Freedomshift

In late April, we asked if for-profit college closures would represent the next multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded bailout. While the country’s $1.3 trillion student debt bubble represents a very real risk to taxpayers over time, for-profit institutions pose a more immediate threat. From a ‘big picture perspective, the push for student loan forgiveness and “debt-free” higher education is certainly kicking into high gear, with the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pushing ideas such as a tax on stock transactions to fund college education in America. Meanwhile, The White House is exploring more “efficient” ways for students to discharge debt in bankruptcy and the “ cancel all student debt ” calls have begun in earnest. That said, any kind of sweeping overhaul will likely take years to implement, but in the mean time, IBR repayment programs allow students whose post-graduation disposable income isn’t deemed sufficient, to simply pay nothing on the way to ...

Media and potential opponents are scandalized that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is considering a run for president even though he didn’t graduate from college. But if Walker (who dropped out of Marquette University in his senior year) won in 2016, he would be joining an exalted group that includes the two presidents most frequently named as the favorites of the American people. Eleven presidents — exactly 25 percent — were not college graduates. Most prominent on that list are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who make up half of Mt. Rushmore’s foursome and are in the top three or top five in virtually every popular survey of favorite presidents. (A 2007 Rasmussen poll put Honest Abe and the Father of Our Country at number two and number one, respectively.) The most recent president to forego the benefits of a sheepskin was Harry Truman, and the list includes other fondly remembered (and a few barely remembered) chief executives. Meet the presidents who droppe...

Since New Year’s is traditionally a time for resolutions, and since the new Congress convenes this week, I thought I would suggest some New Year’s resolutions for Congress: 1)  Bring the troops home — Congress should take the first, and most important, step toward ending our hyper-interventionist foreign policy by bringing our troops home and closing all overseas military facilities. The American people can no longer afford to bear the cost of empire. 2)  Pass the Audit the Fed bill — The American people deserve to know the entire truth about how the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy benefits big-spending politicians and financial elites while harming average Americans. 3)  Repeal the PATRIOT Act and rein in the National Security Agency — It is approaching two years since Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA’s unconstitutional spying. Yet Congress still refuses to put a leash on the surveillance state. Congress should take the first step to...

It has been said that children are our future, and right now the vast majority of our children are being “educated” in public schools that are rapidly being turned into indoctrination centers and prison camps. Our children desperately need to focus on the basics such as reading, writing and math, but instead a whole host of politicians, “education officials” and teachers are constantly injecting as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction.  Instead of learning how to think, our children are continually being told what to think.  Not only that, our children are also being trained how to live as subservient slaves in a Big Brother police state.  Today, nearly everything that children do in public schools is watched, monitored, recorded and tracked.  Independent thought and free expression are greatly discouraged and are often cracked down upon harshly.  If students get “out of line”, instead of being sent to see the princip...

A new study released by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute finds that new technology development that has been encouraged through the use of federal grants has served to threaten children’s privacy by allowing the collection of data on every child. Authors of the study Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins make the case that by means of the nationalized Common Core standards, which states were lured into adopting through competitive grants in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program in 2009, the federal government has used grant funds to induce states to build identical, increasingly sophisticated student data systems. McGroarty, executive director of the Education Project at the American Principles Project (APP), said the study, entitled “ Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing ,” exposes “an idea that dates back to the Progressive era.” Read more: Here

"Loan forgiveness creates incentives for students to borrow too much to attend college, potentially contributing to rising college prices for everyone," is a study's warning over government plans that allow students to rack up big debts and then forgive the unpaid balance after a set period. As WSJ reports , enrollment in student debt forgiveness plans have surged nearly 40% in just six months, to include at least 1.3 million Americans owing around $72 billion . The administration is looking to cap debt eligible for forgiveness, as President Obama's revamped Pay As You Earn scheme has seen applications soar and is estimated to cost taxpayers $14bn a year. The 'popularity' of the student loan bailout plan surged after Obama promoted it in 2012, and now the administration must back-track as costs have massively outpaced government predictions. More: here

There is a reason why US consumer revolving (credit card) credit growth is getting lower and lower and lower and at last check posted a mere 0.2% annual increase . That reason is that as the NY Fed disclosed moments ago , federal student loans officially crossed the $1 trillion level for the first time ever. Notably: the quarterly student loan balance has increased every quarter without fail for the past 10 years ! More here

MONTGOMERY – A homeschooling family from Montgomery, Alabama is wowing many across the nation as six of their ten children have enrolled in college by the age of twelve, and the four remaining hope to do the same. Kip and Mona Lisa Harding state that they are simply raising the “average family,” but credit their children’s success to homeschooling and encouraging their children to pursue their passions at a young age. “We just felt like it was our responsibility,” mother Mona Lisa told reporters about the decision to homeschool. “That’s a big choice, and [we] wanted to be totally in control and make sure they had the right upbringing, and they accelerated because of it.” Read more: here

A YouTube video went viral over the weekend showing a parent who got violently arrested for expressing his frustrations about the implementation of the Common Core at a public forum Thursday night in the suburbs of Baltimore. Somehow, Ellicott City parent Robert Small was then charged with assaulting a police officer in the second degree, reports The Baltimore Sun . Read more: here

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God. Oh God. Oh God, God, God. It is getting worse. Maybe I’ll take cyanide. I find this inspiriting headline polluting my inbox like rotting road-kill. It's from Broward County, Florida: “Child Still Expelled for Toy Gun – a Year Later Parents want their child back in school. School board says no way.” See? Florida collectively is out of its tiny little mind. What if this crepuscular pathology spreads to other countries? Or planets? “School board officials said the rules are quite clear and that the toy gun constituted a weapon.” Me, I figure the school-board officials constitute a pack of priggish low-Board simians who ought to be swinging in trees instead of trying to run a school. But then, I’m a curmudgeon. Think about it. Kid – he’s eight – shows up with toy gun after watching 12,000 hours of shoot’em-ups on the lobotomy box, Luke Skywalker blasting funny-looking milkmen like a pretty little mollycoddle turned psychopath. Kid sees war coverage with heroic GIs ...

Three of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto (1848) are still universally accepted. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. The ten planks were supposed to be the means of ushering in the classless society of Communism. The next sentence after plank #10 revealed the utopianism of Marxism. When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the ...