It could be worse! From a friend who works there lol –
Von nem Freund der da arbeitet lol pic.twitter.com/aZsR1YpTcw
— M (@seitimmer) December 23, 2021
Imagine that this is the first thing you see when you come to work in the morning –
Stell dir vor, dass ist das erste was du siehst wenn du morgens zur Arbeit kommst ??
— M (@seitimmer) December 23, 2021
(I think it’s a stone marten, which seems to cause the same problems in Northern Europe that skunks or racoons cause here in the States.)
Spotted this yesterday, and.. yeah pic.twitter.com/rXXlDuefiu
— Ratchet ?????? (@Ratchet_fox) December 26, 2021
NASA just hired 24 theologians to assess how the world would react if we discovered alien life and I have a feeling this subplot in the season finale of 2021 is planting the seeds for the main storyline of 2022
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) December 26, 2021
On the other hand, possibly a good omen (at least for capitalism) for 2022…
Ever Given back at Felixstowe after uneventful latest trip https://t.co/YKyToikdrr
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 27, 2021
MattF
Here’s a page that tracks the Webb Telescope deployment.
Baud
Tweeting is easier than doing.
NotMax
Ka(r)-BOOM!
germy
germy
JWR
Perhaps already mentioned, another RIP:
Betty Cracker
I guess Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, the Parkland kids, etc., didn’t get the memo!
Cameron
Sounds like somebody at NASA read The Sparrow.
mrmoshpotato
@MattF: Very cool.
JWR
@germy: Yeah, same as it ever was. The bias in our “mainstream” journamalism is quite clear. And to your point, I saw these headlines as the top two stories on yesterday’s AP US News:
germy
@JWR:
Baud
Ever Given looks kind of proud, even defiant, in that photo.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
John Revolta
@germy: It’s almost as if the media were reporting things that supported an agenda that was unmoored from reality.
JPL
@rikyrah: Good Morning!
brantl
@Baud: Expecially since its actual name is Evergreen, not Ever Given.
Spanky
@Baud: That’s right, Baud. Here we see a ship that’s had a chip on its shoulder ever since it was given that lame-ass name.
Baud
@brantl:
According to Wikipedia, Evergreen is the name of the company.
Baud
@Spanky:
How good ships go bad.
Geminid
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam gave an end of year, end of term interview to the Washington Post. He says that when he leaves office he will return to his Hampton Roads medical practice. Northam’s State Senate and Lieutenant Governor jobs were part time, so he only gave up medicine for his four years as Governor.
I tbink Northam has done a good job with the pandemic, particularly with timely social distance and mask mandates. His press conferences were also good. He had a knack for being clear and calming. Northam may have learned the these skills from talking to the terrified parents of his pediatric neurosurgery patients..
Kay
@JWR:
“Despite what we’ve been telling you for a year, observable reality demands we (finally) admit the economy is booming”
I will never trust any of these people again.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Well, that was fun.
Baud
@Geminid:
I hope the next four years aren’t too terrible.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s why I don’t buy the narrative that Dems would have been rewarded if the Obama stimulus was bigger. It should have been bigger as a policy matter, but it wouldn’t have made a big difference in the midterms.
debbie
@germy:
Just heard the in-store increase was 21%.
germy
@debbie:
In NY, the governor and AG are asking people to report any price gouging they experience.
burnspbesq
@Baud:
A friendly reminder: Soylent Green was set in 2022.
Geminid
@Baud: Democrats still hold a majority in Virginia’s State Senate, so I don’t see the Republicans doing much legislative damage, except maybe to themselves.
Both the Senate and the House of Delegates seats are up in 2023, and I think Democrats will take the House back that year. We’ve run on maps drawn by Republicans since 2011, and still made gains. I believe the new maps are more neutral, and Democratic candidates should fare well.
Kay
@Baud:
I think the damage to Democrats was deeper and more profound than one cycle. I really do blame Larry Summers. I think he’s rigid and egotistical and unable to admit error but his approach utterly dominated at the time- Obama would have needed a whole different group of people and a different Congress.
Right and centrist economic people all act like they’re so hardheaded and fact based, but so many of their approaches are based on this moralistic view that most people must suffer and any intervention should be stingy and barely adequate with hundreds of hoops to jump thru lest someone mistakenly get “too much”.
I read Summers Twitter. He’s mad about the student loan pause. They don’t deserve help.
OldDave
@MattF: Thank you for the “Where is Webb?” link.
germy
@Kay:
Most people must suffer except for Larry Summers, his family, and his friends.
Suzanne
Another RIP….E.O. Wilson has died at 92. What a loss.
Kay
@germy:
Oh, I get moral hazard. I’m familiar with the concept. But why would it only apply to the bottom 90%?
If it’s good and true it should apply to everyone. Why always push the punishment down to the people who can least weather risk? That’s a judgment call and a policy choice. They can choose differently- we know that now because they chose differently in this crisis.
Suzanne
Soooo the WaPo has a piece on its cover page about men getting vasectomies, which, yay, good for y’all.
It quotes a doctor who performed his own.
Jesus Christ..
Geminid
@Kay: If the leader of the Democratic Party hadn’t given Summers a Cabinet position, he’d be a nobody. Now he uses his celebrity to undermine the party. As an old time cowboy would say, “Damn a man who doesn’t ride for the brand!”
Gvg
There are still shortages though, so people are going to be frustrated. I regularly have to check multiple stores for certain common items like diet soda and cat food. When I actually ventured into stores, sometimes whole aisles were nearly empty. Petsmarts cat food aisles were nearly empty of all brands just before Christmas. This does not mean the economy is doing terrible but most people don’t really know anything about “the economy” and misinterpret information. They know it’s important and that it will impact them, so they worry and then jump to conclusions.
I had never seen so many empty store shelves before the pandemic. It reminded me of stories from my childhood of communist countries. It actually seems to be getting worse lately. Of course I know the reasons for our shortages are unrelated to the conditions in the Soviet block, but like I said, most people don’t really know what the economy is, or much detailed history either.
Gas prices once caused a huge disruption to our economy and ever since people have almost superstitiously watched gas prices.
Stock price drops led to the Great Depression so ever since, news have reported stock prices as if it is the economy.
these indicators are now tradition, not logic with actual understanding.
MattF
@Suzanne: But… but… every sperm is sacred.
Betty Cracker
This was the Christmas of the Cursed Potatoes at our house. I had the dumb idea to make a last minute change to the baked scalloped potatoes recipe I make every Christmas because I wanted them done closer to the time the roast is done. So, I used a different recipe where the potatoes cook in a crockpot rather than the oven. I figured I could put them under the broiler while the roast was resting.
I sliced my index finger and thumb while cutting the potatoes. I almost never cut myself, so that should have been the first sign. Then, the potatoes cooked in the crockpot for hours and hours on high but were still not soft when the roast came out So, I scooped them out of the crockpot and put them in a shallower ceramic dish and baked them. And baked them. And baked them.
Finally I gave up and served everything else so I wouldn’t ruin the entire dinner over the goddamned potatoes. Later when I was wrapping up the leftovers, I tried the Cursed Potatoes to see if they were still as hard as pavers, and nope, they were perfect. Damn them.
NotMax
@Suzanne
The original YouTube?
“Self-surgery is a vas deferens from treating others.”
;)
Roger Moore
@Kay:
One of the core principles of conservative economics seems to be that while everyone responds to incentives, rich people respond only to rewards and everyone else responds only to punishment.
Kay
@Geminid:
So much of his work is defending his own approach and record that I just don’t think he’s credible. He’s wholly invested in a different approach failing. That’s essentially what he does all day- says “I was right” over and over again.
Here’s what I think happened with the economic reporting. The Biden economy was a proxy for a different approach and there are a lot of people who have spend their careers saying it won’t work, so we were watching that bigger battle be kind of grafted onto actual real time numbers like unemployment stats and inflation rates. It felt unreal and abstract and ideological because it was. It wasn’t about “how many people are unemployed” or “retail sales”- it was whether the Right and centrist economic view prevails or is supplanted by something else. That’s how they turned really low unemployment into a negative and portrayed it not as the ordinary indicator of a cooking economy but as a negative, “a labor shortage”. I mean it IS a labor shortage but that’s not how we ever depicted low unemployment before- it was always depicated as a good thing. It’s been fascinating to watch.
WereBear
@Baud: Then print the legend…
Soprano2
@Baud: Maybe not, but I think if they had handled the housing and mortgage crisis differently, Democrats would have lost fewer seats in 2010 than they did. One of my biggest criticisms of the Obama administration is that they handled the mortgage situation horribly, bailing out the banks but mostly allowing individual homeowners to be foreclosed on even though there was a program to help those people! Some people will never recover from that, and they could have been helped. What’s been done with Covid the past few years proves that.
Chief Oshkosh
@Gvg: Man, I just did not experience what you’re describing at all. Taking a poll of family gathered here, there were no shortages, no empty shelves anywhere. Coverage is limited to larger eastern cities (Philly, Boston, DC, Atlanta) and rural Connecticut, and outside San Antonio (rural), and far ‘burbs of Sacramento and Kansas City. The one example so far is rural Connecticut, where one of us had to go to one extra store to get a turnip (but this was all the way back at Thanksgiving). Otherwise, no change. I guess mileages differ?
Soprano2
@Kay: How often did you hear the line about how people took out mortgages they knew they couldn’t afford, and thus didn’t deserve any help? Never mind that banks and mortgage companies were pushing those bad loans onto people, and most of us don’t hire an attorney to read our mortgage documents when we buy a house – we trust that the people in charge are doing the best they can for us. Also never mind that the rating agencies and people who value properties were in on the scam, too. Meanwhile, all the banks that victimized those people got bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars! People notice things like that, and don’t forget it when it comes time to vote. Millions of people lost houses who shouldn’t have because Obama bought into the high-horse moralizing of people like Summers, and Democrats sure did pay a high price for that.
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
Oh, that is a big loss. What a wonderful mind he had!
Soprano2
I find this interesting. I don’t know where you live, but here in SWMO I find some aisles have less of a product like cat food or diet soda than I’m used to, but it’s rare that they’re totally out. I do see more empty spots on shelves than I used to, though. I’m in a decent-sized city – 170,000+ – so that might have something to do with it.
zhena gogolia
The Friday NYT was unbearable. Charles Fucking Blow, who spent the whole TFG era screaming hysterically about how we’re all gonna die, now tells us that Biden is failing not because he’s broken his promises — he’s exactly who he told us he was — but because he’s not the leader we need in Dec. 2021. I guess we need someone more progressive or something, couldn’t read to the end.
SiubhanDuinne
@WereBear:
Nice Liberty Valence reference!
debbie
@Soprano2:
The larger holders of mortgages went under well before Obama came to office (WaMu, etc.). I believe by the time he was sworn in, banks had already been bailed out.
WereBear
While I agree, and as horrifying as it was: the Republicans would have created a worldwide global collapse.
I don’t even want to think about that. It wasn’t enough, for certain, but what I remember, even as people had their lives collapse around them, at least some people still had places for other people to collapse into.
That was a way Democrats made a big difference, but in a way that didn’t help the poorest, and I’m sure Republicans had a lot to do with that, too.
Look at the corporate campaign donations Manchin is getting. Is that a bribe, or what? It’s amazing we can do ANYTHING with an entire, actual, evil entity determined to stop government doing ANYTHING.
WereBear
@Cameron: This is a dangerous time for book recommendations, my friend. All this holiday gift cards calling to me. Thanks!
Betty Cracker
@Gvg: I think we live not too far from each other, and I’ve seen a few empty shelves and limited availability on some items (one or two per customer rules), but it’s mostly back to normal here.
The shelves are almost all full, though random items aren’t available. Yesterday, I there was no Gruyère cheese in either grocery store in town. Before that, it was impossible to find a type of salad dressing mix I use for a recipe. There was no Saran Wrap to be found, but other types of cling wrap were available.
I don’t buy cat food or diet drinks, so maybe there’s a shortage of that here too and I just haven’t noticed. It’s weirdly localized.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Fifty Shades of Whey via Anne Laurie @ Top:
And this is how the India Times headlined it:
Yeah… I guess that about sums it up.
Chris Johnson
@Soprano2:
Yes. They were staring down the barrel of what we now see and know to be true: they couldn’t have done any differently from what they did, at the time.
