, master plan? The art of the (free-wheeling) deal. Seat of the pants because fluid situations require flexibility. Amorality tends to appear as indecisive or incomplete but it is just a work in progress.

In business, as long as you are "right" often enough to "win" (make a profit) 51% of the time then you are a "success" and your methods are justified and acceptable.

Prince Machiavelli is spinning in his literary grave...;)

 

And how is politics different?

[Winstonm]

Yeah, but I am not criticizing other's attempts to address the problem. You are.

 

You obviously can't answer the initial question - how will Trump's agenda solve the problems of the U.S.A - so you try to change the direction of the thread.

 

I didn't vote for Trump and do not support him. You claim to be his supporter. I'm asking you why you supported him - how is his agenda going to make this country better?

[mike777]

I have a question for those who support Trump: How does restricting illegal immigration and restricting travel from some Muslim countries solve the problems of the U.S.?

 

In other words, assuming that Trump's policies are right, what is the endgame - the goal - and how will those policies attain that goal?

 

I did not vote for Trump.

 

But here are at least some partial answers:

 

I don't really know what Trump's policies are let alone how they attain some sort of goal.

 

As far as restricting illegal Immigration, if you don't restrict it...you have open borders...you have people jumping the queue which really pisses people off who are waiting years for legal immigration. Now of course if you are in favor of open borders...so be it.

 

As far as this one ban.. a ban for what 90 days....ya useless but at this point in the legal process the question has become more, much more a question of separation of powers issue...not an immigration legal issue. to put it another way, a dumb law, a dumb rule can still be a legal rule....dumb but legal.

[y66]

Betsy DeVos is seeking to repeal rules intended to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit colleges, calling the regulations “a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools.”

 

In June, the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, announced plans to dismantle a set of Obama-era policies devised to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit colleges.

 

Yet data released in the final days of the previous administration shows that the existing rules have proved more effective at shutting down bad college programs than even the most optimistic backers could have hoped.

 

The rules that Ms. DeVos wants to repeal are called the gainful employment regulations. For all for-profit programs, and any nondegree employment certificate programs at public or nonprofit colleges, the education department compares how much the typical student borrows versus how much they earn after graduation.

 

If the ratio is too high — if students borrow lots of money and can’t get well-paying jobs — the program is deemed “failing.” A program that fails in two out of three years becomes ineligible for federal financial aid. Since many for-profit programs get up to 90 percent of their revenue through the Department of Education, the penalty will almost surely shut them down.

 

No program has reached this point yet. Before it could complete the rules, the Obama administration had to spend years fighting through a thicket of lawsuits filed by the for-profit college industry. Eleven days before President Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Education released the first list of failing programs. Ms. DeVos has extended the original deadline for appealing the findings, and recently announced plans to rewrite the rules.

 

But a close analysis of the more than 500 failing programs that haven’t appealed their status reveals something interesting: A substantial majority of them, 300 or so, have already been shut down — even though colleges are not yet required to do so. The gainful employment test turns out to be an accurate way of identifying programs that for-profit colleges themselves don’t think are worth saving, as well as identifying programs run by colleges that are on the brink of bankruptcy and dissolution.

 

Some of the failing programs were run by ITT Tech, a publicly traded chain of technical schools that collapsed under a wave of consumer lawsuits and government investigations in 2016. Dozens of other for-profits have failed in recent years, from mom-and-pop hairdressing academies to business schools with dozens of programs in multiple states.

 

The gainful employment results suggest why. Students who earned a bachelor’s degree in fashion design at Sanford-Brown College’s now-defunct Chicago campus left school with over $45,000 in federal and institutional loans. But they earned less than $21,000 per year, before taxes, food and rent. That’s barely above the minimum wage for a family of three. Only 29 percent of students who started the program graduated on time.

 

Sanford-Brown operated for years with results like this, until the education department stepped in. Announcing that the entire chain would shutter, Ron McCray, C.E.O. of Sanford-Brown’s parent corporation, cited a “challenging regulatory environment” and “the gainful employment regulations issued last year.” In other words, rather than invest the time and money necessary to offer affordable programs that lead to well-paying jobs, they simply closed up shop.

