Not bad for a pinch hitter! I delayed reading this column because I am such a fanboy of Nellie,and I didn't relish another TGIF writer, but here I am. And you done good, son. A Natural, so to speak. Keep taking batting practice!
To me, the American Dream is being anything for which you're willing to work . I guess that most people don't understand the phrase delayed gratification. For the son of a son of Eastern European immigrants (Me) to attend college, medical school and to become a physician is my idea of the American Dream. For everyone of my father's children to get at least one college degree was expected by the people of my father's culture. Oh, and I paid of my student loans in their entirety. Every damned cent!
I cannot understand the double standard in this country perpetrated by the media. I was raised to rely on what is good for the goose is good for the-you know the ending. Why people aren't held accountable for their actions is beyond my pay grade. Had some of this Hunter Biden stuff been publicized, Old Joe might not have made the grade. I'd rather have a president who(whom?) I didn't like, and brought us good times, than one I didn't like, and brings us recession and inflation, and keeps piling on the crap executive privilege after executive privilege. Out of more than 300 million people in these United States, one would think that there are 299,999,999 more appropriate candidates.
Wow, Nick's opponents in that debate...not great debaters. So bad in fact that they don't seem like good *thinkers.* I'm surprised that they hold positions of leadership.
The student loan forgiveness is basically just another tax break to yet another group. Plenty of people complaining about this are: 1. PPP recipients whose own loans of way more than $10K were forgiven 2. People like those in New Jersey who avoid property taxes by running a "farm" with a few cows grazing on a posh estate 3. Homeowners who get a $10K deduction every year for mortgage interest and the list goes on.
Acting like students and their parents are the first recipients of unnecessary largesse is absurd--it's been going on for time immemorial.
It's why we need a full flat tax with no deductions or breaks for ANYTHING but a very high standard deduction.
I certainly wouldn’t book a room in a hotel forced to take in the homeless, it seems like just another path to destroy business, like Starbucks closing stores because they are not allowed to stop crackheads from using their washrooms as a home camp.
It’s so infuriating to see otherwise smart leftists like Bill Maher rightly rail about how it took 3 years to hook up his stupid little virtue signaling solar panel on his shed, or how the homeless problem was created by the democrats with insane regulations that drive the cost of proper homeless housing through the roof, and yet he cheers on Noisome and was happy he wasn’t recalled.
What eliminates that single extra brain cell that might allow people to see the cause and effect of their beliefs?
When I was in graduate school I had an instructor who worked a day job for a Dutch company. He told us about having his Dutch counterparts visit the facility in the US, and how he had them over to his home for dinner…ideally a good old fashioned cook out, but I can’t recall.
The Dutch were convinced that he was being grossly overpaid compared to them, largely because he lived in his own detached home on 2+ acres, something only the landed gentry would have back their country.
I’m not going to say that’s the American Dream, but it certainly is something people in other countries can’t even dream about, something completely beyond their comprehension.
The current White House and the FBI leaders are freaking out about the former president having "secret" papers from his own administration.
But, how is it legal for Biden to make random decrees about how to spend taxpayer money - robbing it from the masses to give to the elite/college educated? It cannot be.
How is this constitutional? Isn't this a matter for the lawmaking body - ie, Congress?
Enjoyed your piece, Nick, and thanks for putting in the hard work to make it broad and snappy.
On one of the issues, canceling 10k in college loan debt. I'm not wild about the idea, since the borrowers did sign those contracts, as vague and shitty as they might have been. (Hey, 18-year-olds, get them lawyered before you sign if you don't understand every single word.)
That said, I would take the loud bleatings that "only commies don't pay their debts" with a little less laughing if the poohs and bahs of the GOP would repay their PPP Covid loans. Members of Congress and others holding good jobs in government owe billions of dollars in loan paybacks. Every one of those loans was cancelled. Forgiven. Excused.
If we're going to cancel federal loans even for those rich enough to repay them . . .
. . . I'm not going to cry a river over college debt forgiveness. Set the hyenas of repayment loose on tax cheats, PPP loan holders, and tax-cut billionaires. Once we do, then we can talking about the piddle of debt relief for people trying to get a college education, which our culture has brayed for forty years was mandatory to getting "a good job so you can live the American Dream."
