The huge budget deficit because of that damn foreign aid we give!

When discussing alternatives to carbon, students suggested--and correctly--that alternatives are either expensive or cannot serve the huge demand.  The class seemed pretty confident that the way forward is to aggressively pursue clean energy.

But then this is Oregon and these are wonderfully young people who have not been tainted by alternative facts.

One student, from the back, slowly raised his hand.  "Even a ten percent cut in the military budget can pay for a lot of this stuff."

This president and his minions are in serious trouble if more Americans are like the students in that class.  But, here's what is working well for this president and his adopted white supremacists party:

Fortunately for Trump, most voters have no real idea how the government spends its money

Which is why when this president presents his alternative facts about federal workers being a waste, the crowd applauds thinking believing that he will make America great again!

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild, in her recent book “Strangers in Their Own Land,” about working-class Republicans in Louisiana, documented wider misconceptions. Many of the people she talked to believe that the federal government employs forty per cent of American workers; it’s closer to two per cent. “They think that the government is full of waste and freeloaders,” Hochschild told me.

Think about it.  The reality is a number that is close to two percent.  It is not as if the loyal Republican white working class thought the number was four, or five, or even ten percent.  They thought the federal government employs forty percent of American workers.  40 versus 2!

It is the same case with everything that the party beats up on, which the loyal base applauds, and treats as god-given facts.  Which is why they beat up on foreign aid, or NPR, as if these are the reasons why we have deficits.  You ask them about the military budget and they will repeat the party line that the damn Democrats have weakened the military by repeatedly shredding the budget.  And, therefore, the Democrats are traitors!

This president and his falsehood-peddling minions can talk all the shit they want, but they won't be able to balance the budget.  Simple math:

Most federal spending is nondiscretionary, meaning that it goes to entitlements (such as Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance) and to pay the interest on the national debt. Discretionary spending totals just $1.2 trillion a year (out of a budget of almost four trillion), and roughly half of that goes to national defense, which Trump insists that he won’t touch. The federal budget deficit is around six hundred billion dollars a year, and analysis by the Tax Foundation suggests that Trump’s proposed tax cut would reduce federal revenue by another half trillion or so. So it’s simply impossible for Trump to balance the budget while protecting defense and entitlement spending.

The theatre of endless discussions over foreign aid or PBS will entertain the masses, yes, but the budget hole will continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Such insanity--and remember that this is an administration that is only three weeks old--is also why no economist of any decent reputation wants to go anywhere near being an adviser to this president:

Other than Mr Navarro, Mr Trump struggles to find economists who will support him. Perhaps as a result, his cabinet will be wonk-free.

Seriously, 63 million Americans voted for this man?  The Republican Party kowtows to this nincompoop?  There is simply no way that there can be anything good about a Trump voter!  Assholes, all of them!

Source

Moving on up ...

The name of the new chairman of the Indian conglomerate, Tata Sons, sounded absolutely Tamil: Natarajan Chandrasekaran.  CEOs now are typically in my age cohort, and I wondered if he would be a contemporary of mine.

To me, even this is an example of critical thinking in daily life. Wearing that metaphorical thinking cap is a requirement not only when one is engaged in profitable ventures, or answering exam questions.  Every day life too presents plenty of opportunities to think critically about this world.  If only I can convince quite a few students about this!

So, I did a Google search for Natarajan Chandrasekaran.  Turns out that he earned his undergraduate degree from the same college that I attended much to my disappointment and disgust! ;)  Perhaps this is common knowledge to my college-mates, but news to me because I stayed away from the college.  In this case, I could have then avoided using my critical thinking skills because I would have already known ;)

It does feel good to know that even a podunk institution can produce a big shot, even if only occasionally.

Here in the US, it used to be the case that even small--especially public--colleges and universities provided upward mobility.  From the lower to middle and upper classes.  Like the fabled City College of New York.  It was in graduate school that I came to know about City College--when a professor chatted about European Jewish immigrants gathering in that college, and then moving on to influential roles in society.

It was in California that I also learnt about its tiered public higher education model.  By the time I started teaching, tuition and fees were not as low as they once were, but were still affordable.  Apparently that old  place where I taught for a couple of years is the third best in the country for upward mobility when colleges are ranked by percent of students from the bottom fifth of the income distribution who end up in the top three-fifths.

working-class colleges have become vastly larger engines of social mobility. The new data shows, for example, that the City University of New York system propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined.

How often do we get to read about the important and valuable work that podunk universities like mine do, right?

“[E]xpanding access to the high-mobility-rate colleges identified here may provide a more scalable model for increasing upward mobility for large numbers of children,” Chetty and his co-authors write. “The colleges with the highest mobility rates have annual instructional expenditures less than $6,500 per student on average, far lower than the $87,000 per student spent on instruction at elite private colleges.”

But, guess what?

The share of lower-income students at many public colleges has fallen somewhat over the last 15 years.
The reason is clear. State funding for higher education has plummeted. It’s down 18 percent per student, adjusted for inflation, since 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

I.e., college is getting too damn expensive for working class students. 

The question is how to enable more working-class students to do so. “It’s really the way democracy regenerates itself,” said Ted Mitchell, Obama’s under secretary of education.

Ah, yes, we know fully well how much the new president loves democracy and, therefore, what will happen to the public higher education system.  Elections have consequences!