 

Other colleges stayed open, but quickly dispensed with their failing programs. Fortis College, which operates more than 40 campuses in 15 states, used to offer an associate degree in criminal justice and safety studies at its Centerville, Ohio, location. Students typically left the two-year program with nearly $32,000 in debt — yet earned only $15,400 a year. Officials at the Centerville campus say the program is no longer accepting new students.

 

In fairness, colleges may not have known how ineffective their programs were. Complete, detailed earnings information is hard to come by. (The education department gets its data from the Social Security Administration.) Administrators may simply be acting responsibly based on new knowledge, as Harvard did when it suspended a theater arts program that failed the test.

 

The colleges that are keeping their failing programs open tend be small concerns that simply can’t afford to lose the revenue. The Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine offers only three programs, one of which, a master’s degree in acupuncture, failed the test. Tuition is $76,800. The median earnings for program graduates is $16,256 per year.

 

Despite strong evidence that the gainful employment rules are working as intended, Ms. DeVos has decided to tear them up and start from scratch, calling the regulations “a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools.” Both Ms. DeVos and the president of the for-profit college industry association, Steve Gunderson, have said that students should be protected from “fraud.” Many of the failing programs aren’t fraudulent, in the strict, legal sense of the word. They’re just extraordinarily ineffective: a waste of taxpayer money and student time.

 

Bridgepoint Education, a publicly traded for-profit college corporation, offers an online associate degree in early education through Ashford University that costs almost $34,000 in tuition, fees and supplies, most of which students finance with debt. Fewer than half of students finish on time, and the median graduate earns less than $16,000 per year. If those results continue, the program will be cut off from aid under current rules.

 

Until this year, Robert S. Eitel was a top executive at Bridgepoint. He is now a senior counselor to Ms. DeVos, and has been officially designated as the education department’s regulatory reform officer, in charge of trimming rules under an executive order issued by President Trump.

 

It will take two years for the Department of Education to write and set into effect new gainful employment rules. A department spokesman declined to say whether the department would be enforcing the existing rules in the meantime. If it doesn’t, and if the new rules gut the existing regulations, Ms. DeVos will have destroyed a highly effective tool for protecting students from for-profit colleges that offer few job prospects and mountains of debt.

[mike777]

Betsy DeVos is seeking to repeal rules intended to protect students and taxpayers from predatory for-profit colleges, calling the regulations “a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools.”

 

thanks for posting

 

I note you left out non profit colleges and how we can shut down those

 

It would be nice to see a study of how we can destroy non profits not just profits schools.

[awm]

thanks for posting

 

I note you left out non profit colleges and how we can shut down those

 

It would be nice to see a study of how we can destroy non profits not just profits schools.

 

No schools are being shut down. All we are doing is protecting government investment -- something which used to be a Republican priority, before they moved on to funneling money into the pockets of the already-wealthy by any means possible.

 

We have in place a system of government loans, where the federal government loans money to college students so they can get their degree. This program costs the taxpayers very little as long as most recipients pay the government back with interest. Having such a system is very good for the economy, allowing people from middle-class (and below) backgrounds to get appropriate education and training to be competitive.

 

However, in order to protect this system we must make sure that the recipients of these loans are attending programs and institutions where they are actually gaining useful skills, and that they will be able to pay back the loan with a reasonable probability. We don't want to just hand over government money to scam institutions (i.e. Trump University) -- doing this will be terrible for the students (who now have huge debt along with a useless degree) and for taxpayers (who are now on the hook for the money which won't get repaid). So we need to make sure our government-backed student loans are going to students who are learning something legitimate.

 

All the system described does, is to evaluate the average salaries and total debt of the graduates of various programs, and refuse to issue government loans to programs where the salaries of graduates do not justify the expense. Note that even legitimate and prestigious institutions have fallen afoul of this (one of the programs named was at HARVARD). Of course the institutions are not shut down, the programs need not be eliminated. But some of these institutions are basically scams -- profiting almost solely by sucking up federal government "loan" money in order to give useless diplomas to poor people looking for a leg up. Once the federal government declines to fund such programs they have little choice but to shut down (a recent example being ITT Tech).