These are not those times. The masks are off (except for those of us who wear ’em for covid management). We now know what they are and they’re fascists, and resisting them is no longer off the table. We have now seen so much of what you get when you allow the wealthiest people to run the whole show (Trump even counts because he counts as Putin running our show, and his money is strictly Putin’s money, and Putin inarguably has a shitload of money)
More than ever I don’t fault Obama for how things went. All this was under a rock when Obama was in office, and he had to know what he was up against: and I don’t think he was exactly an AOC or a Bernie, he’s a pretty measured guy who wanted the whole system not to collapse. I sympathize.
Mike E
Yeah, skunks stink and racoons are handsy little devils but, but… that’s a fcuking wolverine loose in her grocery, campers!
Roger Moore
@Kay:
One of the things that’s become obvious to me about our economic reporting is how it’s completely slanted toward what rich employers want compared to what ordinary employees want. The biggest economics story of the past year has been that many employees don’t want to go back to their old jobs and are looking for something better. Even though that story is primarily about decisions made by employees, it’s been reported almost exclusively by talking to employers. That’s why it’s been turned into a story about a labor shortage rather than one about absurd working conditions, and why the reason workers aren’t going back to their old jobs is treated as a great mystery rather than something obvious. All we get is speculation by bosses about why their workers aren’t coming back when we could get some answers if reporters would bother talking to the workers instead. To give it the DougJ treatment, “Why aren’t workers coming back to their old jobs? To find out, we asked these six hiring managers at a convention in Newark.”
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: Interesting. I had a completely different take on that column and thought Blow made some thoughtful points. He didn’t say Biden needs to be more progressive. He’s saying voters elected Biden primarily to get rid of Trump but that the facts on the ground have changed since election day. He said Biden has a short window to address a narrative that is hardening to his (and the party’s) detriment and that he can do that by being more present in the national conversation. I’m not sure Blow is right, but it wasn’t a hit piece, IMO.
Soprano2
This is true, but to be fair as you said there really is a labor shortage. Something like 4 million fewer people are employed now than were before Covid hit. That has lots of different causes, but it does make the idea of unemployment now different than in other times. Plus, I don’t think people feel as free to move around for jobs as they did before – if a place has a lot of jobs but the covid and covid mitigation situation is not good, many people will decide not to move there and try something else instead. We didn’t have that factor before. I have to say I have been puzzled at how low unemployment has been turned into something bad by the financial press. What you’re saying explains that, because I’ve never seen it before.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: Your experience matches mine…. shelves are mostly very full, but then every once in a while, there’s something sold out or delayed for some reason.
So I bought Mr Suzanne one of those Solostove fire pits for Christmas. I ordered it right after Halloween, because I was concerned about supply chain delays. The damn thing arrived four days later on my porch, in packaging clearly indicating the contents! So I had to schlep it upstairs to my office (and it is heavy) and hide it for weeks. THANKS BIDEN. Anyway, he loves it.
Soprano2
@debbie: I know, but I think they did even more after Obama was elected, and they really didn’t do nearly as much as they could have to help individuals who were outright lied to by banks and mortgage companies. Most of those people took out mortgages in good faith, and then they didn’t get any help at all. It was dumb.
Baud
@Soprano2:
Alternative realities and all that, but I’m not so sure. There would always have been something to criticize as we’re seeing now with Biden.
Soprano2
@Chris Johnson: I think with most things they did the best they could, but there was a program run by the administration to help homeowners that mostly didn’t do anything. It didn’t help that Obama’s Treasury Secretary was quoted as saying things like they were “foaming the runway” to help the banks weather the coming foreclosures. I will always believe they could have done a lot more to help homeowners, but instead they bought into the framing that most of them stupidly took out mortgages they couldn’t pay, and it was believed that there was way too much “moral hazard” to help them keep those homes. Somehow, though, continuing to help banks didn’t have any “moral hazard” to it at all. And yes, I know the banks paid all the money back, and I understand why they did what they did with the banks. I just think they could have helped actual individuals more, rather than leaving them to the mercy of Bank of America and Citibank.
Kay
So we could have gotten more reporting and analysis on this, which would have been actually interesting because I don’t think anyone knows what exactly is driving it:
Why are they starting small businesses? Is it because they got some backstop on household bills so could take more risk? Is it because of “the great quit”? Is it because they got a break on their student loans? Who knows? No one in media cares, apparently.
Instead we got ridiculous reporting on milk prices.
The disconnect is we have rigidly conventional reporters and news media covering a really weird and unconventional period- they can’t adapt. So they return to the familiar- Larry Summers and the 1990s.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: People on our side should be building Biden up, not tearing him down. There’s plenty to talk about.
Soprano2
@Baud: Oh sure, but I think it would have helped at the margins. Lots of those people didn’t have to be foreclosed on, but they were, and I’m sure for many of them to this day it’s affected their lives negatively.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Haha. Biden almost ruined Christmas!
Roger Moore
@Soprano2:
I would put it slightly differently. One of the big flaws with our government is that it’s been hollowed out so it’s lost a lot of its capability to run programs that involve reaching out to individual citizens. Instead, everything is run by pushing money through a much smaller number of businesses, and often by handing money out to banks in the hopes the money will eventually trickle down.
Look at how many of our responses to COVID followed that basic paradigm. Instead of having robust unemployment systems, we gave money to banks and then promised to forgive loans that met certain criteria. When we tried to deal with the situation through better unemployment, many of the state unemployment systems were unable to process the number of claims. People were kept in their homes only by heavy-handed eviction moratoriums because rent subsidies didn’t reach their intended recipients. We had trouble with getting vaccinations out because we don’t have a robust public health system and had to rely on a rickety system of private businesses to handle it.
Taken4Granite
@Soprano2: It’s easy to say that a lot of the mortgages that were issued in 2005-2008 should never have been issued, and that is a statement I would agree with. But the parties here are not equally to blame. Most people who are not bankers or real estate developers are involved in only a few mortgage transactions in their lifetimes, and details of the mortgages are often hidden in the obfuscatory fine print. I have only been involved in one mortgage, the one I used to buy the house I still live in, and I insisted on a fixed rate mortgage in part to keep it in the realm of something I understand. Bankers and mortgage brokers, OTOH, should know what they were doing. I knew the country was in for a world of hurt when I found out that many of the mortgages being issued were negative amortization loans, i.e., the monthly payment does not even cover the accrued interest, and the difference is added to the principal of the loan. Any reasonable banker should expect such a loan could only be paid off by refinancing (into a loan with even more onerous terms) or sale of the property (but then where do the former homeowners live?). That can seem to work as long as prices are increasing, but as soon as the price rise stops, it all comes crashing down.
I think Debbie is right that the banks were already being bailed out before Obama took office–the Bear Stearns collapse scared the heck out of many politicians from both parties. But the programs that were intended to help homeowners in trouble were far less effective than they should have been.
Soprano2
@Kay: That’s why I say I wish there would be more reporting on the people who didn’t go back to their jobs, and why they didn’t go back, and how they’re living now. Did they find another way to make money? Did they find out they could cut back enough to wait to go back to work? This is a mostly unexplored phenomenon, I guess because reporters would have to actually work to find these people. I’ve seen a couple of articles about it, tops.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: The thing that has surprised me is how many people just cannot absorb that the only real solution to a labor shortage is higher wages. That is literally the only answer. Can’t find any employees locally? Pay enough to get someone to move. Can’t find anyone with the right training? Pay for their training (and their expenses during training). Can’t find someone who wants to work? Honey, no one’s doing this because they want to, pay them more.
The FTFNYT ran a piece this week about the employees of SHoP Architects attempting to unionize. Good. Architecture pays poorly for as much education as it requires, and the working conditions are often grueling and bad.
Another Scott
@Soprano2: Political reality got in the way, and he made at least one bad appointment – an infamous guy who thought his job was to protect the taxpayers/banks above all else.
Repost
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
That’s a good point. It’s also why the IRS is tasked with stimulus and other payments. They are the only one with the systems set up to do it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The NASA thing. Not to sure what a pack of Theologians can add to that discussion, or why NASA thinks it can play gate keeper, but NASA is likely thinking about Venus.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: Immigration might help too.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore:
Agree absolutely. And those businesses aren’t equipped for it, either. When all this went to hell and the PPP process started, he company I was working for jumped all over it. But it is a small company of about 40 people, with only two full-time people doing financials. The PPP process consumed them both for a number of weeks.
I read some pieces at the time quoting business owners who hated it, because “it turned them into a pass-through for the government” and consumed a lot of their time. Now, what many of those dumbass business owners didn’t grasp then — though they do now — is that part of employment is paying someone to be available, even if they aren’t doing anything gainful at that specific moment. And so all of the companies who let people go but are now struggling to replace them deserve everything bad they experience.
Baud
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Maybe the theologians all worship the Roman gods.
Soprano2
@Taken4Granite: In 2006 my husband and I had conversations about how crazy the mortgage market was – people were buying houses that they obviously couldn’t afford with their income. Those ads about “change your payment every month” were something we’d never seen before. The idea of an “interest only” mortgage was insane for most people – those loans are usually used in only very specific situations. I think one problem was that the situation was complex, so most people didn’t understand it, and most people who bought houses believed that everyone involved was acting in good faith. Most of those people were acting in bad faith, though; when the mortgage company is just going to sell your mortgage to someone else, they don’t have to care if you can pay it back or not. That was the change that most people didn’t understand – it used to be that the bank or mortgage company actually cared whether or not you could make the payments!
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
Mike E
@Betty Cracker: My warehouse store looked a bit scarce in places, particularly in the whole chicken aisle (and, notably, in the salad section where a listeria recall yanked everything off the shelves) so there went my plan to roast a 4lb bird for Miss E and myself… So, instead, I got a 12lb Butterball for $4 and now I have leftovers galore. Sammiches! Turkey chowder!
Soprano2
@Roger Moore: ITA, these are excellent points.
Taken4Granite
@Betty Cracker: My experience in New Hampshire is broadly similar: my local grocery store has occasionally been out of specific items (most recently Gorgonzola cheese), but shelves are mostly stocked.
I also do not buy cat food or diet soda–for me it’s mostly orange juice, milk, or tap water, with an occasional bottle of wine (the nearby Trader Joe’s has many kinds of decent European wines for $8 or less per bottle), and I don’t have any pets. Other items, such as olive oil or cleaning supplies, I only buy once every few months, so I would not necessarily notice temporary shortages of these things.
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve been looking for lemon curd since Thanksgiving, and have yet to find it. No joy, so I think I’m going to have to concoct a lemon hard sauce to adorn warm gingerbread.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
https://youtu.be/vnLqUiaWXnA
Interview of Dr Petkowski about if Venus has life.
Haydnseek
@MattF:Many thanks Matt! This is just what I’ve been looking for.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Government did respond though. They simplified PPP forgiveness not once but twice. It is as painless as it could possibly be. They made a decision to not evaluate every forgiveness application (with backup documentation) but instead to look only at those with obvious red flags for fraud. It makes sense. There will be fraud they wil miss but that’s a decision policymakers can make- should we make everyone jump thru elaborate hoops and what’s the cost of doing that? Is the cost of elaborate hoop jumping higher than the fraud they’ll eat? They decided to eat some fraud in return for making it easier for most people.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Honestly, I’m not happy about immigration as a backstop in my field. American architecture schools are filled with the sons and daughters of rich foreigners, and increasingly Americans can’t afford the education. It’s not acceptable. And it’s leading to credential inflation. When I entered graduate school at a state university in 2006, in my class of 15, only four of us were from the state. The last time I checked, about four years ago, more than half of the class was international and fewer than three (in a class of 30) were from the state. When I graduated in 2010, there was exactly one American university offering a Ph.D. in architecture. Now there are probably 50, despite the fact that the degree doesn’t really offer much; you can teach and get a license in every state with only a professional Master’s (MArch). The overwhelming majority of those pursuing that degree are foreigners, who are looking to maintain a student visa. Many of them never actually practice. A friend of mine who is teaching at Carnegie Mellon said that her classes are at least 80% foreigners, almost all of whom are children of wealthy people.
We have put this education out of the financial reach of most Americans and for that reason, among many, I support forgiving student loans and providing free public education through every level.
Baud
@Soprano2:
And when Dodd-Frank tightened up mortgage lending rules, the GOP attacked it by saying people couldn’t get access to credit.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
The IRS is also under federal control, so state governors can’t sabotage its programs in hopes of making Biden look bad. We shouldn’t overlook sabotage as one of the major things crippling our COVID response.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Agreed. One reason I am interested in postal banking ideas is that it would be another direct line to ordinary people.