The Biden debt stunt deprived everyone. We have been deprived of the right to have a discussion in congress about higher education and it's $1.7 trillion dollar mess that has indentured those students, then all of us as taxpayers. In 2018 colleges received $1. 07 trillion in revenue. That's a lot of potatoes if you look at it as a corporate structure/industry. Almost $150 billion was subsidized by the tax-payer back then too. I bet that number is a lot bigger today! With nearly five hundred billion in forgiveness, I wonder how that is going to distribute, but I digress. I think by taxing it we can get the institutions to truly self-fund students in need.
A few points that I would like people to consider.
Why is a section of an industry, more specifically the university system, allowed non-profit status if it rakes in at least $1.7 trillion financed dollars? Doesn't this seem completely out of whack? It throws all this debt on people and yet gets to keep every penny tax free. Biden says this does not serve society, yet he is willing to give this form of piracy a tax-free haven to rake in trillions of dollars.
My proposal is we have this crazy money issue on the table. Let's not default to partisan rage habits. Instead let's plot a solution that gets some cash back from the tassel & calligraphy paper distributors. The president was really clear that this is an economic problem for a generation, however he only presented a solution for one generation, most of whom work for him at a low-cost jobs in the oval office.
Using some math & economic skills that I did not get in my undergraduate degree, this is what I am thinking. We can pay for these $500 billion dollars and way more by instituting taxation of higher ed.
Let's take a look at endowments as an easy first step in. Make it really simple, pay capital gains tax like the rest of us if you have over $20 million dollars warehoused like a hedge fund. If you have over $100 million pay income tax on all dividends too! Once the money is flowing think of all the good it will do for education and the federal budget!
Second, (& this is where we can get creative with tax code) Education cost over $10k per year per student, (State college cost), is taxable at the corporate tax rate for the university to pay. Like a lot of Internal Revenue Code- I want this number to be good and firm. We can't have a person with a JD and an LLM in taxation getting creative with the legislation to hand out huge breaks for graduate degrees, can we now? Let's keep it as simple as a $300-500 billion dollar loan bailout.
Room and board is taxed at 100% of revenue using lodging tax codes and exemptions. Hey if COVID taught us anything, it'ss that you don't need to be there to pass a class or get that tassel!
Perhaps this is the remedy for the irrational cost of college & redirect the myopic focus of college at any price in high school education dogma.
Would love to have this discussion too to bring the non-for profit world; government, schools, hospitals and others back into the same country that the rest of us live in. Perhaps this can actually help improve divisiveness as well. When all is pealed back most divides are economic. The non for profit world is absolutely tone deaf to the rest of us, and this is one of the core issues of the divide- understanding the ramifications of taxes. More specifically understanding value of what we are all paying for. So please let's discuss getting people who reside in the the tax free vacuum to start talking, feeling, thinking, and yes paying like the rest of us.
The Biden Administration's give away of free money to certain Democratic party constituents in a blatant attempt to buy votes is reprehensible at its core. UPS drivers, plumbers, and secretaries collectively paying 20k to a couple making a quarter million per year is not just bad politics and even worse economics: it is immoral.
So, gay and straight people enjoy the movie, "Top Gun". That's nice.
Ron DeSantis is a rare fighter against the grooming of children for "transgender"/Radical Gender Theory which harms both gay and straight young people.
Not seeing many comments on the James S. Sweet article. My husband is a historian who left the discipline because of the dynamic Sweet was talking about (i.e., cherry picking history to make modern political arguments--and they better be the sanctioned arguments). I'm sad that Sweet apologized for the "harm he caused." What a load of crap. You want to know why so many people like the nutty Republicans who gaffe a lot? Because they don't apologize to the apparatchik hordes. Matt Gaetz says all pro-choice women are ugly, which is certainly a stupid and juvenile comment, but people yell at him that they are offended and he says they can be offended. Sweet says something that matters and the apparatchik horde goes after him and he apologizes. Bunk. He should have said, "be offended."
100% agree. For too long, leftists have viewed history as the repository of grievances to be mined for use as weapons in their battle to win the victimhood wars. It’s disastrous that he apologized for pointing out the obvious - that this is a complete subversion of the study of history.
Civilization rests upon the study of history. Humans are able to learn from the wisdom that our ancestors acquired at great cost. We don’t have to “re-invent the wheel” with each generation. Yet the “experts” today want to sweep away our greatest gift and substitute their own hubris for the wisdom of the ages.
