Voting When Educational Standards Fall

Unless you are part of that body of voters we cavalierly call “Trump’s base,” you pretty much have figured out that the President is all about spoon-feeding the rich and using the earnings of that vast horde of “most of us” to bear the underlying financial or health burdens. Deregulation has not created many high-quality jobs, but consumers are paying higher prices at almost every level. 

The unemployment numbers explain volume, not pay scales and quality of the “new jobs.” As I have blogged before, 70% of “us” have made no real pay gains in 40 years, 40% of “us” have struggled and missed on significant bill payment in the last 12 months, and we have exactly the same number of job-seekers as we had before Trump was elected. The big numbers come from the earnings at the top of the economic level but have largely left most of “us” in static numbness.

Remember that Trumpian “job-creating” tax cut where those corporate tax savings would trickle down to the workers? Well except for a meagre 8% spent on new hires and capital improvements, the balance of the resulting corporate savings went into share-buybacks and dividends to shareholders. But all Americans are equally liable for the trillion plus dollar add to the deficit. We all have to make the interest payments on that debt and have to pay back the principal someday.

Here’s how the big lie works: “‘During the past year,’ the White House says, ‘over 6 million workers have benefitted from the tax cuts in the form of pay raises, better benefits, and bigger bonuses.’

“Whether workers are getting pay raises is the question needing to be proved, not asserted; we’ve already dealt with ‘better benefits’; and as for ‘bigger bonuses,’ this appears to be a reference to the one-time gifts of a few hundred or a thousand dollars doled out by companies raking in millions from the tax cuts. A couple of points: Since the tax cuts were only enacted in December, it’s a bit odd to claim they’ve been in effect for a full year.

“Also, 6 million workers constitutes a less than princely 3.7% of the 162.2 million U.S. civilian workers, even if the claim is that all 6 million got bonuses, raises, and better benefits, a dubious proposition. The Trump administration would love to claim that the tax cuts have increased all workers’ take-home pay, but obviously that effect is much more pronounced at the top of the income ladder, where most of the cuts were concentrated.

“If the White House is hanging its argument on these sorts of calculations, it must really be desperate to paint a fictional picture. When someone’s argument is that ‘things would look better if only you used different math,’ beware.” Michael Hiltzig writing for the September 8th Los Angeles Times. But the base just hears the words and assumes that they are better off, even if a hard dollar examination of their own finances would clearly say otherwise.

To get a really good idea how pro-business this administration is, and how expendable ordinary people have become, take a look at how under-educated Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, a billionaire with tons of family wealth, treats hard-working Americans who tried to better themselves with some additional vocational education, but were defrauded by for-profit post-secondary schools that just wanted their money, much of which was provided by a federal government lending program.

As many of these schools were officially shut down as fraudulent and then simply went out of business, Betsy DeVos fought hard to require the students left high and dry still to pay off those loans in full or at least most of that indebtedness. “The Trump administration is granting only partial loan forgiveness to the vast majority of students approved for help because of fraud by for-profit colleges, according to preliminary Education Department data obtained by the Associated Press.

“The figures demonstrate the effect of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ new policy of tiered relief, in which students swindled by for-profit schools are compensated based on their earnings after the program. Of the roughly 16,000 fraud claims approved so far by the Education Department under DeVos, slightly more than 1,000 students received full forgiveness on their loans, according to an AP analysis of the data.

“DeVos has been pushing to ease regulations for the for-profit sector and raise the bar for students seeking relief for fraud. Critics say DeVos, who has hired officials from the for-profit sector to top positions in her agency, is favoring industry interests. But DeVos counters that the previous approach was unfair to taxpayers who ended up paying for those forgiven loans. She says the new process will enable students to get their claims considered more quickly and efficiently and will be more balanced than an “all-or-nothing” approach.

“More than 165,000 claims have been filed since the loan forgiveness program was launched in full in 2015 under the Obama administration. A total of nearly 48,000 claims have been approved.

“Since DeVos took over, the agency has reviewed more than 25,000 claims.

“Partial forgiveness awards have covered on average about 30% of a student’s outstanding loan, with the median loan of roughly $11,500 reduced to about $7,800, according to the data. The department computes the amount erased by comparing their income to the incomes of peers in similar programs.” Maria Danilova of the Associated Press writing for the September 8th Los Angeles Times. Claiming she is protecting “taxpayers,” DeVos shifted from an Obama-era practice of total loan forgiveness to a fractional forgiveness program that most former student cannot afford, particularly without the training they paid for.

DeVos is deeply anti-public primary and secondary education, believing that vouchers for charter schools, where religious values (read: Christian) can be taught, are better for America. Meanwhile, the American public education, based on worldwide test scores, has slipped from first place to somewhere between 17th and 19th place, depending on the subject matter. Americans are becoming less globally competitive with every day... but at least less-educated people just might continue to be sold a bill of goods by politicians expert at lying with statistics. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am watching more than a third of Americans consistently cheering as we unravel and hand the high-end economic and political future to our traditional enemies... without a struggle.