Mean-spirited Universities Sit on Cash

Our Democratic friends in the House of Representatives recently passed an education bill to take $18 billion away from the evil student loan industry and give it to students.  We at Road to the Middle Class have criticized them for this, a mindless shoveling of more cash and subsidies to the universities. Now Senator Kennedy is pushing the bill through the Senate.

But that’s not the real problem, writes Lynne Munson.  The problem is that universities are sitting on piles of cash, like Scrooge, watching it grow through the magic of compound interest.  But do they spend it?  Oh no. 

The value of college and university endowments skyrocketed 17.7 percent last year, while private foundation assets increased 7.8 percent. Just 3.3 percent of the increase in academic endowments is attributable to new gifts. Most of the gain is a result of stingy, outdated endowment payout policies that retain and perpetually re-invest massive sums.

Regular private foundations are required to spend out five percent of their endowments every year.  But universities only average a four percent payout.

How does that work out in an actual university?  Munson takes a look at Stanford.

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

We know why the select universities all charge tuition.  They charge because people will pay it.  Parents are willing to pay big bucks to get their children into Stanford and other select colleges.  Although colleges talk a good game about diversity and broadening access to higher education, in reality they charge whatever the traffic will bear.

Anyway Congress has the whole thing well in hand.  It’s the student loan companies that are to blame!

The Cruelty of the Welfare State

Everyone knows that the welfare state is the most wonderful thing in human history.  Finally, after the madness of the nineteenth century when the poor went unfed and the homeless unsheltered and children uncared-for, we have a system that cares.

Then there are the folks like us here at Road to the Middle Class that believe that the welfare state is the cruelest, most uncaring system in history.  This column by Jennifer Roback Morse, author of Smart Sex and Love and Economics, on the foster-care system suggests that we here are right and “everyone” is wrong.  Well of course we are.

The story concerns the death of a child in foster care.

Malachi Jermaine McBride-Roberts life was brief and difficult. He was born to a teenage mother living in foster care. After she ran away, he was sent to live with another foster family.

So this kid was a second-generation foster kid!  How could it happen?  Well, the short answer is that the system encourages it.  First of all it encourages birth parents to hang on to their parental rights.

Some birth parents consider the best of all worlds to be keeping parental rights, seeing the child once in a while, but letting someone else do the hands-on child-care work. Unfortunately, the system enables, rather than discourages this posture.

Why be surprised?  Isn’t that always how the welfare state works.  And, of course the local bureaucracy of social workers and attorneys live off the process, the process of managing children in foster care.  And the last thing they want to do is make a mistake.

Although California law requires infants to be “fast-tracked” for permanent placement, attorneys and judges don’t want their decisions overturned on appeal.

We know, of course that swift adoption is the best option for the children of children, particularly, as in this case, the child of a teenager with no possible means of support.

Adoption removes a child from the foster-care system. Adoptive parents become accountable for a child in a way that the bureaucratic government agency never can be. Adopted children do better than the children of single mothers. And even the average child of an average single mother has far better life chances than a child in foster care.

But the system doesn’t encourage that.  Instead it rewards bureaucrats and attorneys who dot their “I”s and cross their “T”s.  And of course the reality of adoption politics is that the government bureaucrats and the attorneys get the ear of the legislators.

What would be the best way to define a cruel and unjust society?  I’d say a society that allowed children to moulder away in foster care for their entire childhood.

And that’s what we have under the current cruel and unjust welfare state.

Grabbing The High Ground

Back in the old days before the French Revolution the world was a conservative place. Rigidly conservative.

And the reason was pretty simple.  In the agricultural age if you made a mistake out on the farm it was curtains.  The only thing to do was to stick with what worked: tradition.

But since the Enlightenment tradition has been on the defensive.  In fact even gradual reform has been on the defensive.  Human rights and reason have carried all before them. 

In the old days, the reformer had to prove his point; now the traditionalist had to show cause why mindless tradition should be preferred over rational reform.  And never mind what Edmund Burke said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

That’s a big deal, as Ben Shapiro writes.

In the realm of politics, the question of burden of proof is a vital one. Whoever has the burden of proof is at a disadvantage.

The issue of gay marriage illustrates this.  Reverend Reggie Longcrier asked the Democratic presidential candidates this week:

[W]hy is it still acceptable to use religion to deny gay Americans their full and equal rights?

When you put it that way—and the MSM usually does—you put yourself in the driver’s seat, forcing the opponents of gay marriage to show cause why we should not implement gay marriage immediately.

For the argument against gay marriage is usually an argument from tradition.  That’s the way it’s always been and we don’t know what could happen if we change things.

Actually, in the area of gay marriage we do have rational knowledge.  We know that children need to live with their married mother and father if they are to be safest.  And we know that the “sexual constitution” by which men are socialized from their natural predatory instinct to be faithful fathers and providers is harmed by promotion of “diverse” lifestyles.

