Search Results for: Clinton

Hillary Clinton’s College Affordability Plan

by philg

Hillary Clinton has proposed to change the way Americans pay for college. The money collected by universities will stay the same, the teaching methods will be unaltered, and students will do the same things for the same amount of time. The big difference is that about $350 billion in additional taxes will be paid by Americans and then the government will make sure that (at least most of) the money gets to the colleges. Paying taxes instead of tuition will make college more “affordable” for Americans, according to Clinton and most of the media (e.g., nytimes), just as Obamacare made health care more “affordable” despite the overall cost remaining roughly constant as a percentage of GDP.

It occurred to me that a politician could promise to raise the average American’s tax bill by $70,000 and then buy each family a Mercedes or BMW at list price. This would be called “The Mercedes and BMW affordability plan.”

One of the interesting provisions of the bill is that, if not paid back via a modest percentage of “income,” loans will be entirely forgiven after 20 years (or 10 years, if working in an official do-gooder job). Consider a Massachusetts citizen who goes through 10 years of college and grad school or professional school, learning a lot of interesting but not very practical material. Towards the end of grad school, the citizen has casual encounters with two different members of the opposite sex earning $250,000 each, and retains custody of the two resulting children. Under the Massachusetts child support system, this will lead to a comfortable $80,000 per year in tax-free payments, none of which count as “income,” plus additional court-ordered amounts to pay for direct expenses of the child, such as daycare while in grad school or college tuition if it isn’t entirely free by then. The payments end when the youngest child turns 23, at which point all of the student loan debt has been forgiven.

What can the well-educated child support profiteer do during those 10 or 20 years post-graduation to maintain skills and also accumulate savings for retirement? How about… work? To get the 10-year “do-gooder” schedule of forgiveness, the citizen starts a non-profit corporation and accumulates tax-free profits inside the corp. (see this article for some numbers on Planned Parenthood, which is apparently able to bank over $100 million per year in profits) Perhaps the citizen pays himself or herself a minimum wage for 10-15 hours per week. After the loans have been forgiven, the citizen can then use the accumulated profit (“surplus” in non-profit argot) to contribute to a tax-deferred retirement account and/or to pay a much higher salary.

What if the citizen doesn’t have any non-profit ideas? The citizen forms a C corporation and works through the C corp., which pays corporate taxes on any profits but retains or reinvests nearly all after-tax earnings. This may not be tax-efficient because if the money is eventually taken out as salary the citizen will also have to pay individual income tax on previous years’ income (this pain could be reduced by moving to Puerto Rico (Forbes)). But, on the other hand, skipping out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt should provide a boost to overall financial health. Essentially the citizen meets day-to-day personal expenses from child support and saves for retirement by building up value in the C corporation.

A separate question is how this would work for an American who graduates from college and emigrates to, e.g., Singapore. If he or she renounces U.S. citizenship how does the U.S. then get income data sufficient to calculate the former citizen’s student loan repayment liability?

Readers: What other interesting strategies and outcomes would you expect based on the percentage of income cap and the forgiveness-after-20-years policy?

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Clinton versus Obama; poor state versus rich state

by philg

An economist pointed out that Bill Clinton was practically a libertarian compared to Barack Obama. Both are popular Democrats, separated by just eight years, so how to explain the difference in philosophy?

My answer was that Clinton had come from Arkansas, a poor state (#48 in household income). There wasn’t that much accumulated wealth in Arkansas to ladle out to cronies. Clinton thus turned to the only remaining possible strategy of trying to grow the pie by making an environment more conducive to business investment.

Obama, by contrast, came to national office from Illinois, a wealthy state (#16). By taxing some of the real estate, factory, and other wealth in Illinois it is possible to hand out significant checks to tens of thousands of supporters. Why attempt the hard work of growing the economy when one can simply tax the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower?

Temperamentally we should expect politicians from wealthy states to behave like Saudi princes, assuming that an inexhaustible supply of wealth is their birthright and spending most of their time figuring out how to distribute it.