Baud
Reading this thread, apparently Biden is hoarding all the cheese!
Suzanne
I did recruiting for my company a couple of years ago, went to three universities (Arizona State, Texas A&M, UC Berkeley) and I met a lot of students. I think more than half of the Ph.D. candidates in architecture were Persian women. None of them wanted to practice actual architecture, they all wanted to stay in visualization.
Universities love international students, they pay a lot more to attend than in-staters!
senyordave
Regarding the PPP, this was free money. There should be some hoops to jump through for free money. Make it minimal as possible for individuals in need, but definitely more involved for businesses.
Ohio Mom
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Too long/can’t watch. I assume the answer is Yes, We will discover some form of life on Venus.
Will it disrupt our biosphere if brought to Earth, that’s the only issue I am concerned about. As a devout atheist*, the discovery of life on other planets will not upend my belief system.
* You know the joke about Judaism, It’s a religion full of atheists.
@JWR: I can’t help but rue that Sarah Weddington’s last years of life included watching her signature achievement, her great contribution to the welfare of her fellow citizens, whittled away and threatened with being overturned completely. It’s tragic.
Kay
@Suzanne:
We did a lot of PPP because we have a lot of small businesses. I thought it ran as well as it could have run. They were really pretty responsive. There was one sort of fly by night lender (Utah, of course, which in my experience is where every scam originates- do they regulate anything in Utah?) and the government stepped in and allowed a direct forgiveness application since the “lender” was completely incompetent and seemed to have no actual employees.
Roger Moore
@Soprano2:
One of the things we should have learned from the mortgage crisis is that shared responsibility is no responsibility. Everyone thought the system was safe because it had so many layers of protection built into it. It turned out we had a system with lots of layers, but the protection wasn’t there. Everyone had let the layer of protection they were supposed to take care of rot away because they figured someone else would handle it.
MattF
@Ohio Mom: Hey, atheism is only one away from monotheism.
Suzanne
@Kay: I agree with you. My company was dealing with trying to maintain a workforce that is expensive to recruit and maintain and so they were happy to do it.
Ohio Mom
@MattF: I never thought of that, very insightful. Thanks, something for me to think about.
Gvg
@Soprano2: I live in Gainesville. North Central Florida. And it is multiple items, over and over, getting worse the last 2 months, to the point that I try to keep track of the day of the week that Publix, Target and Walmart restock. Sometimes I check multiple locations. I do my shopping online with curbside pickup. Walmart and Target will ship if they don’t have it in stock, but they have sometimes been out that way too this month. Chewys and PetSmart were also out of multiple things, fancy feast cheddar that my old cat will eat and friskies gravy that he other like. Plus some of the litter I use, a common type.
it got better this summer but much worse the last few months. Multiple stores. It has to be supply chain issues.
Taken4Granite
@Soprano2: Right, the stuff going on with Wall Street was one of the big drivers. People, including some relatively sophisticated investors such as university endowments, were eager to buy these securities, which managed to get AAA ratings from the agencies who are supposed to evaluate such things. Securitization of mortgages had been around for some years–Fannie Mae existed to do exactly that with certain mortgages, and I think my grandfather invested in some of those securities–but not on the scale we were seeing in the aughts.
In retrospect, lots of people who should have known better were subscribing to the Greater Fool Theory. They overlooked the theory’s obvious flaw: in a world with finite population there must, somewhere, be a Greatest Fool. Prices cannot continue to rise once he has bought everything he can afford to buy.
I haven’t heard anything about mortgage shenanigans in the current housing market yet, but I am worried about there being another real estate bubble in progress. The family two doors down from me just bought their house (similar in size to mine, although they do have a much larger yard) for about $600k–you need an income well into six figures (which they probably do, because he is a professor of economics, so his salary should be high compared to professors in most non-STEM departments) to come close to affording that. It helps that we live in a neighborhood where one car per family is enough, but most people can’t afford to buy into this neighborhood anymore. There is a definite mismatch in this area between what is available and what people can afford.
debbie
@Soprano2:
Well, many were lied to by the brokers who told them the payments would be affordable or the terms could be renegotiated. What the banks did that was wrong was securitize and resell them in groups that included the worst of the worst mortgages. Those groups were then chopped up and resold yet again.
The real problem in mortgages was the jerk at Drexel who thought risk was nothing more than a mathematical formula. Too many people/banks relied on that formula.
debbie
@Soprano2:
Tell that to Mr. Potter! ?
schrodingers_cat
Didn’t expect nativist hate for international students in the comments this morning. Another data point to proving that so called progressives and MAGAs are not that different actually
-fake American previously a foreigner who took up seat that belonged to a good real American with citizen grandparents. BTW I was on fellowships and assistantships for the most part. Foreign students don’t qualify for need based financial aid.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: +1 People need to realize that we have the post-secondary education system we have because of the choices that we (governments, universities, etc.) have made. Continuing to push costs down onto students is dangerous.
In the STEM fields, it’s been going on a very long time (most of my EE grad school student colleagues were foreign and that was in the mid-late ’80s). The Pentagon is finally starting to realize that there’s a bit of a conflict between farming out defense-related basic and early applied research to universities and private entities while wanting to stay ahead of foreign adversaries.
Basic research benefits everyone, and the free exchange of that type of information is essential for progress. Training foreign students benefits the USA as well. But it costs a lot of money and can accelerate the development of capabilities of nefarious actors. All of our choices have consequences…
Cheers,
Scott.
Taken4Granite
@debbie:
All models are wrong. At best, they are only as good as their underlying assumptions.
Apparently, that particular model assumed that houses would always increase in value. A bit of historical research would have confirmed that this assumption was false, but that would have interfered with the short-term money flow, and we can’t have that on Wall Street.
sab
@brantl:Tjere are ships all over the world with Evergreen painted on the side in giant letters.
Evergreen is the shipping company. Ever Given is painted in smaller letters on the bow.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: Oh, for fuck’s sake. Dumb and mendacious take. It’s a failure of American public policy that American students and taxpayers cannot afford to attend American public universities. You know, the universities which have the core mission of educating the population of their states.
Your attempt to turn that into an expression of nativist sentiment is genuinely offensive.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: You calling international students names and stereotyping them was like flower petals in the morning for me. So thanks.
If MAGAs do it, it is nativist sentiment if you do it is just dispassionate economic analysis. Of course. My bad.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: Engineers say much the same thing.
I think the shortage of workers varies from field to field. Immigration is probably necessary in some but not others. And it’s not necessarily just service workers who are needed. Every doctor who treated me in Iowa was an immigrant.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: That’s PR. As irritating as I find many liberal opinion columnists, including occasionally Charles Blow, I think it’s generally a good thing they don’t feel obligated to serve as cheerleaders for our side.
satby
@SiubhanDuinne: when do you need it by? My friend David at the Great British Treat House makes a lovely one and I can get one to send you tomorrow.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: It’s not a stereotype, it’s data: most international students pay full sticker price at American public universities. As you noted, they don’t qualify for financial aid. And most of them do not need it, their families pay their way.
Again, the core mission of American public universities is to educate the students within their state. It is awesome to open the doors to out-of-state and out-of-country students. It is problematic when those in-state students cannot afford to attend.
sab
@Gvg: PetSmart is owned by a private equity firm that is trying to milk it dry by underfunding inventory like private equity firms often do. Good way to kill a company.
Ken
I really doubt we’ll find life on Venus, what with the temperature. Maybe we’ll find a fossil NFT, from the era just before the runaway greenhouse started.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: International students do not qualify for need based financial aid or subsidized student loans but they do qualify for scholarships (assistantships, fellowships and tuition waivers)
Majority of international graduate students especially those in PhD programs are on scholarships which pay a stipend and come with a tuition waiver.
What you say is true about undergraduate students but not graduate students.
MattF
@Ken: I suggest reading Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, which explores the possibility of life under physically extreme conditions.
Suzanne
I will also note that state universities do a lot more of the “lifetime learning” thing than private universities. It is much more common for “non-traditional” students, who are older or changed career paths or were in the military or stopped-and-started their education for whatever reason or they have to go part-time, to go to state universities. So those students are also taxpayers. So the idea that “they get preferential treatment because their grandparents were citizens” is…. stereotyping and bullshit.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott:
In the mid-70’s, over half of the students in MIT’s Nuclear Engineering graduate program were from Iran. Wonder how their careers worked out.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I was talking about professional architecture programs, most of which are not funded (just like most medical and law schools don’t fund because they are professional degrees).
Once again, you characterizing this as xenophobic is offensive in the extreme.
Soprano2
@Roger Moore: And they were all making so much money that they thought everything would be OK, as if nothing were ever going to change. They ruined the housing market for a long time, but many of them got off basically scot-free with most of their money. And yes, we should have learned that there should be more guardrails to protect the average borrower. When the appraiser and the realtor and the seller and the lender are all making huge sums of money by lying to the borrower about the value of the house and how much they can afford to borrow, the borrower has no protection unless they can afford to hire an attorney to guide them, and few people are going to do that.
schrodingers_cat
I never said that. I just called out your broad brush generalizations and your sentiment that the international students didn’t deserve to be there and were taking away seats from American citizens. But do go on.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
Now we have a bit of a different problem, which is that it’s increasingly difficult for “average borrowers” to qualify for a mortgage at all. Sigh.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
We also should have learned that pain, like prosperity, is shared. Throwing millions of people off a cliff so they lose their homes may have made Larry Summers feel good because they were being appropriately punished “by markets” for their poor decisions on buying houses, but it hurt the whole economy, so all of us.
We’re in the normal, real economy, where people need residences and money to spend or “the economy” doesn’t do well. I don’t know what economy he lives in.
They bailed out restaurants here, where I live. Helps me. I don’t want a town with 11 empty storefronts. I want them to survive. They’ll hire people and pay taxes. It’s a good investment.
Taken4Granite
@Another Scott: The business model of a research university is to attract the best scholars they can attract, no matter what their country of origin, to do research at their university and bring in grant money. That includes foreign students. Some of those students end up staying in the US, which is a long-term benefit for the US. Others return to their native countries, to the long-term benefit of those countries, and a few end up in third countries.
As you say, STEM graduate programs have long had a high fraction of their students attending on student visas. This is partly because, while graduate students in these fields are typically paid assistantship stipends, these stipends are low compared to non-academic STEM jobs in the US, and a Ph.D. program carries high opportunity costs. For people coming from countries with lower typical salaries, the pay is relatively higher and the opportunity costs less than for American students in Ph.D. programs. So many Americans make the rational (for them) decision not to attend graduate school, while many foreign students make the rational (for them) decision to attend graduate school in the US.
I have in particular noticed that Chinese who earn Ph.D. degrees in my field are increasingly likely to return to China. Part of this is because China has been aggressively expanding its own STEM graduate programs and actively recruiting scientists who earned Ph.D. degrees in the West. But there is at least one other China-specific factor in the US: it is actually illegal to spend NASA grant money on a bilateral collaboration with a Chinese institution. (It is allowed if there are also collaborators from a third country.) This law was written into the NASA budget around 2011-2012, and had the side effect that it suddenly became difficult for Chinese nationals to get postdoctoral research positions in the US, a necessary step for obtaining a faculty position (I know at least two people who left the field for this reason). I suspect some Chinese students interpret this rule as a sign that they are not fully welcome in the US.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat:
I never said that and you’re a liar for saying that I did.
I said that it is a failure of American public policy that many Americans cannot afford the education they want, even at publicly funded universities in their own country and state, and that I do not think that we should cover up for this failure by in filling the gaps in the market with foreigners. I also asserted that architectural education is increasingly going to children of rich people and that sucks.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Somehow the Repub oped columnists don’t mind doing PR. Only the supposed Dems.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: You implied it.
Kay
@Taken4Granite:
My son works internationally as an engineer and he says the US STEM degree is more valuable than others. In his (single, so anecdotal experience) employers think it’s worth more than a degree in other countries, even in those other countries, which I thought was really interesting because I would have thought they had a parochial or nationalist preference for training taken in their own countries. He says they think ours is better. It’s affected how he thinks because he now has a daughter. He wants her to go to a US university.