I fear that real history will soon have to be studied in secret, and kept alive only by a determined few.
As cynical and idiotic as is the student loan bonanza, the first and only story must be that the FBI (FIB or the American Stasi) actively intervened in and subverted the 2020 election by calling the Biden laptop "misinformation" when it had the laptop and knew full well that it was genuinely Hunter's property. The ONLY thing left to do is disband this gang of fools (they couldn't even protect our little gymnasts) and gangsters (SWAT team raids on 60 and 70 year old non-violent targets arrested for political crimes), tear down the building they occupy that's named for a cross-dressing blackmailer and start anew with patriotic Americans who take seriously their pledge to our Constitution.
Nick you miss the real story: university and college administrative bloat. Debt forgiveness just lets this problem worsen. This bureaucratic explosion puts the cost of an education through the roof, while also excacerbating wokeness, free speech barriers, on and on. See David Graeber’s work and get Common Sense on the real story here— Universities are broken, the middle ministration layers are a big cause of the problem, and forgiving student debt just feeds the addict.
Every single immigrant I’ve ever known believes in the American dream. And they’ll say they live it.
What bewilders them entirely is media and people who were born here deeply hating America itself, whether by supporting socialism, controlling speech, or treating criminals better than victims.
And when they catch wind of UC Berkeley banning whites in some areas, those from the former Soviet Union warn me: America is in trouble.
While an indentured servant to my student loan I often wished something could be done. I had mountains of credit card debt that complicated matters-- make minimum payments or eat? I worked three jobs and lived with roommates into my early 40s. The interest and income based repayments and forbearances took a 30,000 education to 150,000....but just last year, I became debt free. I make well under 100,000 with two jobs which means I owe taxes at the end of the year. So just as I’m finally free -- I get to watch people who make 120,000 a year get off easy....my rent escalated....and on Facebook I was labeled a “prick” for questioning this insulting decision. After all, despite wishing I could get out of paying too (because I lived hand to mouth working full time) there’s nothing quite like getting out of it on your own. But this is the generation whose health insurance covers fake genitals, so...
Not bad for a pinch hitter! I delayed reading this column because I am such a fanboy of Nellie,and I didn't relish another TGIF writer, but here I am. And you done good, son. A Natural, so to speak. Keep taking batting practice!
To me, the American Dream is being anything for which you're willing to work . I guess that most people don't understand the phrase delayed gratification. For the son of a son of Eastern European immigrants (Me) to attend college, medical school and to become a physician is my idea of the American Dream. For everyone of my father's children to get at least one college degree was expected by the people of my father's culture. Oh, and I paid of my student loans in their entirety. Every damned cent!
I cannot understand the double standard in this country perpetrated by the media. I was raised to rely on what is good for the goose is good for the-you know the ending. Why people aren't held accountable for their actions is beyond my pay grade. Had some of this Hunter Biden stuff been publicized, Old Joe might not have made the grade. I'd rather have a president who(whom?) I didn't like, and brought us good times, than one I didn't like, and brings us recession and inflation, and keeps piling on the crap executive privilege after executive privilege. Out of more than 300 million people in these United States, one would think that there are 299,999,999 more appropriate candidates.
Wow, Nick's opponents in that debate...not great debaters. So bad in fact that they don't seem like good *thinkers.* I'm surprised that they hold positions of leadership.
Well done, sir.
The student loan forgiveness is basically just another tax break to yet another group. Plenty of people complaining about this are: 1. PPP recipients whose own loans of way more than $10K were forgiven 2. People like those in New Jersey who avoid property taxes by running a "farm" with a few cows grazing on a posh estate 3. Homeowners who get a $10K deduction every year for mortgage interest and the list goes on.
Acting like students and their parents are the first recipients of unnecessary largesse is absurd--it's been going on for time immemorial.
It's why we need a full flat tax with no deductions or breaks for ANYTHING but a very high standard deduction.
I certainly wouldn’t book a room in a hotel forced to take in the homeless, it seems like just another path to destroy business, like Starbucks closing stores because they are not allowed to stop crackheads from using their washrooms as a home camp.
It’s so infuriating to see otherwise smart leftists like Bill Maher rightly rail about how it took 3 years to hook up his stupid little virtue signaling solar panel on his shed, or how the homeless problem was created by the democrats with insane regulations that drive the cost of proper homeless housing through the roof, and yet he cheers on Noisome and was happy he wasn’t recalled.