Bill Clinton’s autobiography

by philg

I’ve been listening to Bill Clinton’s autobiography in an abridged book-on-tape version, read by the author.  He talks about his daughter’s pet frog.  He talks about his family and their struggles with obesity and alcohol and cocaine addiction.  He talks about stopping at McDonald’s for coffee towards the end of his morning jog back in Arkansas.  The book demonstrates how far politicians have come since the days of Nixon (no one dares hope that anyone in our current crop will measure up to an old thinker/writer/doer such as Jefferson).  Nixon was the man who struggled with big issues that were important to all Americans.  You’d expect to find Nixon writing about how he started up the Environmental Protection Agency, got us out of Vietnam, and opened up trade with Red China.  Clinton, on the other hand, seems totally unreflective.  He talks about how people cheered when he got Itzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat to sign some sort of agreement in the backyard of the White House but not about why, if this was such an important accomplishment, 12 years later the war between Arabs and Jews continues unabated.  He mentions the dates on which he decided to start bombing people in former Yugoslavia but does not take advantage of the distance of a decade to look at the long-term result (as far as I’ve heard, both the Christians whom we bombed and the Muslims on whose behalf we were bombing hate us now).


Clinton rails against the “conservative media” who misrepresented his proposals, much as our current rulers rail against the “liberal media”.  He expresses genuine confusion that the U.S. contained so many angry little people who harassed him by alleging scandals or imagined that they understood his motivations or marriage.  Speaking of “little people”, Clinton never seems to have harbored any doubt, even as a young man, that he was entitled to their vote.  He believed right from the start that he was the best-qualified person for whatever job he was seeking.  Perhaps this is why we’ve had so many presidents from small towns in obscure states and surprisingly few from big cities.  If you grow up as the only smart person in a tiny school you might subconsciously believe for the rest of your life that you ought to be elected governor, president, whatever.  If, on the other hand, you grow up in Manhattan you might remember “hey, there were a bunch of folks in my old neighborhood who knew a lot more than I did and would probably do a better job.”  This might tend to sap your confidence.


If you want to learn about government, foreign policy, management, etc. the book is useless.  If, on the other hand, you’re exasperated at the mediocrity of our current President, this book is a nice reminder that George W. has no monopoly on mediocrity.


[You might ask why I continue to listen.  I’m driving N to Nashua, New Hampshire every morning for helicopter lessons and then SW to Concord, Massachusetts for English riding lessons in the afternoon and therefore am spending several hours every day in the car.]

Hillary Clinton plagues aviation

by philg

After some rich New Yorkers got killed on a helicopter sightseeing flight in Hawaii, Hillary Clinton leaned on the FAA to tighten regulations regarding such tours.  In particular she wants the FAA to eliminate the ability of flightseeing companies to operate under “Part 91” (simple) and force them to operate under Part 135 of the regulations, which is designed for small airlines basically.  This will put about 700 companies out of the air tour business by the FAA’s estimate.  It is unclear that it will increase safety because (a) most of the big helicopter flightseeing operations are already Part 135 (gives them the ability to take people farther than 25 nautical miles), (b) most of the people who’ve been killed on air tours were killed by Part 135 operators, and (c) helicopters tend to be unsafe, even when piloted by experts.


Basically because some rich people got killed in a $1 million Part 135 helicopter Hillary Clinton wants to wipe out mom-and-pop air tour operators who fly little float planes or biplanes under Part 91.  The FAA has no statistics to show that the proposed regulations will make anyone safer and indeed hardly anyone gets killed on fair-weather airplane tours.  Here’s a comment that I submitted to the FAA via their Web site:



It would be nice if all aviation could be as safe as taking a Boeing 747 from one ILS-and-radar-equipped 12,000′ runway to another.  If we were to wrap additional regulations (Part 135 versus Part 91) around helicopter tours could they become as safe, per passenger-mile, as a ride in a 747?  From an engineering point of view, this doesn’t seem like a realistic short-term goal.  The NASA research report “U.S. Civil Rotorcraft Accidents, 1963 Through 1997” by Harris, F.D., Iseler, L. and Kasper, E. (NASA/TM-2000-209597, USAAMCOM-TR-00-A-006) concluded essentially that helicopters were impossible for human beings to control reliably without a lot of help from computers, computers that aren’t available until you get to helicopters that cost $5-10 million, 10 times the price of the helicopters that are typically used by air tour operators.


A pilot operating an air tour of any kind is already subject to more regulation than almost any American doing anything.  She needs to follow rules regarding visibility minimums, airspace, weight/balance, etc.  She needs to make sure that her aircraft is maintained at 100-hour intervals by federally certificated mechanics.  She needs to follow whatever rules are imposed by her insurance carrier.  She and her colleagues for the last 100 years have achieved a remarkably good safety record, partly because most pilots take the regulations seriously but perhaps mostly due to the fact that it is tough to get killed in a well-maintained airplane on a clear VFR day and if you take off and land at the same airport the weather isn’t likely to change from clear VFR to dangerous IMC.