Suzanne
I will also note that our professional organization, (American Institute of Architects, aka the AIA) has been studying the reprehensible dearth of African-Americans and Latinos in architectural practice in this country. And the research is uniformly indicating that the high cost of the education, coupled with the relatively low starting wages, is unsurprisingly to blame for this.
sab
@Soprano2: Obama was being advised by central banker types like Tim Geithner, who went off to a bery lucrative job as head a private equity firm after his term with Obama.
These economists are not some sort of neutral academics. They work in the real world, and in the real world economists are not hired by consortia of middle class or working class people. They are hired by top management at big banks and private equity firms.
Paul Krugman is better at predictions than 90% of them, but he has very few graduate students because no one wants to study under him because they will never get a job afterwards.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: The US, France, and Germany were more than happy to sell Iran nuclear reactors when the Shah was around. It makes sense to have people who understand the physics involved with them.
But, … National Security Archive:
These issues don’t go away…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
L85NJGT
Woulda, coulda, shoulda….
Anyone offering up Gene Taylor’s seat to Democrats in perpetuity with one weird trick isn’t dealing in reality. 2010 was the culmination of a long slide by rural white Democratic districts to the GOP.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: You’re a liar. “I’m not happy about immigration as a backstop” for a public policy failure is a complete thought, clearly communicated, but you have an agenda you’d like to push on me.
It is fucking unacceptable that Americans cannot afford higher education where they live and work and pay taxes. That is fucking unacceptable. Way to make it about you.
Kay
@L85NJGT:
It wasn’t the congressional seats that hurt- it was the state losses. They slaughtered us on state races. We don’t put enough money and effort into them. I think it’s partly ideological, ie, Democrats believe in a robust federal government so tend to give short shrift to state government, which is tragic since so many Dem issues are really STATE issues.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: I agree with you there. Even “conservative” pundits like the entire National Review staff who decried Trump when they thought he would lose in 2016 fell into line and became cheerleaders. It was gross and dishonest.
schrodingers_cat
Final point, college should be more affordable. But one can make that point without calling international students rich dilettantes who are making it unaffordable for everyone else.
Ohio Mom
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Yes, engineers rail against their imported colleagues, I know that because like you, my husband is a retired engineer.
Ohio Dad’s take is that the issue is how foreigh engineers are used by the big companies: brought in under temporary visas not because they have knowledge and skills not found among American engineers but as a method of keeping all salaries down.
In a way, a version of out-sourcing to another country: insourcing. Theoretically, it could be possible to have a mix of foreign and American engineers AND pay them all well, but profit margins, quarterly earnings reports and stock prices.
Something similar can be said about the mix of foreign and American students in higher education. Since the 1970s, we’ve cut back on government support and underwriting of higher education, and colleges and universities have learn to make up at least some of the difference by bringing in students from other places who could pay inflated tuition rates.
There is certainly an argument that having a mix of types of students is broadening for all but that was never the goal, the goal was balancing budgets.
What we have on both cases is Divide-and-Conquer, regular people squabbling among themselves when their animosity should be directed at the one-percent of the one-percent (whose love of tax cuts is what ultilmately caused higher Ed’s budget woes).
in the tired phrase, Late-stage capitalism. We’re a big country with a huge economy, we could accommodate ourselves and a good number of immigrants easily and well. IF.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat:
I didn’t say that, either.
But they are disproportionally economically privileged and I don’t think education should be a class privilege.
sab
@Soprano2: I think banks and mortgage companies used to have to care about whether you could pay it nack because they were stuck with you for the next 15 or 30 years. Deregulation allowed all the weird new financial creations in the 1990s and 2000s that made it possible for them to create garbage loans, package them up with better loans to make the overall product look plausible, and sell the package off to other investors. The whole derivatives thing. Earning commissions was the whole driving force.
There were laws and regulations in place before that to prevent that bad behavior.
Ken
@Another Scott: This reminds me that, according to some sections of the intelligence community, Iran has been just six months from obtaining a nuclear bomb for forty years now.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne:
Define economic privilege and prove your assertion that a majority of international students pursuing graduate degrees in American universities are wealthy.
Kay
This to me is the centrist arrogance. Their plans have to work. Did any of them do any “replacing loans with grants”? Summers was a government employee and/or advisor from Clinton to Obama, so exactly the period where college became unaffordable. Why didn’t the centrists address it in a way that worked, if only to beat back the dirty Leftists? Why are they never held accountable for any of these problems? They’re always in the driver’s seat, yet they’re also the biggest critics of a different approach.
Put up or shut up. The only real selling point for “centrism” is “it works”. It has to work.
If they even said “our plan to reduce student debt over the last 30 years was not robust enough, which led us to demands to forgive it” but they never do. They just drop in when the problem they ignored becomes a crisis and scold us on what we should do.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@debbie: Yes the Bush folks had pushed at least half the TARP money out the door by the time Obama was sworn in. I guess his people could have halted those payments and reassessed who qualified or whether they were the best way to handle the crisis. But then every business news outlet would have screamed bloody murder and he would have taken a big immediate hit on handling the economy. Letting the rest of the funds go out as planned probably seemed like the lowest risk option at the time.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ohio Mom: Yeah, that sounds right. The economic effect of immigration is a complex issue.
SiubhanDuinne
@satby:
How nice! I don’t need it by any particular time, but I’d love to try your friend’s version. Will DM you to learn particulars and arrange payment. Thank you!
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
I think this varies a lot depending on the field. In the sciences and to a lesser extent the humanities, what you say is true. But doctoral programs in professional fields tend not to have the same kind of scholarship and tuition assistance. For example, I know someone who’s getting a PharmD, and she has to pay the whole tuition.
That said, the fields where students are expected to pay their own way with teaching and research assistanceships have their own problems. As I’m sure you’ve experienced, work-based funding means grad students and postdocs tend to be treated as cheap labor as much as they are students. There’s a long-term problem with the number of new doctorates far exceeding the number of available jobs. There’s still a lot of exploitation, but it’s in a different form.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@MattF:
Kind of like how US two-party winner-take-all democracy is only one party away from single-party totalitarianism.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I mean, basic-ass Google-fu turns this up as the #1 hit: The Globalization of America’s Colleges in The Atlantic. There’s a lot of links to studies in there that you can go read, since apparently you cannot be bothered to look this up yourself, despite this issue being covered in American media for years, fairly extensively.
From that piece: “Most of the international students pay for their American education, which is the most expensive in the world, with personal or family funds. About 20 percent receive funding from their respective American institution, while a smaller percentage receives funding from colleges or governments in their home countries. Chinese students make up a plurality—one third— of all international students in America. Students from India, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia together comprise another 25 percent. Far smaller numbers come from countries like Canada and Brazil.”
I’m done with you. You’re not an honest broker.
dnfree
The electoral-vote.com website discusses how badly directed Democratic political donations were in 2020. They’ve become a daily must-read for me.
Democrats Are Trying to Get Voters Focused on State-Level races
Republicans have focused on capturing state legislatures for over a decade and have done very well at it. During Barack Obama’s time as president, they picked up 1,000 seats in the state legislatures. Democrats have seemed oblivious to the importance of the state legislatures, but now that the Republicans are passing laws to restrict voting, lock in their members of Congress, and overrule public health authorities, they are beginning to wake up.
Former AG Eric Holder, one of the few high-profile Democrats who is focused on state-level offices, recently said: “I’m not being hyperbolic or alarmist. I think our democracy is on the line.” David Squadron, a former New York state senator, whose group the States Project is trying to raise $30 million,said: “We believe the right wing is signaling a strategy to steal the election through state legislatures in 2024.” And there are a few others.
But convincing the voters—and especially the donors—to pay attention is something else. The Democratic Senate candidate in Kentucky who ran against Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Amy McGrath, raised $96 million and was easily crushed anyway. She never had a chance in the first place. In contrast, the Democratic Party committee that raised money for state legislative seats raised a total pf $51 million for all 50 states combined. If all of McGrath’s money had gone to the state races, the Democrats might have flipped a few chambers. In the end, they didn’t flip any and the Republicans flipped a couple of Democratic chambers. Similarly, Jaime Harrison raised an astounding $130 million in a completely futile race in South Carolina. If the $226 million from those two hopeless races had gone to Arizona legislature races the Democrats could probably have flipped both chambers.. Democrats are attracted to bright shiny objects, like opposing senators they hate, no matter how bad the odds are, whereas $1 million in a state House race is an incredible amount of money.
Also a big problem for Democrats is “roll-off,” where the voter gets tired of filling in the ballot after the top couple of races and doesn’t even bother to vote for state representative or state senator. Republicans vote right down to deputy assistant dog catcher.
It’s not only state legislative races that Democrats tend to ignore. In 2019, Democrats lost a crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court race by fewer than 6,000 votes, cementing that court’s conservative majority. The only bright light for the Democrats at the state level is the governors’ mansions. Since 2017, Democrats have flipped 10 of them, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. But again, these are high-profile races, whereas the state senator from Oshkosh is not. And to enact laws that make voting easier, rather than harder, Democrats will have to win state House and Senate seats in large numbers all of the country and that will require a major shift away from wasting money on unwinnable high-profile races to much-more-winnable low-profile races. (V)
Suzanne
@Roger Moore:
Absolutely. Most professional degrees are not funded.
Kay
@dnfree:
So true and everyone knows it. If we just do that one thing, get our voters to vote the whole ballot, we would have accomplished a lot. The difference in drop off between D ballots and R ballots is really pronounced.
JWR
@Ohio Mom: It’s tragic
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. As in, “boy, I wonder what she thinks about this court?!” And it only took fifty years to get here. ;(
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
My impression is that the issue of students from countries we’re not on the best terms with is a mixed bag. Yes, it’s a way those countries can develop abilities we don’t want them to have. OTOH, students coming to the US has been a key form of soft power. It’s amazing how many world leaders studied at US universities, and it means they already have imbibed the US worldview. It doesn’t mean they agree with the US worldview, but they at least understand us. That’s a huge advantage.
Fair Economist
@Betty Cracker: As usual, any problems are with the media, not Biden. Biden provides TV material multiple times per week and has very active press releases and tweets. He says cogent, interesting, relevant things.
The media reports little of it because they don’t want it to be heard, and they rarely discuss it because they don’t want it thought about. Frequently they just lie to disagree, like Andrea Mitchell claiming there are many more empty shelves than prepandemic, when it’s actually almost the same (90% vs. 91%).
Kay
@Fair Economist:
After Benghazi and the emails I don’t know why Andrea Mitchell is still taken seriously.
It doesn’t make any sense to claim Clinton’s emails are a huge national security issue and then never mention it again in any other context. She’s just full of shit.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: I agree. Being an international student is no picnic. All international students have wealthy parents who can pay out of state tuition is an oft repeated trope.
International students are prohibited from working off campus. Try being alone, cold and poor in a strange country where some people hate your guts for existing in their space.
The international students with money to throw around in my anecdata were few and far between
BTW I had a full tuition waiver for an MBA program. And many of my friends have had fellowships to pursue medical specializations like pediatric oncology, nephrology. So they do exist.
Privilege in India or China or a country in eastern Europ doesn’t necessarily translate to $$ in the US
So scholarships for professional programs also exist. And my friend had a fellowship in pediatric oncology.
Suzanne
@Kay: One thing that has been really helpful to me regarding “roll-off” is when my local Party or LD releases a voter’s guide, especially or the nominally non-partisan races and judgeships. In the past, I left a lot of things blank because I didn’t feel informed enough.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat:
Untrue. They can work paid internships that pertain to their degree. I hired many of them.
James E Powell
@Betty Cracker:
I want to agree, but I also want to go one, maybe two, election cycles without the dead weight of the “but some Democrats . . .” on our backs.
Kay
@dnfree:
I’ve helped with state races as a volunteer which I enjoy and I have to say there’s the awful entitled approach from rank and file Democrats. Being the candidate sucks. It’s thankless in a red area. It means you have a demanding part time job for a year and your regular job and you don’t get paid for the second job. They miss family events and their whole social lives, people are fucking vicious to them, they have almost no campaign money. But rank and file Democrats are like “why can’t we get BETTER people?”
Um, because it sucks and it has a really slim chance of paying off? It’s not, actually, fabulous and glamorous? It’s this soul sucking GRIND? Maybe that?
Another Scott
@dnfree: Meh. We cannot win if we don’t try, and high profile races are expensive. It’s a mistake to think that money raised for one race would automatically go elsewhere.
I can’t find a link, but I recall reading that Ossoff and Warnock raised over $500M (certainly much more than $200M cited in December stories).
