How To Fix The American Economy Part 2 | QPOL Issue #26
How ending wasteful spending on education and the military can turn the country around. Featuring guest writer, Mike Hobart.
End All Federal Spending on Education
A major problem we have in America is that multiple generations of people have been brainwashed into getting into debt for a worthless degree. it wasn’t worth their time and they were lied to. You don’t get ahead in life with a piece of paper, you need ROI on your education via skills for the workforce.
Jordan Weissmann wrote in The Atlantic in 2013 that “We spend more of our economy on higher education than almost any other developed country, and achieve some of the worst results.” Those results mean dropouts. He also found most of these costs are driven by the low end of U.S. higher education programs in Universities, which tend to be the colleges that are “functionally dropout factories”. It’s found that in countries like Germany, there’s a stronger emphasis on apprenticeships in trades, rather than degrees in fields which don’t provide sustainable ROI, or any return at all.
When the government subsidizes education and there are low interest rates, young adults will be encouraged to go into debt for school. It’s a fine example of moral hazard. Their student loans are basically backed by the government, which means the following:
this guarantees lenders can’t lose money because if you get a loan you can’t bankrupt your way out of it
which guarantees the bank makes money off your interest payments
The lender gets off Scott-free because it’s backed by the government
Due to the moral hazard of guaranteed federal loans for education, the system is set up to where young adults are incentivized to take on astronomical loads of debt to study in fields that will keep them in said debt. Compared to other countries, it’s as if the system is wired to make Americans debt slaves that are inadequate to be proper market participants, and therefore become ever more dependent on the aid of the state. Whether or not this is an intentional strategy to weaken America and funnel out the middle class (which it undoubtedly is) is a whole other discussion.
However, even though education spending isn’t as much as other programs that were mentioned in Part 1, we have a society filled with indebted adults with no valuable skills to provide for the workforce. If America eliminates student loan guarantees from the government, there’d actually be skin in the game again for people putting their money where their career aspiration is. Their education would be treated as it should be, an investment.
With this paradigm shift, worthless programs and areas of study would lose funding and STEM studies and a variety of trades would take over. This would give people the incentive to invest their time, money, and talent into fields where they’d receive a higher return on their education. Removing government safety nets in education would simply yield a smarter and robust society and economy, instead of propagandized gender studies zombies.
~ Phil Gibson
Bring Home The Military
By Mike Hobart
The military must be brought home from abroad. As a veteran of the Army, I can state with personal experience that much of the Army, as well as broader military, knows & understands that we are not being deployed to “defend freedom.” Soldiers are not dumb. We know the incentives. Many are serving due to a calling to serve; to do ‘what feels right,’ some as an act of last resort, some out of desperation, for a steady paycheck. But none of them are too dumb to see that the US military is not the Shield of Hope & Freedom it represented as we emerged from the Second Global Conflict.
What I am not suggesting is that those countries that request our aid in the defense of trade should be ignored. But I do believe that the US is behooved to withdraw a bit. We are at a point where our economy is largely wasting American blood and taxpayer dollars in fabricated conflicts. Some of these conflicts, I would argue, have been used as false flags; as justifications. Some of these conflicts have been at the behest of allies, maybe with the guise of supporting trade. And some of these conflicts have been purely over egos of manchildren. What’s worse is the US (among other superpowers like China & Japan) are experiencing alarming declines in birth rates. Sending our boys & girls overseas for conflicts that lack a justifiable ROI needs to be rethought. That ROI needs to be for a return on investments for the country – as a whole – not the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, politicians, etc. (fat chance on that, I know).
Then there’s the topic that seemingly nobody wants to talk about; the economics. Military activity across the board is expensive. With yards of equipment across the US on bases just rusting away because it would cost more to repair them than to replace them: trucks, tanks, cranes, planes, etc. Not to mention there’s the expenses on munitions. From bullets to bombs; sh*t’s expensive. You know what else is expensive? The medical liabilities. What about the terrible treatment of our soldiers that have been gravely wounded? How many were blown apart, both physically and mentally, for engagements that weren’t necessary? These are expenses that should not be curtailed, but the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy that “supports” the VA is a catastrophic failure.
Then we have the Pentagon failing their audit (shocker). Failing to account for 61% of its assets. SIXTY-ONE PERCENT. “Oops…,” I guess? Sure seems to be a lot of money that just disappears in a day and age where visibility into activity is at a peak and privacy is a far-off dream. Even for the Pentagon, $2.1 trillion is a lot. With my very little experience in the Army I very much doubt that these assets’ locations are “unknown.”
All of this boils down to blatant waste. Of taxpayer dollars. Of American life, sweat, and blood. And an erosion of belief in American ideals from the very American populace we claim to defend. This also directly coincides with an erosion of the trust of American institutions, from the politicians, to the banks, to the universities and the soldiers. What is seemingly being lost is that the failures in our institutions and politicians and bankers directly reflects upon the failures of each of us individual Americans. Bring our boys & girls home, let’s hash-out these internal conflicts. Not unlike when an individual needs to figure themselves out, we as a country need to do the same. America needs a little “us time.”
Maybe a little meditation and time in the gym will help us clear our heads (and our economy), maybe.
Be sure to follow Mike’s work on his Substack The Daily Doom.