Layering on Part 135 regulations might make people who love regulation feel good but it is tough to see what it will do for the public.  If all the existing Part 91 rules are followed, air tours are already very safe.  Instead of putting resources into processing reams of Part 135 paperwork, why not put those resources into (1) more ramp checks to make sure that air tour operators are actually following the existing rules, and (2) certifying inexpensive helicopter autopilots and stability augmentation systems?


In the United States an incumbent Senator is basically immune to electoral challenge.  Hillary Clinton seems to be in good health.  So we can probably expect to remain in office for at least another 40 years.  That’s a sobering thought for America’s aviators.

Why Jew-hatred is so popular at elite universities

by philg

Young Americans hoping to stay elite or join the elites, e.g., via attending an elite university, are forced into behaviors that would have seemed completely unnatural back in the 1970s. A 1970s public school was a cruel bully-filled environment compared to today’s placid “kindness is everything” schools. Teenagers were expected to be solipsistic and certainly not expected to pretend to be committed do-gooders. Today, by contrast, the teenager who hopes to gain admittance to a decent college must feign passion for a social justice cause, helping the “underserved”, etc. Nobody seems to notice that teenagers have enough of their own problems to focus on and that folks who genuinely want to invest time and money in charity tend to be old.

If the Americans who fought World War II were the “Greatest Generation” then surely today’s college students are the “Kindest Generation” and those who attend the most elite schools are the kindest of the kindest. How to explain, then, the enthusiasm for Israel-haterd/Jew-hatred among the kindest of the kind? Here’s a theory from a friend in the Boston area (she’s a 60ish Clinton/Obama Democrat who questions the full Biden/Harris religion):

My theory is that they’re force-fed so much “kindness” that they’re desperate to be mean to someone — and, in reason #100 for antisemitism over the centuries, campus ideology and TikTok gave them the excuse…

I think that she’s on to something. Ivy League (“Queers for Palestine League”) schools demand thousands of young humans every year who are as kind as the kindest Buddhist philosopher. The U.S. doesn’t contain a sufficient size population of ultra-kind 18-year-olds. Therefore, the people admitted to elite schools are mostly those who’ve been great liars and pretenders regarding their kindness levels. They need to take their masks off occasionally (so to speak; of course, the same folks have been very diligent indeed about wearing their COVID-19 masks; #FollowTheScience). They can’t hold an on-campus demonstration to decry crimes committed by undocumented migrants or by Black Americans. They can’t rally against Muslims being reluctant to celebrate the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. What is left? The only acceptable outlets for rage (Two Minutes Hate) are (1) anti-Trump/anti-Republican gatherings, and (2) anti-Israel/anti-Jew gatherings (sometimes layered with a “we don’t hate Jews, only Zionists” gloss).

The idea has now trickled down to some non-elite schools…

Related:

How the elites justify coronapanic

by philg

Tomorrow is the five-year anniversary of my blog post If coronashutdown is to protect the old, why do young people have to pay for it?

The average age of a Covid-19-tagged death here in Massachusetts is 82. Thus, presumably to the extent that any lives are saved from Covid-19 by our educational, social, and economic shutdown, they will be roughly 82-year-old lives.

A friend in Berkeley, California who was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Faucism (cloth masks, double masks, N95 double masks, experimental vaccinations, double and triple boosters, Paxlovid for the inevitable encounters with SARS-CoV-2, school closures, lockdowns, etc.) recently set me an April 16, 2025 paper, “Pandemic preparation without romance: insights from public choice”, by Alex Tabarrok, a tenured economic professor at George Mason University (i.e., a state government employee who can’t be fired). My friend loves this paper and believes that it covers purported “missteps” in the elite Covidcrat response to SARS-CoV-2.

I pointed out that the professor starts from the assumption that humans are in charge of viruses (therefore, preparedness could possible reduce deaths to zero) and then promulgates a narrative that keeps those who spent 2-3 years deep in coronapanic feeling fully justified:

In its size and scope the COVID disaster was unique. COVID killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War combined.

The professor even has data:

Of course, the body count method is fundamentally flawed when talking about a virus that kills people at a median age of 82 and that targets those with multiple comorbidities. If SARS-CoV-2 had actually killed a lot of American seniors who had 10+ years to live, we would have seen the following:

Since we didn’t see any of these things happening, we are forced to conclude that COVID-19 did not have as dramatic effort on American demographics as wars that killed healthy men at age 18 (remember, though, that “Women have always been the primary victims of war” — Hillary Clinton). Nor did Americans suffer as many lost life-years from COVID-19 as we did from the regular relentless toll of car accidents.