Yes, we need to fight hard for every seat, but without robust public financing there are no easy fixes. And the people in the trenches aren’t stupid – they have to play the hand they’re dealt in the system we have.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I’d argue that the economy getting worse (notably, unemployment going back up) in 2010 compared to 2009 really hurt. Meanwhile, Obama was talking about ‘green shoots.’
There wasn’t any surge of GOP voters in 2010, just Dem voting falling off a cliff. And of course there was this:
@Soprano2:
The real pisser was, the Obama Administration had the authority to bail out the homeowners, and didn’t use it.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: I was talking about off campus jobs to make ends meet. I should have been more specific. My bad.
There is both optional practical training and curricular practical training available and has to go through the international programs office and USCIS, SEVIS registry and has to be related to your program of study
Suzanne
@Kay: You are 100% right about that. The chairwoman of my LD back in AZ is a personal friend. She ran twice for state Senate because they could not find a candidate and she didn’t want the Party to be embarrassed. She didn’t want to do it, lost both times, and was more than thrilled when some good candidates appeared a couple of cycles later and started winning. She could not have been happier to stand behind them.
Roger Moore
@Ohio Mom:
I think the 0.01% deserve the opprobrium sent their way, but all the money in the world wouldn’t have bought them their tax cuts if they couldn’t sell them to ordinary citizens. Unwillingness to fund higher education comes from a bunch of different sources. There are rich people who want lower taxes. There are also plenty of less educated people who resent colleges and see them as being full of snooty people who look down their noses at hard working, salt-of-the-earth folks who get by with high school diplomas. And there are bigots who resent that universities have become a way for Those People to catch up. It’s a toxic stew.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Agreed. They fell out of fashion because it’s uncool to tell people what to do or whatever, we’re all cool cats and we can’t be herded, but we started doing them again, because as it turns out people who are not political junkies just want broad stokes.
“THIS is the Democrat” Thanks! Please continue to tell me what to do :)
My favorite canvass ever was this woman who had “busy mom” written all over her and she just waved me away “I just vote for the Democrat. I generally agree with them”. Honest! Loved her. She’s not pretending she’s parsing any platform. She doesn’t care that much! She has other things she delves into and that’s okay. Make it easy for them.
James E Powell
@dnfree:
This has been a D problem since forever. I have no idea what solutions might work, but I feel like D lean voters are less committed to voting party.
Kay
@Suzanne:
I get so upset. “She has kind of weird hair”. OMFG, you do it. Go spend every weekend at the Eagles and the Knights of Columbus talking to hostile Right wingers. Go to all the county fairs. See how much fun that is.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
Did you mean “like to disagree?”
Either way, it works.
I think that the media actually does report economic news accurately, even Andrea Mitchell’s employers. And dedicated business and financial sites are also good. But the discussion by the high profile media figures like Mitchell tends to be full of bias.
And you have instances in which the headlines and top paragraphs of a news story are biased, while the nuance, if present, comes much later on.
Geminid
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us: My recollection is that when Democratic Congressional leadership ageeed to fund TARP at $700 billion, the deal was that Bush could spend half, and Obama would spend the second half.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, I’ve done it many times. As I noted, there are fewer and fewer Americans (relatively) getting professional architecture degrees. I have thought the world of most every international student who has ever interned with me. They have almost all been smart and motivated and hardworking and talented. At the graduate level, most people are.
But I can also point out my in-state classmates who dropped out because graduate school is ludicrously expensive, and this is at the university whose core mission is to educate them. In fact, the year I got my MArch, only two of us were from the within the state (and this was at Arizona State, literally the largest university in the country). To say nothing of those who never started or even applied.
This is a massive failure to invest in the future of this country.
Roger Moore
@sab:
That hasn’t been true for a long time. There were new levels of securitization in the era leading up to the financial crisis, but the basic idea of mortgage lenders packaging up mortgages and selling them off goes back to the New Deal era. This was done with good intentions and good results. One of the big dangers with mortgages is the risk of a local downturn wiping out the local banks. By having mortgage lenders package up mortgages and sell them off, banks were shielded from that risk, which made everyone safer- as long as the mortgage originator did their job.
schrodingers_cat
Anyway I am done with this topic and had my fill of being called a liar and worse for expressing an opinion contrary to the progressive narrative of boiling everything down to economics.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: When did the no off campus jobs rule come into effect? My Chinese brother in law put himself through American graduate school in the 1980s by working at UPS. It was allowed then. My nephew’s Canadian wife couldn’t get a timely student to study in the US six years ago because she couldn’t prove that she could afford to live and study here without working. So she went to graduate school in Canada.
I think the problem isn’t so much immigrants as that the rules under which they work have changed so much that we are getting a different type of legal immigrant.
Our system’s idea of what we want as immigrants has changed so drastically. Now they can buy their way in and help keep our overly expensive graduate schools afloat. They won’t be allowed to stay unless they are sufficiently wealthy.
Before they got visas because they demonstrated they were academically up to doing the work and we hoped they would stay with the skills they acquired or improved here.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
Bail out homeowners how?
To let them stay in homes that they really could not afford in the first place? Or what?
What program did not get enacted that Obama could have done without Congress?
Suzanne
Another point of anecdata: in my grad school years, all but one of my classmates who dropped out were people of color. They incurred most of the cost but didn’t finish the degree and therefore cannot get a license and therefore recoup the cost. Yet another reason I support student loan forgiveness.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I called you a liar because you said I said things that I didn’t say. Not because you “expressed an opinion”. Get off it.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: It is not allowed on the F-1 visa. I am not sure about J visas. If you have a GC you are eligible for both financial aid and working off campus.
Betty Cracker
@James E Powell: I don’t see that changing until we have two mostly sane parties that are broadly interested in governing again, which may be never.
Roger Moore
@sab:
I don’t think the problem is immigration at all. The problem is that state schools aren’t funded well enough. When the Boomers were in school, state universities received enough money that students could afford to pay for their tuition with a part time job. That degree of subsidy has been declining since the Prop 13 era. There’s still a substantial subsidy to in-state students, but not enough that students can afford to pay tuition with a job that will leave them with enough time to learn anything.
So universities are left trying to figure out how to make up for the big hole in their budget that used to be filled by state tax money. They raise tuition on in-state students, but they can only go so far because those students (and their parents) are voters. So they charge full freight and then some to students in professional programs and to students who don’t qualify for the state subsidy- out of state and foreign students. The problem is that this effectively limits access to those programs to people willing to take on massive debt or those who can find someone to pay the tuition.
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
Oh lordy. I’m not even gonna waste my time on this.
If it didn’t get enacted, it didn’t exist. I don’t even know what you’re talking about because that sentence literally makes no sense.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
I’ve been reading along and that’s not at all what has happened in this thread.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s a simple question. What program did not get enacted that would have saved homeowners?
Also, you keep implying that Obama could have acted unilaterally. Did Congress propose some program that he opposed?
I am honestly curious to learn exactly how Obama failed.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore:
Absolutely right. I will note that in some states, Arizona among them, the amount that can be charged to tuition and raised each year is limited by law. So they started adding “program fees” which are not in the base tuition, but vary depending on what field of study you pursue.
The taxpayers of the state of Arizona now pay under 10% of the cost of a degree at their state universities, leaving the rest to students and their families. It is reprehensible.
SFAW
@debbie:
Yet another example of The Biden Inflation Disaster OMFG!!!!!!
Suzanne
I will also note that the assertion that my position is solely economic and not racial is also incorrect. The high cost of American higher education limits access and creates disproportionate harm for people of color and therefore is absolutely perpetuating racism.
The only way this could be considered an economic argument and not a racial one is if you assume that American students are all white.
schrodingers_cat
Deleted.
Raven
We got through Greensboro, Charlotte and Spartanburg and the boss took the helm! Two hours and we will see if the floor is being finished!
SiubhanDuinne
@Raven:
That stretch of I-85 is so fucking boring. Even the Big Peach in Gaffney no longer packs the same punch it used to 25-30 years ago. Safe travels the rest of the way.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
Part of the problem is that we’ve simultaneously seen big increases in the real, unsubsidized cost of higher education (as seen by ballooning tuition at private schools) and a big expansion in the number of people getting it. If we tried to subsidize schools so the real tuition was the same as it was 50 years ago, it would completely blow up the state budget. Any serious attempt to expand state-funded education to K-16 has to take on the cost.
gwangung
@lowtechcyclist: This tells me that you have no idea of how to answer his question. Therefore, another form of Green Lanternism.
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: Heck, not even reduced tuition, sometimes no tuition. I know any number of people (yes, all immigrants or first-generation children of recent immigrants) who went to City College of New York because it was free, and actually good, and then went on to higher-level graduate or professional degrees. They lived with their parents, took the subway, and had essentially no expenses. This sounds like fantasy now.
Raven
@SiubhanDuinne: And the construction from Kings Mountain to Spartanburg sucks.
PAM Dirac
@Brachiator:
Probably referring to the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) which was part of TARP which did get passed by Congress and did not need any unilateral action by the executive branch. Many people complained loudly that the Obama administration didn’t really put much effort into it. The Wikipedia quote is :
Raven
@Roger Moore: Georgia has record enrollment and record budget cuts to Higher Ed for over 15 years straight.
Soprano2
@dnfree: Interestingly enough, this morning I’m listening to a repeat of a Hidden Brain podcast where political scientist Eitan Hersh says there has been a rise of “political hobbyism”, which is concentrated more on high-profile races and not much on the day-to-day practical wielding of power to obtain votes. He presents a pretty compelling case for his thesis, which your post just reinforces. Republicans have been more focused on the day-to-day wielding of power to get votes, while Democrats have focused more on the high profile races that get hobbyists all riled up, because that’s where the money is.
Raven
We listened to the entire “American Radical” podcast series on the way up. Give it a listen, it’s nasty shit.
Soprano2
@Kay: Or to completely ignore it when people in TFG’s administration did almost exactly the same things!!! It’s like the caravans – they drop completely out of the news the minute the election that’s using them to fearmonger is over.
Brachiator
@PAM Dirac:
Could be. Too bad that the other commenter refused to explain what they meant.
But even here, HAMP was not all that successful. Some homeowners could get loan modifications to their existing mortgages. This still did no good if the underlying problem was that they could not afford the home in the first place.
And note here that I am not blaming the homeowner. I dealt with tax preparers whose clients had flat out been lied to and given loans for which they did not qualify, because the bankers could profit off the fees no matter what happened later to the person taking out the loan.
And tax professionals saw taxpayers who got loan modifications one year still lose the home to foreclosure in the next year.
SiubhanDuinne
@Raven:
Yeah, the entire 100-mile SC stretch of 85 is pretty awful. I’m always happy to clear Charlotte, and then I come home on I-75. Been too long since I travelled to Canada, and I wonder if I still have a long solo road trip in me.
Kay
@PAM Dirac:
It was just so, so bad. Really determined people (and you had to be really determined) would jump through all the hoops and STILL get denied. It was just enraging. I ended up thinking it was deliberately “fake”- that it was never designed to help anyone, that it was just a mechanism to allow lenders to foreclose more slowly and thereby not admit how much bad debt they were holding.
The financial crash changed how I think about the US financial sector. It radicalized me. By the time we got to the trough- 16% unemployment, misery everwhere I looked, page after page of forclosure notices and people just weeping our in office (or losing their shit and screaming) – pushed to their absolute limit- I would have grabbed a pitchfork myself. It was brutal and it didn’t have to be that way. It was a choice by people like Larry Summers. I see his smug mug now and I just want to puke. A stern moral judgment on their fitness and worthiness, adminstered by their betters. I’ll never forget it. It wasn’t fair and people knew it wasn’t fair. They couldn’t pin down why and they sometimes blamed the wrong people but they knew.
James E Powell
@Kay:
Has anyone in the press/media ever acknowledged that Benghazi & emails were not serious, important issues that should have determined the presidential election?
Also, just about anyone who is reliably anti-The Democrats can get a permanent place on cable TV.
Raven
@SiubhanDuinne: me too, we’re talking about an out West Road trip but my legs wonder. I’m getting a steroid shot next week, we’ll see if that does anything.
Brachiator
@Kay:
The asswipe lenders created the bad debt that they were holding. And then they cried crocodile tears about it.