We know that where the family is concerned the burden of proof ought to be on the people who want change.

But still.  As of right now the burden of proof is on the traditionalists.  On almost everything.

And that has to change.

British Conservatives in a Pickle

In Britain they are trying to dry out after 50 year floods.  But in the Conservative media they are drowning from the incompetence of Conservative leader David Cameron.  At least that’s what ASimon Heffer thinks. 

The leader of the Labour Party, he writes, has shown himself to be a “serious politician.”

The Leader of the Opposition, by contrast, has no programme other than a concatenation of stunts... He finds the traditional beliefs, and the traditional believers, of his party utterly detestable.

Not surprising, when you consider that his only proper job before entering politics was in PR.

Here in the US Cal Thomas has written off not just the British Conservative Party but the whole United Kingdom.  Reviewing the Conservative Party policy document on welfare reform, “Breakdown Britain” and the hostility of the British courts to religion he expects things to get worse, not better.

Britain is broken. The cause runs deeper than the Tories can address, even if they win the next election, which seems unlikely.

In the present political season Republicans in the US are not feeling too good.  The Iraq War is a mess and Democrats are raising a lot more money to fund the 2008 presidential election. But a look at Britain tells us just how good we have it.

The reason that David Cameron is struggling is that he is leading a center right party in a country with two center left parties.  He is in the same position as US liberals.  Living in a conservative country they have to pretend that they are patriotic and respectful of religion and traditional values to get elected.

But everyone knows that liberals think that patriotism is really nascent fascism, and God is a delusion.

In Britain the Conservatives have to pretend that they are really centrists, that they really love government schools and government health care.   When everyone knows they do not.

The Secret Life of Cars

You may not have wondered how a car makes you feel, but BMW has.  That’s what Richard Morrison found out.  Says the “driver interfaces psychologist” at BMW:

We’re constantly asking the question: what kind of psychological space is a car?

Well, of course, we’ve all wondered that.  And we’ve wondered how many people call their car by a nickname (26 percent of women), the importance of cup-holders (they make you feel safe).  And you’ve wondered how many people sing in the car (four times as many during the morning rush hour as the evening rush hour).  It’s all there in BMW’s Secret Life of Cars.

But the big question is why people drive their cars rather than take public transportation.  The answer is perfectly simple.

Time and again, car owners identified the “cocoon-like security” of the car — the enjoyment of personal space, the chance it gives for “me time” — as the reason why they prefer to drive, even where public transport is cheaper and more convenient[.]

But you knew that.

Democrats' New War on Poverty

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards both want to declare a new war on poverty, writes Linda Chavez.

Mr. Obama wants to tie the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index, which would price the lowest-skilled workers, especially young blacks, out of the job market, not to mention increase inflationary pressure on wages.

Mr. Edwards would have the government create 1 million new temporary jobs for the chronically unemployed, despite abundant research that shows these programs have no lasting impact in reducing poverty or increasing long-term employment among the poor.

Oh dear.  All this stuff has been shown to be nonsense time and time again, most notably by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So why don’t Democrats propose something that might actually work?

The elephant in the room, of course is family breakdown.  As Chavez relates:

Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families only 8.3 percent.

This really isn’t rocket science.  Government welfare benefits encourage family breakup and broken-up families reduced to the mammalian minimum of mother and child are much poorer than mother-father-children families.

Chavez writes that Democrats worry about not being “inclusive” or of being “intolerant” if they “talk up marriage.”

I wonder about that. 

The problem for Democrats goes deeper than inclusiveness and intolerance.  It’s not airy-fairy notions that hold them back from reforming the welfare state.  It is political survival.

Democrats’ whole political support system is built upon patronage and clientage, playing Lady Bountiful and distributing benefits to the tenants on the liberal plantation.  People that have risen out of poverty through work and family find that they don’t need government.  That’s when they stop voting Democrat.  And that’s when all the Democratic government employees find themselves out of a job.

And Democrats know it. 

The "New Victorians:" a Trend or a "Trend?"

It would all seem pretty sensible if it weren’t that the trendy New York Observer’s Lizzy Ratner was all over it.  According to  Suzanne Fields the new generation of twentysomethings are getting married earlier and having children.

Websites for "modest clothing" are expanding, and Wendy Shalit, who earlier wrote about "A Return to Modesty," has a new book called "Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good."

And in a telling comment, the daughter of sex goddess Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) illuminates the other side of the sexual revolution.

"When you’re 12," says Molly Jong Fast, "there’s nothing funny about your mother’s fourth wedding."

Erica Jong had books to sell so she had an excuse.  But the rest of womankind doesn’t do well with open marriages and a “sexual life.”  Women don’t do too well with abortions and empty cradles.  But a lot more women are going to have to be hurt before we change the culture to make it more friendly to families and mothers and children.

But is this really a trend?  Or just media hype?