What eliminates that single extra brain cell that might allow people to see the cause and effect of their beliefs?
When I was in graduate school I had an instructor who worked a day job for a Dutch company. He told us about having his Dutch counterparts visit the facility in the US, and how he had them over to his home for dinner…ideally a good old fashioned cook out, but I can’t recall.
The Dutch were convinced that he was being grossly overpaid compared to them, largely because he lived in his own detached home on 2+ acres, something only the landed gentry would have back their country.
I’m not going to say that’s the American Dream, but it certainly is something people in other countries can’t even dream about, something completely beyond their comprehension.
The current White House and the FBI leaders are freaking out about the former president having "secret" papers from his own administration.
But, how is it legal for Biden to make random decrees about how to spend taxpayer money - robbing it from the masses to give to the elite/college educated? It cannot be.
How is this constitutional? Isn't this a matter for the lawmaking body - ie, Congress?
Enjoyed your piece, Nick, and thanks for putting in the hard work to make it broad and snappy.
On one of the issues, canceling 10k in college loan debt. I'm not wild about the idea, since the borrowers did sign those contracts, as vague and shitty as they might have been. (Hey, 18-year-olds, get them lawyered before you sign if you don't understand every single word.)
That said, I would take the loud bleatings that "only commies don't pay their debts" with a little less laughing if the poohs and bahs of the GOP would repay their PPP Covid loans. Members of Congress and others holding good jobs in government owe billions of dollars in loan paybacks. Every one of those loans was cancelled. Forgiven. Excused.
If we're going to cancel federal loans even for those rich enough to repay them . . .
. . . I'm not going to cry a river over college debt forgiveness. Set the hyenas of repayment loose on tax cheats, PPP loan holders, and tax-cut billionaires. Once we do, then we can talking about the piddle of debt relief for people trying to get a college education, which our culture has brayed for forty years was mandatory to getting "a good job so you can live the American Dream."
The Biden debt stunt deprived everyone. We have been deprived of the right to have a discussion in congress about higher education and it's $1.7 trillion dollar mess that has indentured those students, then all of us as taxpayers. In 2018 colleges received $1. 07 trillion in revenue. That's a lot of potatoes if you look at it as a corporate structure/industry. Almost $150 billion was subsidized by the tax-payer back then too. I bet that number is a lot bigger today! With nearly five hundred billion in forgiveness, I wonder how that is going to distribute, but I digress. I think by taxing it we can get the institutions to truly self-fund students in need.
A few points that I would like people to consider.
Why is a section of an industry, more specifically the university system, allowed non-profit status if it rakes in at least $1.7 trillion financed dollars? Doesn't this seem completely out of whack? It throws all this debt on people and yet gets to keep every penny tax free. Biden says this does not serve society, yet he is willing to give this form of piracy a tax-free haven to rake in trillions of dollars.
My proposal is we have this crazy money issue on the table. Let's not default to partisan rage habits. Instead let's plot a solution that gets some cash back from the tassel & calligraphy paper distributors. The president was really clear that this is an economic problem for a generation, however he only presented a solution for one generation, most of whom work for him at a low-cost jobs in the oval office.
Using some math & economic skills that I did not get in my undergraduate degree, this is what I am thinking. We can pay for these $500 billion dollars and way more by instituting taxation of higher ed.
Let's take a look at endowments as an easy first step in. Make it really simple, pay capital gains tax like the rest of us if you have over $20 million dollars warehoused like a hedge fund. If you have over $100 million pay income tax on all dividends too! Once the money is flowing think of all the good it will do for education and the federal budget!
Second, (& this is where we can get creative with tax code) Education cost over $10k per year per student, (State college cost), is taxable at the corporate tax rate for the university to pay. Like a lot of Internal Revenue Code- I want this number to be good and firm. We can't have a person with a JD and an LLM in taxation getting creative with the legislation to hand out huge breaks for graduate degrees, can we now? Let's keep it as simple as a $300-500 billion dollar loan bailout.
Room and board is taxed at 100% of revenue using lodging tax codes and exemptions. Hey if COVID taught us anything, it'ss that you don't need to be there to pass a class or get that tassel!
Perhaps this is the remedy for the irrational cost of college & redirect the myopic focus of college at any price in high school education dogma.