Ramona Rosario
@schrodingers_cat: US citizen now, STEM International student at private university then: Most international students were very rich. They talked of where they vacationed. They had top of the line cars and wore expensive clothes. Many were my friends so I know they were wealthy. Don’t know what things were like in a state architecture program though but after getting my PhD and teaching at Florida State University, I encountered several international undergraduate students who had to be wealthy to afford the international student tuition rate without having recourse to loans.
prostratedragon
From the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. Like “The Apprentice” but, you know, serious, as I emphasize:
The projects they highlight include solar-powered therapy cribs for infants and cold storage for vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, and a technology to make use of an invasive nuisance plant. Sounds like stuff we could use here, too.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
RE: After Benghazi and the emails I don’t know why Andrea Mitchell is still taken seriously.
Inertia. If you are a pundit who can talk long enough to fill the time before a commercial break, and you can sit up straight, you have a permanent place in broadcast media.
Obviously not. Hell, to this day, I don’t know what the issue was. Clearly there was no security problem, no leak of information to hostile powers. If anything, the Russians and Trump were unhappy that Clinton had a secure email server.
But the lie that the media kept alive, to the benefit of the Republicans, was that Clinton was obviously hiding something nefarious. Didn’t matter that no one looked for anything, let alone found anything. Voters could simply imagine whatever horrible thing they wanted and use this to vote against the Democrats.
Of course, in many ways the faux outrage over the Afghanistan evacuation is the “but her emails” applied to the Biden Administration. A non-story used as part of a perpetual smear campaign.
In the good old days, there were right wing hacks and left wing hacks. It was still a bunch of pundit bullshit, but I suppose it was more balanced.
PAM Dirac
@Kay: That’s how I feel about it (and felt about it at the time). It might have been a poorly constructed program that was always going to mostly fail, but that sure isn’t how it was sold. And if our brilliant betters knew it wasn’t going to help homeowners why didn’t they say it at the time? Why let people put so much effort and hope into a process just to smash them down? That’s a rhetorical question. I don’t think I want to hear the answer.
prostratedragon
@zhena gogolia: The title of Blow’s memoir, Fire in My Bones, is from Jeremiah, who Blow himself has admitted is quite a whiner.
smith
From Benghazi to emails to earphones with wires. Is there any limit to the depths of triviality our National Misogyny Corps won’t sink? Guess we’ll have to elect a lot more high-profile women to find out
James E Powell
@Brachiator:
Here is a review of some ways in which the Obama administration fell short. It’s complex and I can’t claim expertise.
At the time, Duncan Black at Atrios was regularly talking about unused funds from Treasury that could have been used for mortgage relief, but were unspent.
What really mattered was that Obama lost the narrative almost right after inauguration. It was not his doing, but the whole financial crisis became his fault by March. The bank bailouts were suddenly his doing. Bush was no longer mentioned by the press/media who had become accustomed to worshipfully comparing him to Winston Churchill.
Baud
@James E Powell:
While a lot of the criticism is legit, I won’t forget that he saved this country. The imperfect recovery was not our worst case scenario.
schrodingers_cat
Out of curiosity I went and checked the numbers of international grad students in architecture. This is what I found. Number of international graduate students in architecture for masters degree programs is about 30%. These numbers are from 2015. Last 5 years have seen a drop in international students across the board so the current percentages will be most likely lower than this report.
International students in doctoral degree programs in architecture was less than 10%. So international students are not crowding out students from the US.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-obama-foreclosure-20161230-story.html
The HAMP program ended up being a mess, and helped far fewer people than it should have. All the banks got made whole again, but people who just needed some refinancing or other kinds of help couldn’t get it. They just let those people go under. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did because there was too much of the attitude that they “deserved” to get hurt because they were “too dumb” to know they shouldn’t have taken out those loans in the first place, even though everyone they trusted to have their interests at heart said “yes you can do this”, including realtors that they hired! Turns out no one had their backs.
schrodingers_cat
@Ramona Rosario: I have encountered them too. However, not every international student is loaded, most I knew when I was a student weren’t.
James E Powell
@Baud:
Obama had an impossible job. And many people forget he had like twelve Joe Manchins and one Joe Lieberman in the senate and a pack of blue dogs in the house.
Kay
@PAM Dirac:
They had billboards up all over eastern Michigan telling people to apply. Detroit. Jesus. I would just fume when I would see them. Don’t give them hope. It was cruel.
There’s this odd little lending subsidy out of the Department of Agriculture that does “distressed rural areas” – they had the only program that actually worked. They waived everything- they just wanted to keep a roof over people. These are piece of shit houses- 60k, 70k – it didn’t make any sense to foreclose. They don’t want the property. They want the borrower to keep it, so they worked with them.
Tony Jay
@James E Powell:
Of course not, not would be a violation of the terms of entry to the wonderful world of Infotainment advancement, and that’s simply not on the cards.
It’s the same over here. Johnson’s shower of gobshites keep on getting afforded all of the unearned credibility in the world with nary a scintilla of recognition afforded their long and ignominious history of blatant lying and glaring incompetence. Yesterday means nothing, and every day is a bright new tomorrow for the ‘Right’ kind of people.
By the same token, the cowardly shit-flingers in Labour red who spent the last six years never further than a flea’s taint from a TV camera or a Guardian Opinion piece as long as they were sabotaging their own Party’s chances of victory now find themselves unaccountably barred from the rolodexes of their former dinner-party chums, unless, of course, they’re agreeing with the general thrust of Tory policy and casting venomous aspersions on those horrible, horrible Leftists, which they’re oh, so happy to do at the drop of anyone’s hat.
Pavlov should write a book about them.
Ohio Mom
@Gin & Tonic: That was my cousin Arline. She has often quipped that because she was an English major and all her books were novels that could be borrowed from the public library, her only expense was subway fare.
And while I’m not going to research it, I’d bet subway fare in real dollars was a lot less in the late 60s and early 70s.
Soprano2
@James E Powell: But HAMP was a program that was passed by Congress!! They had it right there, a program to help homeowners who had been impacted by these junk mortgages, and they mostly didn’t use it at all. It was a failure to use a tool they had to help people, IMHO mostly because of the attitude that the people who took out those bad mortgages deserved to be hurt because they were too dumb to know better.
burnspbesq
@Roger Moore:
There’s no labor shortage. There’s a shortage of folks willing to do shit jobs for shit pay.
Now, some jobs will always suck; I’m not sure you can re-engineer fast food production or cleaning hotel bathrooms to make those jobs stimulating and rewarding. If not, Mr. or Ms. Employer, stop denying reality: the supply and demand curves have shifted up (if wages are on the y axis), and the shift is permanent.
If you have to drive an Audi instead of a Benz, too fucking bad.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
And again, as I noted above, a lot of these people went under anyway because of their underlying financial situation. They were in houses that they could not afford.
And the banks, having got their bailouts, were unwilling to assume further risk.
The banks, like most grifters, including Trump, hate their marks. They blamed the people as being “dumb,” but did everything they could to exploit them, and laughed about it. I recall seeing some transcripts in which lenders boasted about the degree to which they roped in suckers.
And in talking about this with accountants and others, I heard stories of Hispanic customers who were told one thing in Spanish, but the papers they signed were in English and spelled out different terms.
Ultimately, the banks figured correctly that they would be bailed out, no matter what they did. And after the S&L crisis, they lobbied hard (bribed Congress) to change laws so that they would not go to jail if they cheated consumers.
But the bottom line is that I don’t think that the HAMP program would have saved that many people, but the Obama haters and others need something to cling to.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Soprano2:
as I read the article you linked to, it was a hastily written law/program attempting to address an enormously complicated problem, essentially rewriting a lot of contracts
My italics: “quickly”, “force”, “housing advocates say”. So Treasury tries to force the banks to abide, and the banks say “we’re trying!”. And Treasury says, “You’re not trying hard enough!” and eventually takes it to court, and the banks have fancy lawyers and often sympathetic judges and near-infinite resources, and time. The courts don’t move quickly, and can stop the executive branch from forcing private entities from doing things, and I doubt there were many housing advocates on the relevant federal benches. So maybe it wasn’t so much a failure to use the tool, as teh tool was inadequate to bring righteousness into a cascading legal and financial crisis
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
What program didn’t exist that would have saved homeowners?
All of them, Katie.
:sigh: If his opposition kept Congress from passing a program, he couldn’t have acted unilaterally.
Seriously, are you familiar with the basics of how our government works? Presidents can only act using the authority that either Congress or the Constitution itself gives them.
it’s been a decade or so, but IIRC Congress included the authority in the stimulus bill that was passed in early 2009. Atrios blogged about it frequently at the time.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
We’re in agreement. The reason the media talks about it as a labor shortage is because they’re talking to employers and ignoring workers, which is part of a systemic problem with the way they report on economic issues. Everything tends to be framed in terms of how it affects the wealthy and business owners, not how it affects ordinary workers.
Ohio Mom
I think the point being missed here is: the number of wealthy foreign students is A symptom of what is wrong with public higher education, not THE cause.
Someone could wave a magic wand and make all foreign students, wealthy or not, disappear, and the problem that American young people are priced out of their state’s schools would remain.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: There’s a big ProPublica story about HAMP and opposition to cramdowns and all the other issues at my “Repost” link above. It’s not a simple issue and most people, including Barney Frank, were frustrated by the politics.
Putting it mostly on Obama is wrong.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@burnspbesq:
Yep. Also, people are quitting fairly decent jobs to look for something better.
The public radio program Marketplace regularly reports on the JOLT report.
During one period there were about 11 million job openings, but 4 million people who had quit their jobs. Clearly, they were not that interested in what was available to them.
In a detail story, Marketplace interviewed a guy who quit a good professional job because benefits and working conditions were unsatisfying, and spent 13 months looking for a better job, which he eventually found.
Another person took a job for lower pay in a field that she enjoyed more.
Conservatives hated the enhanced unemployment benefits program and opposed stimulus payments in part because of some faux moralistic belief that people should have to take whatever job is available, even if the job is crap or undesirable. Hypocritically, they also oppose raising the minimum wage and other measures that might make job environments and opportunities better.
But a common pattern is that a lot of people who had to stay home without work or do remote work had an opportunity to re-evaluate what their jobs meant to them, and this spurred more people to take a chance on something that was more rewarding.
James E Powell
@Ohio Mom:
Less, but not a lot less. Using available online calculators, 1970’s 30 cent fare is $2.15 in 2021.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
A huge part of the problem was the banks not wanting to admit the houses weren’t worth what people had paid for them. The banks worked with homeowners, but often only to the extent of trying to keep them in the houses they had paid too much for.
What was really needed was a program that would have reduced the principal amount to something the homeowner could afford, but there were too many forces working against that. That would involved admitting the houses weren’t worth what people had paid for them, which would call into question the value of all the other mortgages. It would also encourage people who had paid similar amounts but could afford the mortgage to ask for similar treatment. Once that got rolling, it could drive the banks into insolvency, which was exactly what they were trying to avoid. And that would have been an expense that dwarfed TARP, which was already so much money it scared people. We would have been much better off forcing cram-downs and recapitalizing the banks if needed, but it would have been a very hard sell.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: This
The number of international students in the US is less than a million total and represents slightly less than 5% of the overall student population
burnspbesq
@Brachiator:
Marketplace is arguably the best thing on National Quisling Radio.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
I have enjoyed many of your other posts. Here, you don’t have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the issue.
I don’t particularly care what Atrios or others may have posted about this in the past and am not going to look it up. If you cannot explain what you accuse Obama of doing or failing to do, just move on.
Others have mentioned the HAMP program. Fair enough. But as I noted, I don’t think that this would have helped as much as people want to believe.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
IMO, the key word here is “faux”. The real motivation when you drill down to it is that they want the workers currently stuck in poorly paid, dead-end jobs to stay there for their current pay so the people benefiting can continue to do so. If you talk with them for long enough, it will come down to them not wanting to pay a bit more for a Big Mac or whatever cheap thing they’ve gotten used to underpaying for. Sadly, even people who claim to be liberals are often willing to make this argument, apparently unaware of how it conflicts with their stated political positions.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: But I’m not an “Obama hater”, far from it. I think most of what he did was good, and I think he was a good president, but I think this particular program wasn’t good, and was not administered well, and was advertised as something it wasn’t. It was being pushed to people as a solution to their problems, when it seems that it was mostly an attempt to spread out the foreclosures for the banks so it would be easier for them to absorb. Don’t tell us you’re going to help people and then not help them.
