Paying the college loans for those who signed for them

I worked at the local public library and the drug store when I was in high school.  In summers and during the school year in college I worked various part time jobs--usually the college library.  My parents provided most of the cost going without since 3 of us were in college at the same time. Dad would have considered it an embarrassment to take money from the government. Then when I got married during my senior year, my parents provided me with a loan which we paid back in a year or two. 

College education costs became a huge bubble since those days (1960s), worse than the real estate bubble of 2007-08, and mainly because the government flooded the colleges with loan and grant dollars. The colleges and universities just raised tuition and built more buildings and cut back state support. Academe has continued that bad planning by luring young people away from those colleges that could have benefitted them in order to meet federal requirements for minority enrollments. And with slight of hand academe "counted" foreign students whose governments were paying for their educations in their minority quotas.  The American minority students took on loans they could never pay back and never got those good jobs without the degrees they were promised. This is what happens when we think someone else will pay, and since it isn't the government's money, they just throw it at anything and anyone that moves.

There is no free lunch.

My peanut butter nightmare story

In my No Free Lunch newsletter, #13, (see the previous entry on the background of that newsletter) I wrote about my peanut butter fears. It sounds a bit like today's gasoline stories, so I thought I'd share it. I was actually discussing concentration in the food industry and reported that in 1963 the 50 largest companies accounted for 42% of all food manufacturers' assets, and by 1978 it was 63.7%, and that by 2000 it could be 100% (as reported in "The U.S. food and tobacco manufacturing industries," 1980). Here was my nightmare scenario in 1981

"I don't have a crystal ball and I'm certainly no economist, but as someone who has been eating peanut butter on toast for breakfast since 1945, I'd like to share a fear of mine with you.

There was a terrible drought in the summer of 1980--bad year for many crops, particularly peanuts. If you can get peanut butter at all, you're paying dearly for it. Peanut butter is a product that can be simply made (grind up, add salt, pack in jars) by a small company and can be marketed locally because of its wide appeal. If a national firm comes out with a $1.00 off coupon on their brand of peanut butter, the smaller firms will probably be out of business in a short time. And the American shopper will fall for it, because she thinks a coupon is saving her money.

And then, my nightmare continues, OPEC countries begin buying up acreages in the south that produce our peanuts, and decide to invest some of their oil earnings in the food conglomerates that produce our peanut butter.

Soon foreign investments are in control, and cutting back on what they'll let us buy, and American shoppers are lining up at the grocery store at 5 a.m. to get a scoop of peanut butter for breakfast."

See how worrying about tomorrow spoils today? I'm still eating peanut butter, but that last paragraph does remind me of the gasoline problem. We have no control over the source of our oil, but need it for breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything else. I also didn't remember this drought, I think because we had such a bad heat wave and drought around here in 1988. So I looked it up, and here's what I found in the Monthly Weather Review, v. 109, #10 (Oct 1981)

Economic losses during the hot, dry summer of 1980 were estimated at $16 billion. Despite these substantial economic losses, analyses of historical (1895–1980) monthly temperature and precipitation data across the 48 contiguous United States indicate that conditions could easily have been worse. Much more hostile conditions have existed in the past, particularly during the 1930's and the 1950's. However, the summer of 1980 does stand out from the past two decades as an extreme anomaly across the southern and southeastern United States.

Wasn't this during the time when we were warned about the coming new ice age? Well, at least this can't be blamed on President Bush.

The government's thrifty plan for food

Food stamps are issued based on the USDA's calculation of what a family of four with an annual income of $26,856 would need to eat nutritiously. AP writers, like the one who misled you all in the Tribune's May 16 article (Columbus Dispatch May 17) on Chicagoans using food stamps, say this can't be done with today's rising prices. Hogwash.

First of all, any family of 4 can eat on that plan even without food stamps, and the stamps will get them $542 worth of food a month. Buried at the bottom of the article (which is where truth is always found in an AP story, if it's there at all) is the crux of the matter: "carts filled with soda pop, bags of cookies, potato chips" because its cheaper for low income people to feed their families bad food than good food. Lie upon lie! Get this journalist to a library, or at least show him how to Google a dot gov site. Then have him walk the aisles of any supermarket with $500 in his hand and have him purchase ONLY real food--flour, sugar, shortening, apples, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, beans, oatmeal, peanut butter, milk, eggs, etc.; he'll be be stunned at how much food he can buy.

In the early 1980s I was writing about food budgets, coupons, sweepstakes, and other ways to play with your food, just as I do today in my blog, but using an electric typewriter, a bottle of white-out, research in the OSU Agriculture Library, and a photocopy machine to issue my own newsletter, No Free Lunch. I was interviewed on a local TV talk show, spoke to women's book clubs, a faculty lunch group at OSU, and I was featured in the local suburban newspaper. However, because my theme was in some ways anti-business and chiding the consumer for poor planning, I was not in great demand as a speaker or writer. You can't tell business that their methods are suspect and consumers that they are not behaving rationally and expect to be popular!

I was just as opinionated then as a liberal Democrat as I am today as a conservative Republican. I wrote a lot about how government and food conglomerates worked together to confuse or hurt the consumer and put the local food companies at a disadvantage (and I hadn't heard of a Wal-Mart). Actually, I still feel that way, but now wonder why Democrats continue to lull voters into thinking even more government control of their lives and wallets is beneficial. And I see how increased regulation of business hurts the little guy, and especially the poor.

In issue 8 of No Free Lunch I wrote about how the government determines the Food Stamp benefits and then I compared that to my own food purchases. I was a SAHM (I think I worked three hours a day at OSU on a temp contract), with 2 elementary school aged children, living in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Here's what I wrote (all figures based on food costs in 1980, almost 30 years ago):

"Benefits on which the Food Stamp Program are based are adjusted to changes not in the Consumer Price Index, but in the cost of the "Thrifty Food Plan."

In January 1980 this plan allowed $49.60 for 2 parents and 2 elementary shcool aged children per week. My own food bill at that time was about $45 per week, including paper products and non-food items, not included in the government's Thrifty Food Plan.

How can my food bill be lower than "thrifty?" First, I don't use the menu on which the government's plan is based. A second consideration is "economy of size" (a misuse of the term)--my husband and I are not big people, so we don't require as much food as larger people.

I don't do any of the usual things promoted as cost saving--I don't comparison shop, I don't shop at a major food chain, and I try not to use coupons and refund schemes. I avoid highly promoted, expensive new products.

I do buy a higher proportion of my food fresh and unprocessed than the average shopper, and I contribute my own labor (which is not taxable). I do not buy prepared desserts and snacks, and that was the big jump in food expendistures in the last 15 years. We drink orange juice and egg nog instead of soft drinks. A garden or a freezer would help, but I'm satisfied that food in America is a very good buy."

So what does the AP writer in today's paper say about Food Stamps and the Thrifty Plan? Here it is, full of half-truths, myths, and gotcha's. The truth is our government has been crippling poor people for generations now with the best of intentions. Enmeshed with subsidized housing, government funded school breakfasts, lunches and after school snacks, summer lunch programs, food stamps, SCHIP health plans, church food pantries (almost all getting government grants to purchase food to give away) combined with an education system that expects failure, little or nothing from the students or parents, unmarried families (that's a huge penalty for the poor), and more and more "green" regulations that the poor can't even use or which will destroy their neighborhoods for redevelopment. How in the world do these people ever hope to climb out of this government made mess?

What using less than the thrifty plan looked like in 1981