Would love to have this discussion too to bring the non-for profit world; government, schools, hospitals and others back into the same country that the rest of us live in. Perhaps this can actually help improve divisiveness as well. When all is pealed back most divides are economic. The non for profit world is absolutely tone deaf to the rest of us, and this is one of the core issues of the divide- understanding the ramifications of taxes. More specifically understanding value of what we are all paying for. So please let's discuss getting people who reside in the the tax free vacuum to start talking, feeling, thinking, and yes paying like the rest of us.
The Biden Administration's give away of free money to certain Democratic party constituents in a blatant attempt to buy votes is reprehensible at its core. UPS drivers, plumbers, and secretaries collectively paying 20k to a couple making a quarter million per year is not just bad politics and even worse economics: it is immoral.
So, gay and straight people enjoy the movie, "Top Gun". That's nice.
Ron DeSantis is a rare fighter against the grooming of children for "transgender"/Radical Gender Theory which harms both gay and straight young people.
Not seeing many comments on the James S. Sweet article. My husband is a historian who left the discipline because of the dynamic Sweet was talking about (i.e., cherry picking history to make modern political arguments--and they better be the sanctioned arguments). I'm sad that Sweet apologized for the "harm he caused." What a load of crap. You want to know why so many people like the nutty Republicans who gaffe a lot? Because they don't apologize to the apparatchik hordes. Matt Gaetz says all pro-choice women are ugly, which is certainly a stupid and juvenile comment, but people yell at him that they are offended and he says they can be offended. Sweet says something that matters and the apparatchik horde goes after him and he apologizes. Bunk. He should have said, "be offended."
100% agree. For too long, leftists have viewed history as the repository of grievances to be mined for use as weapons in their battle to win the victimhood wars. It’s disastrous that he apologized for pointing out the obvious - that this is a complete subversion of the study of history.
Civilization rests upon the study of history. Humans are able to learn from the wisdom that our ancestors acquired at great cost. We don’t have to “re-invent the wheel” with each generation. Yet the “experts” today want to sweep away our greatest gift and substitute their own hubris for the wisdom of the ages.
I fear that real history will soon have to be studied in secret, and kept alive only by a determined few.
Thanks to You and Scuba Cat, Heyjude. You may, or may not, be interested:
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nikole-hannah-jones-has-taken-over-the-history-profession/
As cynical and idiotic as is the student loan bonanza, the first and only story must be that the FBI (FIB or the American Stasi) actively intervened in and subverted the 2020 election by calling the Biden laptop "misinformation" when it had the laptop and knew full well that it was genuinely Hunter's property. The ONLY thing left to do is disband this gang of fools (they couldn't even protect our little gymnasts) and gangsters (SWAT team raids on 60 and 70 year old non-violent targets arrested for political crimes), tear down the building they occupy that's named for a cross-dressing blackmailer and start anew with patriotic Americans who take seriously their pledge to our Constitution.
Nick you miss the real story: university and college administrative bloat. Debt forgiveness just lets this problem worsen. This bureaucratic explosion puts the cost of an education through the roof, while also excacerbating wokeness, free speech barriers, on and on. See David Graeber’s work and get Common Sense on the real story here— Universities are broken, the middle ministration layers are a big cause of the problem, and forgiving student debt just feeds the addict.
Every single immigrant I’ve ever known believes in the American dream. And they’ll say they live it.
What bewilders them entirely is media and people who were born here deeply hating America itself, whether by supporting socialism, controlling speech, or treating criminals better than victims.
And when they catch wind of UC Berkeley banning whites in some areas, those from the former Soviet Union warn me: America is in trouble.
While an indentured servant to my student loan I often wished something could be done. I had mountains of credit card debt that complicated matters-- make minimum payments or eat? I worked three jobs and lived with roommates into my early 40s. The interest and income based repayments and forbearances took a 30,000 education to 150,000....but just last year, I became debt free. I make well under 100,000 with two jobs which means I owe taxes at the end of the year. So just as I’m finally free -- I get to watch people who make 120,000 a year get off easy....my rent escalated....and on Facebook I was labeled a “prick” for questioning this insulting decision. After all, despite wishing I could get out of paying too (because I lived hand to mouth working full time) there’s nothing quite like getting out of it on your own. But this is the generation whose health insurance covers fake genitals, so...