Soprano2
@burnspbesq: Oh BS, it’s both. I have read that there are 4 million fewer people in the job market now than in 2019. For whatever reason you want to cite, that’s a shortage.
And I don’t drive a Benz or an Audi, I drive a Hyundai Sonata, and my husband drives a 1999 Chevy Blazer, if that makes any difference at all. Everyone who’s affected by this problem isn’t a moneygrubbing fat cat driving a Mercedes telling all their employees to eat shit. Some of us are trying hard to hire people in a job market where unemployment is running at around 2.4%.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Some of the narrative around the foreclosures was just wrong. There were “liar loans” where people misrepresented their income and so got houses they couldn’t afford, but there were also a lot of not very sophisticated people who took the word of the appraiser and the lender on what the house was worth. The values were inflated. The appraisals were junk. That’s not the fault of the borrower.
If they can’t take the word of the appraiser and the lender on what the house is worth, what are they supposed to do? Just come up with their own value? These finance and real estate people represented themselves as experts in property values and how much debt should attach to what property- can be secured by the property. Ordinary non-experts should be able to rely on them- if they can’t, what are they paying experts for?
Soprano2
It might not have. Perhaps it was poorly designed. But they promoted it as a solution to people’s problems, and then it was unavailable. Some of the stories at the time were unbelievable in how poorly people who applied for relief were treated by the banks. Like Kay said, it seems that it wasn’t a real program, but instead was only designed to spread out the bankruptcies. It wasn’t advertised that way, though.
And yes, I know not everyone could be helped, but I think they could have helped a lot more people if they had wanted to spend some political capital on it, but they didn’t.
Soprano2
@Kay: That’s what I mean when I say no one had their backs, when they expected that everyone involved was an honest broker. Instead, everyone involved was lying to them, and in the end the only people who paid any price for those lies was the borrower. Sometimes the lender encouraged people to lie about their income! Too often it was only the borrower who was blamed because “they should have known” even if they had never bought a house before! I had someone tell me that “everyone” hires a lawyer to look at their mortgage paperwork! Who thinks that?
My husband and I aren’t involved in the industry at all, but we knew in 2006 that it was a house of cards that was unsustainable. The “tell” were the ads saying you could set your own payment every month. No one had ever done that before! What did they think would happen when they let people do that?
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
But this wasn’t just about the banks. The entire real estate industry was based on the idea of “yeah, house prices are high, but don’t worry about it! House prices continue to rise, and you can always take money out of your house and buy anything you want, and then sell your house for a tremendous tax free profit. Don’t worry about interest rates. Buy now! Buy more!”
Yeah. Loan modification terms might revise interest rates or extend the term of a loan, but rarely adjust the principal. And what you advocate is too radical, in part because as you note it would have pushed down the value of housing stock. And you could not just do this for people applying for aid, you would have to re-assess the entire neighborhood in which the person lived, if you wanted to be fair. This would have a huge ripple effect on all kinds of things, including property taxes and state and local budgets.
But again, this dances around the problem that predatory lenders failed to act as a gatekeeper in evaluating loan applicants. This crap was so bad that talk radio hosts in Southern California could laughingly refer to “liar loans” where applicants would offer falsified self-employment income amounts that were never verified by lenders who should have known better. How do you establish what the principal of a home acquired with bad information should be in order to be affordable?
debbie
@Soprano2:
I don’t know where you come up with this information. Plenty of loans were yanked from the jaws of foreclosure thanks to HAMP. If homeowners were unhappy with the modifications they got, it was because they didn’t get the terms or principal forgiveness they were convinced they deserved. HAMP, HARP, etc. were essential parts of the recovery.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I’m conventional, right? Responsible. I believe in the system. In 2009. So in the beginning we telling people “work with the lender, make partial payments, stay in touch” all the usual advice.
By the end it was wholly adversarial. It was us against them. We were like “stay in the house as long as you can and don’t make payments, because you’ll need first and last months rent when they evict or you’ll be homeless”.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Thank you. Jeez.
Brachiator
@Kay:
That’s just it. The lenders were supposed to be honest gatekeepers. They weren’t.They were supposed to be able to tell an applicant yes or know because they had all the information required to match applicants to loans and homes. This was what they were in business to do.
They saw that they could get rich on fees and loan payments even if they homeowner ultimately defaulted. And by wrapping mortgages into bundles, they could delay any reckoning.
But because regulation was lax, and there was no real punishment for malfeasance, the banks could get away with this and then run to the government for a bailout.
Yeah, it was despicable, and avoidable. But the money to be made was just too damn good.
Ohio Mom
@James E Powell: Thanks! It’s fun to know that.
Kay
These people. Just reflexive liars. Schmeck told the whole country that he wasn’t a Trump guy and now he’s happily on the wingnut grift circuit wearing a MAGA hat and insisting the election was stolen.
They just lie all the time and it’s the shamelessness that gets me. They’re all national Right wing celebrities- they tell one outlet one thing and another a completely different story and it just doesn’t matter.
Rittenhouse is the same. He’s happily employed as a Right wing grifter now- despite denying it a month ago.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I figured he had to be lying because only a brainless Trump cultist would hijack his own children’s Santa tracker call to barf out “Let’s Go Brandon.” And of course he pretends to be a big Christian. The real Christians really need to clean house. These lying, grifting Trump asshole Christians are worse for the religion’s image than the Inquisition.
sab
@Roger Moore: I am late responding. I think you are right. My point isn’t so much to do with immigrants as it is to do with the cost. But it also means that the immigrants we do get are different, because everyone who is not rich is now going elsewhere than US state universities because they are so imcredibly expensive if you pay out of state tuition and then you are not allowed to work to offset the cost.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: He may have had a green card fairly early. My impression is that we were welcoming to people from communist countries then, but now we only want oligarchs.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I kind of agree with you but also kind of disagree. I think the real red flag wasn’t with the appraisals but with the estimates of what people could afford. House appraisal is crazy because there isn’t necessarily an objective measure of what a house is worth. I guess if there are similar, newly built houses nearby those can serve as a reality check, but mostly it’s about what people are willing to pay.
The real danger was in terms of what people were able to afford. There used to be some traditional rules about house payments not being more than 30% of pre-tax income, but the banks got laxer and laxer about those rules. Maybe a larger percent of income was reasonable, but it went completely off the rails when the banks started to apply those same rules to loans other than traditional fixed rate mortgages.
If you can only afford 30% (or 35%, 40%, or whatever) of your income, that’s all you can afford. If you’re talking about a loan with a teaser rate, you have to base the loan amount on what the payment will be when the teaser is over. And you can’t apply a rule to an interest only loan that was designed for a self-amortizing one. The banks were supposed to be the financially sophisticated party. It’s their job to make sure loans are only going to people who can repay them. If they gave loans based on obviously misused rules for repayment, they have only themselves to blame when they can’t get their money back.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat:
I suspect part of what clouds up this discussion is that the slightly less than 5% of foreign students are not evenly distributed.
Probably not too many at small liberal arts colleges, or at bigger schools majoring in classics and philosophy, taking visual and performing arts classes, setting out to be elementary ed teachers, but lots in big state schools majoring in the sciences, business and economics, and the techincal fields, looking to join higher prestige and better paid professions.
In other words, studying to be a biomedical engineer is going to have a lot of international classmates, someone studying poetry is going to have a lot of classmates very much like them.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
Comparables are always the issue.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
During the height of this mess, I would hear some self-styled progressives say “well, the banks got bailed out, so if Obama doesn’t let all these people keep their homes, he is obviously a tool of the bankers.”
They didn’t really care about any specific program that might have helped some or most delinquent homeowners. They were just looking for another opportunity to declare “see, there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, and Obama is not the Progressive Messiah that we wanted him to be.”
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I didn’t say international students are driving Americans out of universities (I said high cost is driving them out of universities). I also said that universities chasing sweet sweet international student full tuition is leading to credential inflation. Literally the architecture PhD did not exist 15 years ago. There has been an explosion in the accreditation and enrollment in these programs in the last 5-10 years. The degree serves no tangible purpose other than to make money for the university and to allow students to stay in the country on student visas. You can get a architecture license and teach at the university level in every state without one. The degree is just a blatant cash grab.
Soprano2
@debbie: When the program was created they said it could help 4 million people. It ended up helping less than a million. I know it helped a good number of people, but it was advertised to help a lot more than it ever did.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: You make good points. My earlier comment gives the statistics for architecture. Commenters can click that link and look at those numbers themselves.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom:
This is true, but it is why I am not okay with using immigration to conceal the reality that American students can’t afford the education they need. If there is a shortage of people in specific skilled professions — and there is — the proper policy response is to discover if there are structural barriers to entry keeping people out and to lower those barriers. The AIA has found that there are insurmountable financial barriers to entry for large swaths of Americans. Less than 1% of licensed architects in the US are black women. That’s by no means an accident. Just throwing our hands up and saying, “Well, let’s just have more visas!” is allowing Americans to ignore this reality. It’s not right.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
It’s not so much the issue of comparables as it is the issue of housing being about competing with other people for a limited supply. Yes, if you’re lucky enough to be in one of the areas where there is still accessible greenfield construction, this is less of an issue. Of course in those areas, house prices didn’t go as crazy as they did in the craziest markets. If you’re stuck in an area that’s already built up, you’re trying to outbid other people for desirable locations.
Houses here in Pasadena sell for a lot of money because there’s a limited supply of housing in nice areas this close to downtown LA and millions of people who want them. There’s no objective way to put a value on that; you just have to look at what people are willing to bid. If people are willing to spend a large fraction of their income on housing, you’d better be, too, or you aren’t going to be able to afford a house.
debbie
@Soprano2:
Borrowers applied for HAMP. If they didn’t meet program guidelines, most banks had their own modification programs and borrowers would be reviewed for them and be approved if they qualified.
I think your flat one million is misleading and many more homeowners were helped, but I don’t know how to google for the statistics that would show this.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
Refinances aren’t based on what people are willing to pay; hence, the number of complaints about nonapproval.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@debbie: some numbers are given in the LA Times article Soprano2 linked to above
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
That is one deranged ___________ .
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Like I said, that doesn’t include the other modification programs borrowers could be reviewed for.
Another Scott
@Soprano2: I think that DeMarco was the main villain, if we have to assign it to one person.
(IIRC, the courts did slap Obama down on at least some of his recess appointments.)
I never understood enough about the situation to know if DeMarco really was doing it wrong, but it illustrates one of the difficulties – lots of the actors were nominally independent.
FWIW
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: Your stats indicate that something like 30% of MArch students (this is the most pertinent statistic from 2015, as that is the degree required for licensure in most states) are international. That is a lot. A lot. Especially given that most architecture programs are publicly funded.
debbie
@Another Scott:
DeJoy’s forerunner?!?
Another Scott
@debbie: DeLightful folks, aren’t they??
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@debbie: sure, I was just offering those numbers
this question mostly interests/bothers me because I see the same kind of language/thinking as was used then and is used here– basically, Obama should have been able to fix this, therefore Obama could have fixed this, therefore the fact that Obama didn’t fix this means he failed– being applied to the question of student loans
there was a former regular here whom I haven’t seen in a while, but judging from their posts had a very fancy education and very high paying career, who spent most of November and December 2016 angrily posting that Obama needed to fix this, i.e. undo the election. When asked exactly how this was supposed to happen, would reply something along the lines of “Fuck you! He wanted to be President! Let him figure it out”
See also Bernie Sanders
BS: The big banks must be broken up, and as president I will do so
Media: What legal mechanism will you use to do this?
BS: The big banks will be broken up, because the big banks should be broken up!
hope is not a strategy, and righteousness is rarely an effective political plan
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Scott:
that damn three-separate-and-equal-branches thing again!
Geminid
@Roger Moore: California is a big state, but all those mountains near the coast seem to impose topographical constraints on housing. I always figured that the biggest reason California tech companies like to set up new operations in Texas is all that flat, buildable land. Companies can buy their own land more cheaply, and their employees can buy cheaper housing. I think that looser regulation and lower taxes are secondary factors. Tech companies will want the state to keep upgrading it’s educational system, so lower taxes are not neccesarily a plus for them anyway.
Atlanta and Charlotte grew a lot from 1980 on, I think partly because buildable land around them is plentiful.
Atlanta and Charlotte have benefited similarly from
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Exactly. Frankly, that the banks even agreed to participate in HAMP is pretty amazing.
