Student Loan Foregiveness

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So tonight I log on for the first time in god knows how long and I see an draft of a post I started to write in 2020.  I haven’t touched it since – still just a brain dump and excerpts of pieces other people wrote – but interesting that I still see things pretty much the same way as I did then.  Anyhow, here’s the unedited draft –

A few questions to frame the discussion of student debt forgiveness:

  1. Why privilege forgiveness of student debt over forgiveness of other types of debt, e.g., medical debt?
  2. What’s the root cause of the student debt crisis?  What, if anything, will debt forgiveness do to address the root cause?
  3. What broader social goods will be achieved by forgiving student debt?

I remain lukewarm about straight-up debt forgiveness because I don’t have satisfying answers to those questions and I haven’t heard any from anyone else. Continue reading →

Moderate Burkean Conservative

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My politics are, roughly speaking, 1/3 B. Sanders, 1/3 E. Warren and 1/3 moderate Burkean conservative.  I can think of an active example of the last sort.  Once upon a time there was MA Senator Ed Brooke, CT Senator and later Governor Lowell Weicker, MA Governor Frank Sargent.  Something I read today got me thinking about that political outlook and I remembered John Michael Greer’s essay, A Few Notes on Burkean Conservatism.  It’s a good framing of the type and I enjoy his language.  It reminds of essays by Lewis Lapham when he was editor of Harper’s.  Here are few excerpts from Greer’s post:

A genuine conservatism—that is, a point of view oriented toward finding things worth conserving, and then doing something to conserve them—is one of the few options that offer any workable strategies for the future as the United States accelerates along the overfamiliar trajectory of a democracy in terminal crisis.

And Continue reading →

The Freedom to Vote Act

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Via Heather Cox Richardson:

“The Freedom to Vote Act… establishes a baseline for access to the ballot across all states. That baseline includes at least two weeks of early voting for any town of more than 3000 people, including on nights and weekends, for at least 10 hours a day. It permits people to vote by mail, or to drop their ballots into either a polling place or a drop box, and guarantees those votes will be counted so long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive at the polling place within a week. It makes Election Day a holiday. It provides uniform standards for voter IDs in states that require them.

The Freedom to Vote Act cracks down on voter suppression. It makes it a federal crime to lie to voters in order to deter them from voting (distributing official-looking flyers with the wrong dates for an election or locations of a polling place, for example), and it increases the penalties for voter intimidation. It restores federal voting rights for people who have served time in jail, creating a uniform system out of the current patchwork one.

It requires states to guarantee that no one has to wait more than 30 minutes to vote.

Continue reading →

Thought for the Day – January 8, 2022

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Resolved:  Coalitions comprised of people with different cultural capital are weak.

Reluctantly, I’m inclined to agree.  What do you think?  Agree?  Disagree?  Usually so, but not always?  What exceptions can you think of?

FWIW, I looked up a bunch of definitions of “cultural capital”.  I find Wikipedia’s definition the easiest to understand:

Cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society.

 

 

Thought for the Day – December 18, 2021

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Betty Hall, founder of Simon’s Rock, on education:

“There is a four-year span here when youth should become acquainted with the whole range of human inquiry – man in relation to his physical environment – man in relation to his fellow man or social environment – and man in relation to the world of his own creation, his music, his art, religion, literature, and philosophy.”

Reading/Listening Material – August 29, 2021

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I forgot to mention the other week that one of my ‘must-reads’ was “Reading and Writing the Lake District” by Jeffrey Bilbro.  “Erasing the Art of Our Imperfect Past” by Katherine Dalton was also very good.  They’re not available on-line but if you can put your hands on a copy of Local Culture I recommend them.  That noted, my lists from the past week:

Must Read/Listen

At least for my adult life, on foreign policy, our political problem has been that the parties have agreed on too much, and dissenting voices have been shut out. That has allowed too much to go unquestioned, and too many failures to go uncorrected. It is telling that it is Biden who is taking the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan. The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them… The tragedy of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy philosophy is that it binds our compassion to our delusions of military mastery. We awaken to the suffering of others when we fear those who rule them or hide among them, and in this way our desire for security finds union with our desire for decency. Or we awaken to the suffering of others when they face a massacre of such immediacy that we are forced to confront our passivity and to ask what inaction would mean for our souls and self-image. In both cases, we awaken with a gun in our hands, or perhaps we awaken because we have a gun in our hands.

KLEIN: I want to draw this out to a principal about the way we talk about foreign policy here, which is that the American foreign policy conversation, the establishment that drives that conversation — it focuses very intensely on the harms caused by our absence, our inaction, or our withdrawal, but there is no similar culpability or reckoning for the harms we directly commit or that our presence creates.  And so if you’re only ever looking at one side of the ledger, then, of course, you’re going to be biased towards action… Look at the intense moral fervor we get into when we think about the harms that could be triggered by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I don’t want to say they’re not real… [but] where is the conversation about the harms that our continued occupation of Afghanistan have visited upon those people, as opposed to simply the harms that our absence might lead to?

A useful chart created by The Economist based on data from UNAMA other sources makes clear that far enjoying “an affordable status quo” Afghanistan was wracked [in recent years] by endemic violence.

Worth Your Time Continue reading →

Thought for the Day – August 22, 2021

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Excerpting and adapting some text from an opinion piece in the Washington Post:

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan reflects a sound realignment of our national interest.  It puts us on better footing to deal with the new challenges of the 21st century and clarify to allies and adversaries what we are and are not willing to expend resources on.  Ending the long and futile war in Afghanistan will allow us to focus more attention on bigger priorities.