[Al_U_Card]

And how is politics different?

It relies on personal preference (bias) to determine "success". OUR candidate is right and THEIR candidate is wrong. The all or nothing vote count determines the "winner", right or wrong.

[mike777]

No schools are being shut down. All we are doing is protecting government investment -- something which used to be a Republican priority, before they moved on to funneling money into the pockets of the already-wealthy by any means possible.

 

We have in place a system of government loans, where the federal government loans money to college students so they can get their degree. This program costs the taxpayers very little as long as most recipients pay the government back with interest. Having such a system is very good for the economy, allowing people from middle-class (and below) backgrounds to get appropriate education and training to be competitive.

 

However, in order to protect this system we must make sure that the recipients of these loans are attending programs and institutions where they are actually gaining useful skills, and that they will be able to pay back the loan with a reasonable probability. We don't want to just hand over government money to scam institutions (i.e. Trump University) -- doing this will be terrible for the students (who now have huge debt along with a useless degree) and for taxpayers (who are now on the hook for the money which won't get repaid). So we need to make sure our government-backed student loans are going to students who are learning something legitimate.

 

All the system described does, is to evaluate the average salaries and total debt of the graduates of various programs, and refuse to issue government loans to programs where the salaries of graduates do not justify the expense. Note that even legitimate and prestigious institutions have fallen afoul of this (one of the programs named was at HARVARD). Of course the institutions are not shut down, the programs need not be eliminated. But some of these institutions are basically scams -- profiting almost solely by sucking up federal government "loan" money in order to give useless diplomas to poor people looking for a leg up. Once the federal government declines to fund such programs they have little choice but to shut down (a recent example being ITT Tech).

 

I agree that a lot of these student loans do indeed seem to be scams. The next big financial scandal may very well be the taxpayer not getting their money back from the students. It looks like roughly half the loans are in trouble of not being paid back.

 

As you rightly point out shutting down some of these nonprofit colleges which fail students is very difficult if not impossible. The good news is that the failing for profit schools are easier much easier to destroy the bad news is the nonprofit schools are protected and almost impossible to destroy. Another issue seems to be a growing problem of students getting these loans and not going to class and blowing the loan money.

 

"Outstanding student loan debt is now the second largest form of consumer debt, but about half of the $1 trillion in student loan debt isn't being repaid because the borrowers are struggling to make payments, according to an analysis released Monday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau"

 

-----

 

The answer to the problem may be to simply have the feds pay all and I do mean all the costs of college and not worry about whether the students graduate or not. That way the teachers can pretend to teach and the students can pretend to learn...win win

[ldrews]

You obviously can't answer the initial question - how will Trump's agenda solve the problems of the U.S.A - so you try to change the direction of the thread.

 

I didn't vote for Trump and do not support him. You claim to be his supporter. I'm asking you why you supported him - how is his agenda going to make this country better?

 

You are right, I can't answer how will Trump's agenda solve the problems. But the current system seems to be failing rapidly. Doing nothing doesn't seem like a solution. How would you solve the problem?

[Winstonm]

You are right, I can't answer how will Trump's agenda solve the problems. But the current system seems to be failing rapidly. Doing nothing doesn't seem like a solution. How would you solve the problem?

 

I believe that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Putting Trump in charge is like finding yourself in a hole and hiring an excavation team to see if you really can make it to China.

 

I believe in adult solutions to adult problems, meaning that nothing moves quickly when the government is purposefully at odds. Compromise seldom leads to grand bargains but to incremental change. I don't expect a single payer healthcare system in the next 40 years, but that does not mean the the Affordable Care Act - initially a Republican think-tank idea - cannot be adopted as a working model and improved upon. To do what the Republicans did - demonizing a plan that their own think tank originated - is childish and to continue to try to undo it as a change in "healthcare" is disingenuous; the Republicans want a tax cut for the wealthy as a result of taking government out of the healthcare equation.