You know who could have made the banks obey? TFG. He didn’t have a problem ordering anyone to do whatever he wanted because he didn’t believe in democracy. I’d like to ask all the people who are bitching that Obama didn’t do enough if they’d have preferred TFG’s way.
Can’t have it both ways.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
If they covered it from the employees side they would show the rich for what they are. And as the owners of the big media companies are somewhat on the wealthier side they are never going to shoot themselves in the wallet. Just a guess but they may be unable to see, understand or give a fuck about anyone with less than 7 figure bank accounts. The wealthiest 700-800 people in this country are billionaires. I remember when this countries budget was discussed in billions, not trillions. 30 yrs ago the federal budget was 1.4 trillion, in 2020 it was 6.6 trillion. My point is that things change and one of those things is that the wealthy have gotten wealthier. I’d bet that the number of poor has gone up with population, as well as the amounts counted as wealth by the wealthy have gone up. Capitalism can be pretty good for a lot of people or it can be extremely good for some and crappy for others. A lot depends on the wealthy paying a fair share and many times in the past (and in the present) that doesn’t happen.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
This is correct. The Constitution doesn’t allow either house to adjourn for more than 3 days without the other house’s permission (Article 1, Section 5, Paragraph 5). Starting when they took control in 2011, the House Republicans refused to go into formal recess, holding pro forma sessions every 3 days so the Senate couldn’t go into recess either. Obama tried to make some recess appointments during those periods. The Republicans challenged those appointments, claiming the Senate hadn’t been formally in recess. IIRC, Obama sensibly claimed the pro forma sessions didn’t have a quorum and hence couldn’t take up his appointments, but the Supreme Court sided with the Republicans and blocked those recess appointments.
Soprano2
@Kay: That’s how I figured it would end up, yet because of the way the “regular” press covered the whole stupid “controversy”, most people will always believe he wasn’t a “Trump guy” and the whole thing was just a joke. Perhaps he planned all along to end up here, on the wingnut gravy circuit sopping up the bucks and selling his “grievance”. They are all put-upon victims of the left “woke culture” the way they tell it on right-wing media. All this because he insulted the president while his kids were talking to them. My grandparents would die of shame if they were still alive. I think they couldn’t envision a world where people would feel it was OK to be this rude. It’s like the idea of rudeness being wrong has disappeared.
Betty Cracker
Obama wasn’t an economics guy, which is not a flaw. It’s not reasonable to expect presidents to be experts in everything. But it is reasonable to expect presidents to appoint people who will execute their policies and arrange to receive counsel from aides who will help them make choices that align with their vision for the country. Obama relied on people like Summers and Geithner. That was a mistake, IMO. He didn’t make a ton of mistakes, but that was a doozy.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: Well, that’s not me. I fully understand that not everyone could be helped – some people lied about their income, others just did take on more house than they ever could have afforded. (I had several friends and co-workers at that time who were absolutely shocked at how much a bank told them they could borrow, because they did know it would be impossible for them to keep making those payments, but a lot of people aren’t that sophisticated about it.) That movie “The Big Short” illustrates this with a ridiculous example that might have been kind of true! My only point was that there were so many horror stories about HAMP and how people who actually could have been helped were abused by the system, and the administration either couldn’t or wouldn’t help them. I would NEVER say that there is no difference between the parties; I only think that in this particular instance some cruel promises were made for a program that didn’t seem able to ever carry them out.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
They were underwater on the houses, because the values were inflated and then dropped. That meant they couldn’t even sell it and get out from under the mortgage, unless they walked away and discharged the deficiency in bankruptcy, which we ended up telling them to do.
It was more complicated than “they bought too much house” as far as the monthly. The thing itself wasn’t worth what they borrowed on it. It’s the single largest purchase they ever make. If the lender and the appraiser tell them it’s worth X they should be able to rely on that, particularly the lender who is securing the loan with the house. If the asset drops in value the whole risk shouldn’t fall on the borrower. I didn’t order Wells Fargo to make those loans. They should eat some of it, cram down the mortgage. There’s your “moral risk”.
Soprano2
@Another Scott: OH, I remember that. Yes, he was one factor. I think in the end it all came down to a belief by many actors in the Obama administration that a lot of the people who were victimized by the system should have known better, and shouldn’t have borrowed the money in the first place, so weren’t that deserving of help. It’s the same attitude Kay talks about when she says they think anytime there’s an economic downturn the poor automatically have to suffer more. I know it’s not just Obama who is at fault, but he did pick Geithner and Summers for positions, and they hired people, and that’s how we got to a place where so many people were foreclosed on. Perhaps it was impossible to help them all, but I know that the prevalent belief among too many people was that the banks all got bailed out and the people got nothing from the Democrats. Perhaps it was unfair, but a lot of people believed it.
Soprano2
Yep, they didn’t seem to think the banks should suffer too much for making so many shitty loans.
Geminid
@Kay: A lot of those new home purchasers were stampeded by real estate industry actors telling them to buy “Now!” before home prices climbed out of reach. Political actors went along. Maybe the purchasers should have known better, but I think the banks and politicians did know better.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
Yep. But also as I have noted, the banks had the background and experience to know who could afford the loans they were offering. They abused the trust that had been placed on them by deliberately lying to and exploiting many homeowners. And a lot of these people could never have been rescued by HAMP because they never could have qualified for any loan or loan forgiveness and still been able to make payments. These people were doubly failed by the banks and by government programs.
But to be fair, other people were helped, and many more were helped by the Mortgage Forgiveness Act.
I think that this movie provides one of the best and fairly accurate explorations of the financial mess the bankers created.
debbie
@Brachiator:
Plenty of new loans were made by dishonest mortgage brokers who would then turn around and sell the new loans to banks. I’m sure that bogus risk formula was used by banks when deciding whether or not to buy the loans.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
People shouldn’t have to declare bankruptcy if they can’t pay their mortgage. It’s a secured loan, so they should be able to turn the security over to the lender and be done with it. There’s no way they should somehow be on the hook for phantom income from the difference between the value of the property and the amount due on the loan. Reforming our bankruptcy law to fix that would have two positive public policy benefits. On the one hand, it would mean lots of people could avoid bankruptcy. On the other hand, it would force lenders to be more careful about their lending. It seems like a win win.
ETA:
In fairness, if the asset rises in value, the whole of the benefit accrues to the borrower. This is the inherent danger to financial leverage; it multiplies the amount you gain or lose relative to the amount you initially put at risk. It’s the reason standard loans have a 20% down payment requirement and amounts less than that require mortgage insurance; the risk gets out of control otherwise.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
The vast majority of these homeowners were able to discharge the debt using the Mortgage Relief Act. Of course, they lost the home. In many states where the mortgage was secured by the home, there would never be any taxable cancellation of debt income by definition.
Things could get complicated if there was a refinance or amounts greater than those allowed by the Mortgage Relief Act.
So the main issue here is the wish for a magic wand that would let people keep their home even if they defaulted on the mortgage.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I think what people wanted was aggressive cram downs where the mortgage holders would have to eat the losses. People who think this way assume the mortgage lenders would have to eat the losses anyway, so they might as well do that in a way that keeps people in their houses rather than requiring masses of foreclosures and resales. You might even save some money in the long run by avoiding the costs associated with foreclosing and reselling, plus the inevitable cases of people wrecking their homes before they were foreclosed on. It might well have been the best public policy outcome. It just wasn’t likely to happen given that it would help ordinary people at the expense of MOTU.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t pretend to be a wonk about HAMP and the qualifications and application process, but I suspect the under-performance of the program had more to do with technocratic, bureaucratic and legalistic snafus (situation normal….) than with anti-debt moralism of well-known and much-despised boogeymen with fancy offices in DC
Roger Moore
@Roger Moore:
Adding to my own comment:
There was strong resistance among the bankers, securitizers, etc. to any kind of cram down. They thought, with some reason, that cram downs would reward people who had taken out loans the couldn’t afford by letting them keep the homes they shouldn’t have bought in the first place. That is a big moral hazard.
What those people are missing is that you can make the opposite argument for the solution we wound up adopting. We wound up protecting the banks at the expense of the borrowers. That taught the banks that they could get away with lousy lending standards, since they knew they’d get bailed out if the whole system went to hell. That is also an enormous moral hazard, and one that we have not dealt with very well.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
It was not going to happen because it would have been insane public policy. In effect, people wanted the government to say “The bankers were naughty, so even though you would never have been able to afford this house, we will let you keep it.”I suppose this might happen when we achieve progressive Nirvana. Everyone will have a house. But they will have to share it with three other families.
J R in WV
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
One of my first civilian jobs was in a hot-type print shop, with a furnace full of molten lead-based type metal in the corner. Venus is hotter than that furnace full of molten metal. So I beg to differ with you on that.
dopey-o
IIRC, sub-prime mortgages paid higher commissions to the originators, who manipulated naive borrowers. IMHO, many who lost their homes in the crash had been forced into untenable positions.
@Suzanne: And regarding state-funded universities, our fine state of Misery sold our state lottery by claiming the proceeds would go to education. And immediately legislated that an equal number of dollars would be snuck out the back door, to be given to highway
contractorscontributors. The rich get richer, and the poor get GEDs.J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
Expressing a desire for more local students over foreign-born students isn’t exactly the same as “hate for international students” in my opinion. You seem to jump from mild disapproval all the way to hatred more than seems necessary to me. Just think about it, please.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Adding to my own note:
In many cases, the banks should never have made the loans in the first place. They broke their own rules. The borrowers would never be able to repay the loans unless you artificially reduced the principal to some ridiculous amount. But this would create all kinds of problems down the line.
Ultimately, the government had to bail out the financial system, so it is not really a case of lenders vs borrowers and whose ox can be gored and who you can give a freebie.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I fail to see why this is any crazier than making the bankers whole after they made epic bad loans. The basic idea is that the banks were going to have to eat a lot of those bad loans one way or another, since the houses simply weren’t worth what people had paid for them. Whether the losses came from foreclosure and resale or from cram downs, the banks were going to lose money and need to be bailed out. We might as well adopt the less disruptive solution of keeping people in their homes rather than the more disruptive one of having the banks foreclose and resell the houses.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: I’m referring to the strip club dancer who bought 3 houses!
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
RE: In effect, people wanted the government to say “The bankers were naughty, so even though you would never have been able to afford this house, we will let you keep it.”
The government did not make bankers as individuals whole. It rescued the financial system. I think people should have gone to jail, but that is another issue.
This is false. Assessed valuation may be somewhat subjective, but it is not arbitrary. A house is not worth what you want to pay for it. This would be like saying, “I only have $5, so that is what this house should be worth.
So, if 200 people make a $200,000 bid on a house, and the bank gives me a loan even though it knows that I really don’t have any money at all, and cannot ever afford the house, you are saying that the house is really only worth $1 (a nominal amount) and that should now be my cost because the bank was dishonest? Whoopee, I don’t have to pay property tax, even though everyone else on the block pays based on more realistic valuations.
Can we do this for other assets as well? If I buy a car and can’t make the payments, can I now keep it?
If I lose my job or spend all my money on hookers and blow, like some bankers do, can I still keep my house?
More seriously, would you insure every homeowner against ever losing their home due to a change in their financial situation? What would the dollar limitation, if any, be on that?
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
I knew of some instances where a couple bought a duplex and lived in one unit and had their son live in the other unit. Another situation where people refinanced their home and used the proceeds to help a family member by their home.
In all these cases, none of the people involved could afford the properties that they bought, even though they made the purchases in good faith because the lenders told them they could.
The duplicity of the lenders was grossly unfair to these people.
Many of my former neighbors worked for the lender Countrywide Savings. I think that most of them lost their jobs as fallout from the financial mess. As far as I am concerned, these people should also have been made whole.
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
I did not see Suzanne calling international students names of any sort. You become very prickly some days, attacking people who are actually on your side. Perhaps you should step back when you have an urge to a ttack a long time Jackal here on Balloon-Juice?
Maybe take a deep breath, and try to see if the commenter you are about to attack is actually deserving of your ire…
schrodingers_cat
@J R in WV: You are right, perhaps hate was too strong a word.
Further down I linked to an article about students in architecture programs from a years ago. The number of international grad students pursuing a doctoral degree in architecture was less than 10% and less than 30% in master’s programs. So nowhere near a majority.
So whatever is keeping domestic students from pursuing those degrees it is not the international students wealthy or otherwise.
schrodingers_cat
@J R in WV: You are right I have been prickly.