Month: May 2022

President Biden has approved a program of student loan cancellation up to $10,000. Matt Yglesias isn't happy about it:

The student loan cancelation issue is white collar nonprofit workers making the transition from class-in-itself to class-for-itself.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 28, 2022

I get Matt's irritation about this. It really is a triumph of relatively privileged young activists who are demanding cancellation of debts that they went into with their eyes open and with signatures on loan documents saying they'd pay them back.

On the other hand, Biden's $10,000 program is also the best compromise available here. It means that by far the biggest share of the money will go not to MBA students and Harvard grads, but to folks who went to community colleges, trade schools, and state universities. These are people who ran up big debts they might not have fully understood in return for fairly workaday degrees. I can live with that.

But there's one piece of this that I continue to think isn't as appreciated as it should be: this is really not a federal problem. If there's a presidential election in progress, then sure, you lobby the president. Anyone would do the same. But the federal government can't cancel pieces of student debt forever, so this is merely a one-time benefit, not a solution to the high cost of university education.

For the vast majority of students, this is a state problem because they're attending state universities. That's who liberals should be lobbying. Conservatives are very good at grinding out policy victories state by state, but it's hard, often unrewarding work. That goes with the territory, though, and this is a case where states are the ones who raised university costs and they're the only ones who can lower them. Anything else is just a bandage on a suppurating wound.

Let's get back to some straight-up tourist stuff, shall we? This, of course, is Notre Dame cathedral photographed late in the afternoon, and from the front it looks like it's never been damaged at all. But perspective isn't everything: I photoshopped out both a big, ugly crane and a big, ugly fence that runs along the entire entrance, so now it looks pristine. The fusion of medieval architecture and 21st century high tech is a grand thing indeed.

I am one of those terrible liberals who has long-since given up on gun control and mass shootings. The pro-gun sentiment in America—even if it's not a majority—is far too strong to permit any meaningful firearm legislation. Combine that with a pro-gun Supreme Court and I'm unable to see even the slim possibility of any serious regulation in the near or medium-term future. I've never been interested in pie-in-the-sky activism, which is why I don't write much about gun control and don't even think very highly of other liberals wasting their time on it.

But short of serious gun control, are there ways to rein in mass shootings, especially in schools? Yes, but they're minimally useful and all of them are fraught with problems. In this case, it's us liberals who (rightfully) resist conservative proposals because of our concerns over constitutional rights.

So that's my counsel of despair on mass shootings. For the record, though, my own personal proposal for gun regulation is to ban civilian ownership and use of (a) semi-automatic weapons and (b) magazines with a capacity greater than six rounds. This would still permit anyone to own not just a gun, but a genuinely useful gun that can kill people and animals just as well as today's weapons. The only difference is that they're inherently slower unless you're very highly trained. Permitted guns would include things like bolt-action rifles, shotguns, single-action revolvers, and so forth. The gun experts can work out the details, but basically all legal guns would require a separate human action to load a round into the chamber before firing. This wouldn't end mass shootings, but it would cut down the death toll considerably. At the same time, hunters could still hunt and suburban parents could still put guns under their pillows for self defense.

Needless to say, this won't happen. And even if it did, can you imagine how long it would take to confiscate 300 million semi-automatic firearms? The mind reels.

POSTSCRIPT: One of the things I hate most about American gun worship is that it can be kept going only by a campaign of relentless fear about crime. NRA pamphlets and PR campaigns are bursting at the seams with images and statistics designed to convince urban dads that they need plenty of guns along with constant vigilance to keep their families safe from the thugs who stalk our streets and the protesters who threaten to burn our cities down.

Life could be much more pleasant for all us—and less dangerous for many of us—if everyone could get it through their heads that America is a far, far safer place than it was 30 years ago. There's simply no need for the kind of fear that was at least moderately justified back in the '70s and '80s.

Unfortunately, there's a powerful lobby whose very existence depends on making sure everyone believes just the opposite. And they have a media megaphone in the form of Fox News that makes sure their message is spread relentlessly.

In a nutshell, I hate guns for much more than the actual damage they do on their own. But that doesn't change the fact that I can't see any effective way to change things.

On the flight over we passed near a thunderstorm that was pretty spectacular. I figure it to have been somewhere in the very northern reaches of the Great Plains, maybe even a little way into Canada. As usual with things like this, I never quite caught an image of the very best lightning bursts, but I got a few good ones. Here's what it looked like.

I am thousands of miles away from the land of mass shootings, about to head out with Marian and a picnic lunch for a beautiful afternoon walking along the Coulee Verte, an elevated park similar but larger than New York's Highline Park.

But don't think I'm not thinking of you. I've been collecting Republican proposals to stop mass shootings, and I have a stern tsk tsk for liberals who refuse to take anything with an R by its name seriously. It turns out they have lots of good ideas:

• Harden classroom doors. It works on airplanes!
• Arm teachers with serious weapons. It works in European airports!
• More and better trained school guards. It works in prisons!
• Hope and pray. It works in churches!¹
• More active shooter drills for kids. It worked during the Cold War!²

Does this seem to you an awful lot like turning elementary schools into prisons? Then you're a liberal who has no respect for the Constitution. Shame on you.

¹Well, not all the time. But way more churches haven't been attacked than have been, amirite?

²No one died from a nuclear war, did they?

Ha ha ha:

At least 25 companies that merged with special-purpose acquisition companies between 2020 and 2021 have issued so-called going-concern warnings in recent months, according to research firm Audit Analytics.

....The companies with warnings amount to more than 10% of the 232 companies that listed through SPACs in that period....That percentage is roughly double that for companies that listed through more-traditional initial public offerings, Audit Analytics said.

....The relatively large number of dire warnings is the latest example of the rough state of the SPAC sector,

Becoming a public company is a pain in the ass. It requires a ton of prep; a detailed prospectus; a willingness to share detailed financials; a road show to drum up interest; and much, much more. It's hardly a surprise that SPACs—which require a lot less work—are attractive, especially to companies that might not want to reveal just how solid and stable their prospects really are.

I might not care about any of this if SPACs were available only to sophisticated investors. But SPACs are by definition open to the ordinary public, and the ordinary public is easily talked into the glories of SPAC investment—just like they were talked into CDOs and synthetic CDOs and SPVs and CDSes and all the other wonderful Wall Street products that we learned about after they crashed in 2008.

Investing in startup companies is inherently risky, even at the IPO stage. For retail investors, there's no excuse for making it even riskier.

Atrios has a question for me:

How's your self-driving car, Kevin?

Yeah, yeah. I'm not giving up on self-driving cars, but it's true that things haven't been going as swimmingly as I'd thought they might. It turns out to be a hard problem!

Then again, my old friend Atrios is stuck in Philadelphia. I'm in Paris and just got back from a glorious day at the French Open. So who really has the better of it right now?

These are the first two cats we came across in France. They were roaming around in a field in the town of La Roche-Guyon and they appeared to be housemates. The black cat was a little shy, but the Siamese was friendly enough, though pretty occupied with hunting-related program activities while I was busy taking pictures.

The latest housing forecast from Fannie Mae takes note of the tremendous jump in average monthly payments for homebuyers in 2022:

As a result, their forecast for mortgage originations has declined:

That totals $2.7 trillion for 2022, and Fannie now projects that 2023 will see only $2.25 trillion in mortgage originations.

This is (duh) the Cluny La Sorbonne metro station in the Latin Quarter. The photo features a homeless man sleeping on a bench side by side with a student reveling to his earbuds. These are probably the two most common sights in the Latin Quarter.