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Er, French, same thing!

Student Loan Excesses Harm the Most Vulnerable

It looks more like the goal of these schemes is to impoverish the poor.

This article is written about student loans, and points out how these loans actually hurt the people the Boomer progressives are attempting to help.

"The real losers in the student loan merry-go-round are precisely kinds of students—marginal, little family experience in college, low income—that the Obama administration most wants to help. The Wall Street Journal:

'The conventional wisdom among student activists and and elected leaders is that high levels of student debt are causing young Americans to delay key milestones like buying a home, getting married and having kids.

New research paints a more complicated picture. It suggests student debt is indeed a barrier for a significant minority—college dropouts—but that it’s generally not holding back those who earned degrees […]'

College dropouts … typically owe small amounts of student debt—under $10,000—but don’t have the degrees that provide an earnings boost that would position them to buy a home."

But this problem is much deeper than just student loans. The prior post on the minimum wage is another area where the Boomer progressives have created policies disastrous to the poor, 

The list is endless, public transit, the minimum wage, higher education, and higher education loans, occupational licensing, unionization, and myriad other Boomer progressive government policies damage the poor, while benefiting the upper middle class the most, and while still offering some benefit to the middle class.

Most of the benefit comes from the upper middle class being able to navigate the rules, so upper middle class parents help their children navigate the college by ensuring they take a major which will result in a job as well as an education.

"Well-intentioned but harebrained social engineering is a menace to the poor. Instead of idealistic social schemes, policy elites should go back to the basics: expand vocational education and training programs, limit competition from illegal unskilled immigrants, reduce paperwork and regulatory restrictions that make it hard to start businesses in the cities where so many poor people live, and put an end to the war on low-wage jobs that is forcing employers to replace tellers, checkout clerks and other unskilled and semiskilled jobs with machines.

These are policies that would actually help, but they violate treasured liberal myths, so we earnestly saddle poor kids with debt they can’t afford for degrees they can’t get—after making them waste 12 years in lousy schools that we can’t seem to operate effectively."

Mead gets much wrong here. Yes, the idealistic social schemes are terrible, but his prescriptions for solving the problems won't work. It is not competition from illegal unskilled immigrants which are causing problems. And while reducing paperwork and making it easier to start businesses would be a benefit, it is not as important as eliminating occupational licensing, eliminating the minimum wage, eliminating all federal and state employer/employee regulations, implementing a federal right to work law, eliminating all Davis-Bacon and related work laws, among many others. These would have immediate, direct, and positive results on employment, and create the underlying pressures necessary to create jobs which would allow people to build job skills, and begin to rise up the wage ladder.

Study Finds Public Pension Promises Exceed Ability to Pay

. . . and many will fail, or partially fail stranding many of the pensioners.

We've discussed this before. This is a very serious problem which is treated un-seriously because neither the politicians, nor the unions want to be limited in how much future money they can throw at the union members. This is shockingly unethical on the part of both the politicians, and the unions. 

Worse yet, every time I take a serious look at this problem it has become worse, more endemic, broader, and more intractable. I fully expect this to be part of the Great Realignment where Millennials take Boomers to task for screwing them out of trillion of dollars.

Driverless Trucks, Driverless Cars, and Unmanned Food Stores, what’s the world coming to? Like Mish I have long thought that this revolution will come full force by 2020, and will be unstoppable. By all accounts, vehicle operations will be much safer, and once we see the Uberization of the transportation network, much cheaper. And how much cheaper, and more convenient will things be when stores are either Amazon mail order operations, or unmanned?

The tech shift away from human operators, and attendants is just beginning. It will lower costs, increase services, and make our lives better. It will also usher in an entirely unknown future, which will create a serious amount of uncertainty, confusion, and fear.

The French union members will likely revolt over changes like this, and the stodgy French economy will be unable to take up this slack, leaving thousands in a much worse off position. The same will happen in throughout Southern Europe.

Change is coming, fast. This would be a good time to prepare.

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