This preface is a far more interesting window into the psychology of American elites than anything in the rest of the paper. It confirms my often-expressed statement that almost nobody who advocated for school closures, lockdowns, forced masking, and forced vaccinations will ever come to see him/her/zir/themself as having been wrong (much less apologize!). These folks either deny that school closures and lockdowns ever occurred (a popular strategy for Californians, New Yorkers, and the righteous of Maskachusetts) or they say that all measures were based on the best available Science at the time and that what’s wonderful about Science is how it evolves from week to week. Mostly, though, these folks simply don’t look at data that contradicts their faith in themselves. A Maskachusetts lockdowner who said that COVID-19-tagged death rate is a measure of a state’s collective intelligence will never get curious about how “do almost nothing” Sweden ended up with a lower COVID-19-tagged death rate than “do absolutely everything” Maskachusetts (or how Maskachusetts ended up with roughly the same age-adjusted COVID-19-tagged death rate as “do almost nothing after a couple of months of panic” states derided as being full of stupid people).

Related:

Have Americans of color been enjoying a cleaner environment?

by philg

“E.P.A. Plans to Close All Environmental Justice Offices” (NYT):

An internal memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities.

Mr. Zeldin’s move effectively ends three decades of work at the E.P.A. to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities, which are frequently located near highways, power plants, industrial plants and other polluting facilities. Studies have shown that people who live in those communities have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other health problems, compared with the national average.

Last month, Mr. Zeldin placed 168 employees who work on environmental justice on leave, but this week a federal judge forced him to rehire dozens of them after finding that the action had no legal basis. Several E.P.A. employees said they were bracing for many of those people to again be eliminated, as the agency and others prepared for widespread reductions in force.

As president, Mr. Biden emphasized the need to address the unequal burden that people of color carry from exposure to environmental hazards. He created the White House Office of Environmental Justice and directed federal agencies to deliver 40 percent of the benefits of environmental programs to marginalized communities that face a disproportionate amount of pollution. The E.P.A.’s Office of Environmental Justice, which was created by the Clinton administration, significantly expanded under Mr. Biden.

The Trump administration has now erased all of that.

The EPA spends $11 billion every year. Apparently, roughly 40 percent of that has been going to government-identified “marginalized communities” (there are experts assigned to determine which communities have been marginalized?). There are hundreds of EPA employees, at least, working on “environmental justice”. Yet the New York Times journalist couldn’t find any evidence to cite regarding Americans of color (e.g., a lavishly paid Chinese-American school superintendent in the Boston exurbs who claims to be “a person of color”) experiencing any benefit as a consequence of this huge effort.

Is there any evidence that Americans are experiencing more environmental justice as a result of 10+ years of government effort in this direction? If one aspect of the environment is not being crowded, I would think that urban Americans have experienced less environmental now that low-skill migrants have been dumped into their neighborhoods (never into the neighborhoods of the elite advocates for open borders).

What would the UK be like if it had stayed out of World War I and/or World War II?

by philg

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, in which the UK, US, and Soviet Union agreed on plans to force German civilians to work as slaves for years after the war. Clearing minefields was a popular assignment (popular with the assigners, that is) and also agricultural labor (i.e., American president FDR was carrying on in the rich American Democrat tradition of agricultural slave labor). This post looks at the question of whether the benefits of this slave labor justified, for the UK, the costs of going to war and staying at war.

I’ve been listening to When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, in which participants describe the heroism of the British and their Allies during the 1944 Normandy invasion (also the cheerful and willing collaboration of most people in France). It’s a worthwhile book, but it doesn’t explain why the British sacrifice was worth it other than “Nazis are bad.”

Let’s back up to 1900. Is it fair to say that the UK circa 1900 was the most successful and richest country in the history of humanity? The sun never set on the British Empire, which included India. The Royal Navy was the world’s most powerful. Compare to today. The UK is a predominantly Islamic society (measured by hours spent on religious activities) jammed with low-skill immigrants. Wages are absurdly low by U.S. standards. GDP per capita is lower than in the poorest U.S. states. After decades of open borders, the core English part of the UK lacks cultural cohesion. The main project of the UK seems to have been assembling humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies and expecting that they and their descendants won’t behave in a violent or dysfunctional manner once parked in the UK. The result is the Southport stabbings (by a young UK-born Rwandan) and the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal and similar. The trajectory of the UK from 1900 to the present looks like that of a country that lost multiple wars, each one having drained away its resources and treasure and each one resulting in the country being occupied by millions of non-British people.