 

I think we spend too much of our countries wealth appeasing the military industrial complex and defense department. I believe the national debt needs to be reduced, but this is not a crisis that requires immediate desperate action.

 

I believe voting should be made easier and simpler to accomplish, not more difficult.

 

But the most pressing problem by far is the redistribution of wealth that has left the top 1% with virtually all of the productivity gains of the past 40 years. Without a strong and vibrant middle class, there will be no great America again. And the middle class does not spring automatically from an economic system that is designed around a zero sum game of winners and losers. It can't. That zero-sum game must be forced into supporting those who lose the game or can't compete equally.

 

This is why I supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Hillary understood that change is incremental, that what is started today may not come to fruition in our lifetimes. In other words, she talked as an adult to other adults.

 

Donald Trump made empty promises and empty threats, appealing to those who have not outgrown their teenage insecurities and anger.

[Al_U_Card]

Quo vadis Hesperades?

 

Trump appealed to insecurity and anger.

 

Clinton appealed to idealism and fear?

 

I suppose that Sanders appealed to intellectualism and regret...

 

As I recently heard on the 2nd season of "Mr. Robot", "Politics is for puppets!"

 

Can the USA continue its Imperial imperative or will the BRICs dislodge the dollar as commercial coercion? As long as the banks have the US taxpayers as underwriters of their largesse, the US should remain on top. Remove or alter that relationship significantly and ...

[ldrews]

But the most pressing problem by far is the redistribution of wealth that has left the top 1% with virtually all of the productivity gains of the past 40 years. Without a strong and vibrant middle class, there will be no great America again. And the middle class does not spring automatically from an economic system that is designed around a zero sum game of winners and losers. It can't. That zero-sum game must be forced into supporting those who lose the game or can't compete equally.

 

This is why I supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Hillary understood that change is incremental, that what is started today may not come to fruition in our lifetimes. In other words, she talked as an adult to other adults.

 

Donald Trump made empty promises and empty threats, appealing to those who have not outgrown their teenage insecurities and anger.

 

Why do you think there is such a maldistribution of income? In my opinion it is due to "regulatory capture". When you put more power into the government, the government then becomes a major prize to be won by the highest bidder. As long as political campaigns cost money, politicians will be susceptible to bribes in one form or another. You want better distribution of incomes, then significantly reduce the size and reach of government. Of course it will be less equal, but better distributed. Not everyone but the 1% will be poor. But can you accept such inequality? Or would you prefer what is happening now, a trend toward everyone being equally poor except for the 1%?

[Winstonm]

Why do you think there is such a maldistribution of income?

 

I said wealth. Wealth and income are not the same thing. Productivity gains used to be shared, albeit not perfectly proportionately, among labor, management, and ownership. That stopped being the case, starting with the redistribution of wealth that occurred under Reagan and Greenspan and has continued since.

 

You want better distribution of incomes, then significantly reduce the size and reach of government. Of course it will be less equal, but better distributed.

 

I can't imagine how greater inequality equates to better distribution. Sounds like something from either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. <_<

[ldrews]

I said wealth. Wealth and income are not the same thing. Productivity gains used to be shared, albeit not perfectly proportionately, among labor, management, and ownership. That stopped being the case, starting with the redistribution of wealth that occurred under Reagan and Greenspan and has continued since.

 

 

 

I can't imagine how greater inequality equates to better distribution. Sounds like something from either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. <_<

 

If everyone has nothing then equality is perfect,right? Is that preferable to some having more than others?

[barmar]

If everyone has nothing then equality is perfect,right? Is that preferable to some having more than others?

There will always be people who have more than others (no one is promoting pure communism, it's as much a fantasy as trick-down). The question is how much more. The top 1% have 40% of the wealth, that's extremely lopsided.

[ldrews]

There will always be people who have more than others (no one is promoting pure communism, it's as much a fantasy as trick-down). The question is how much more. The top 1% have 40% of the wealth, that's extremely lopsided.

 

I agree. The question is: what causes or allows to be such lopsideness. Do you think it is just magic or dumb luck, or might there be some natural laws in operation?