What if the UK had never fought World War I? (As the victors, we typically think of Germany as the aggressor but it was the UK, without ever having been attacked, that declared war on Germany in 1914.) Let’s assume that Germany would, therefore, have attained all of its war goals. Would that have been worse than what the UK has done to itself? Germany’s goals in WWI were to steal some territory from neighboring countries, especially ports, but certainly not to take anything from the UK other than perhaps a competitive edge in colonizing far-away places that the UK didn’t hold onto even after ostensibly “winning” WWI. By not entering the war, the UK would have avoided the death of 6 percent of its male population (nearly 1 million men, though let’s keep in mind Hillary Clinton’s trenchant observation that “Women have always been the primary victims of war.”) and preserved a huge amount of treasure that it could have applied to beefing up its home defense and Royal Navy. Perhaps even more important, would the German people have elected Adolf Hitler if Germany had won WWI? The Nazis represented a dramatic change from previous German governments and a big part of Hitler’s appeal was that he would turn around the downward trajectory of the loss of WWI and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Without the British stepping in to fight WWI, therefore, they wouldn’t have had to consider whether to fight WWII. The UK would have needed to coexist with a more powerful Germany, but not a Germany with a plan to dominate all of Europe. Maybe a more powerful Germany could have pushed the UK aside in some of its colonial ambitions, but the UK lost all of its colonies in the “fight WWI and WWII” case.

The “fight WWI, but leave the Nazis alone and don’t fight WWII” analysis is a little tougher. Hitler supposedly didn’t want to fight the English, whom he admired. He envisioned a German-dominated European union (not too different from today’s “European Union”, including the idea of Jew-/Israel-hatred in most parts of Europe) and, even after the British declared war (without having been attacked in any way), a negotiated peace with the UK (see the background section of Operation Sea Lion in Wokipedia). If the British had used their resources to turn Britain into an island fortress rather than into daily fights with the Germans maybe Germany would never have bothered to bomb or invade the UK (Ireland was neutral regarding the Nazis and Germany never bothered Ireland). The UK might have lost some of its worldwide influence to a more powerful Germany, but the UK has lost all of its worldwide influence in the “fight WWI and WWII” case. As bad as Nazi Germany was, it never did anything so bad that the French weren’t happy to collaborate with the Nazis. Given the huge cost in lives, money, and years of home-front sacrifice, it seems that the UK would be in a better place today if it had let the Germans have a free hand in Europe from 1939 onward.

We can’t even say that the British sacrifices in WWI and WWII defeated the Nazis because we are informed that Nazis today (“far right”) are more numerous than ever and live all over the US and UK. Who wants to explain how the UK’s involvement in WWI and WWII makes rational sense in the light of how things turned out for the UK (i.e., the spectacular decline of the nation).

Related:

  • Proving that none of my ideas are original, the Journal of Diurnal Epistolary Communication (Daily Mail) published a scholarly work on this subject in 2009… “PETER HITCHENS: If we hadn’t fought World War 2, would we still have a British Empire?”: how come we look back on the Second World War from conditions we might normally associate with defeat and occupation? … We are a second-rate power, rapidly slipping into third-rate status. … We had then, as we have now, no substantial interests in Poland, the Czech lands, the Balkans or – come to that – France, Belgium or the Netherlands. … [regarding WWI] We had gained little and lost much to defend France, our historic enemy, against Germany. In a strange paradox, we had gone to war mainly to save our naval supremacy from a German threat – and ended it by conceding that supremacy to the United States, our ally. … What about the Holocaust? There seems to be a common belief that we went to war to save the Jews of Europe. This is not true. We went to war to save Poland, and then didn’t do so. … When, in 1942, the Germans began their ‘Final Solution’, reliable reports of the outrage were disbelieved or sat on. Later, when the information was beyond doubt, we turned down the opportunity to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. It is certainly hard to argue that the fate of Europe’s Jews would or could have been any worse than it was if we had stayed out of the war. [Maybe Jews would have been better off if the Nazis hadn’t been opposed in their efforts to dominate Europe. The Germans might have become so strong that they could have forced the UK to give up some of its colonial territory and then Germany would have forced Jews to move there, which was the original Nazi idea (get Jews out of Europe, not kill all Jews).]