THE BOOMER RETIREMENT MEME IS A BIG LIE - The Burning Platform

…….Boomers aren’t retiring en mass because they can’t afford to retire. The labor participation rate of the younger generations is being negatively impacted by the non-retirement of Boomers. This is called the trickle down effect from unintended consequences. The establishment has strip mined the wealth of the country, leaving a barren wasteland in its wake, creating a seething populace, seeking perpetrators to blame. The populist uprising which propels Trump and Sanders has been spurred by the destruction of the working middle class as the corporate fascists, global elite, and banking cabal have pushed their game of financialization roulette to its limit.

The corporate mainstream media machine, whose job is to keep the establishment in power, scorns Trump when he references a true unemployment rate above 20%, while the BLS reports a beyond laughable rate of 5%. In fact, 24% of all Americans between the ages of 20 and 54 are not working. In fact, 18% of all American men between the ages of 20 and 54 are not working. What are these 13 million men doing on a daily basis? They aren’t retired. A large percentage have been screwed over by a system designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Of the 35 million 20 to 54 year old Americans not working, many have found they can suckle more from the welfare and disability systems than they can by working. This generates animosity between the middle and lower classes, to the delight of the ruling class, as it takes the focus off their never ending criminal activities.

The Big Lie can work for longer than rational people might think, but eventually the revelation of its falsehood leads to revolutionary change. The average person in middle America is waking up to the lies of the establishment. They know the unemployment rate is closer to 20% than 5%. They know their own personal inflation rate is 5% to 10%, and not the reported 1% to 2%. They know the banker bailout, TARP, ZIRP, QE, and trillion dollar budget deficits weren’t designed to benefit Main Street USA. They know the media is in the back pocket of the establishment. They are sick and tired of getting screwed by a system designed by a wealthy elitist class to shake them down at every opportunity. They are starting to get up out of their chairs and yelling:

Full text and charts at: http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/04/04/the-boomer-retirement-meme-is-a-big-lie/#more-118960

VW Says: Thank You Sir! May I have Another? - by Eric Peters

So why did VW “cheat”? Uncle?

That question hasn’t been asked enough. It ought to be.

Now we have the answer – confirmation of what I suspected and wrote about earlier when this “scandal” broke last year.

VW “cheated” because it had to.

Because “cheating” was the only way to keep on selling diesel engines that delivered the mileage buyers expected at a cost that made economic sense to them.

Satisfying Uncle – passing his Rube Goldberg-esque emissions tests, which among other defects don’t measure the totality of a vehicle’s output – grams per mile –  but rather sample parts per million (PPM) with the vehicle in a stationary test rig, would have entailed a noticeable reduction in fuel efficiency and a very noticeable uptick in the cost of the vehicle. Or rather, the cost of the additional hardware necessary to placate Uncle.

Now there’s proof of this.

European Uncles have discovered that diesel-powered VW vehicles “fixed” to comply with the tests use more fuel now – which is a problem over there because European Uncles also regulate carbon dioxide (C02), which is classified as a “pollutant” because Global Warming (whoops, Climate Change).

The more fuel used, the more C02 produced. You see the problem.

Which isn’t the displeasure of the European Uncles.

It’s the fact that you can’t have your affordable/high-mileage diesel cake and eat your making-Uncle-happy, too. There is a reason why there are no modestly priced diesel-powered cars available in the United States … now that VW’s cars are off the market.

VW was the only automaker selling them – and now, they’re not.

And not likely to, ever again.

You can make a diesel that makes Uncle happy. But you can’t make one that makes Uncle happy and which is also affordable to buy and delivers mileage high enough to offset the always-higher price of buying a diesel car vs. the equivalent gas-powered version of the same car.

This is why all the diesel-powered cars you can still buy in this country are expensive cars.

All of them well over $30,000 – which renders moot considerations of economy. People buy Audi, BMW and Mercedes diesels for other reasons, such as abundant low-speed torque and the ability to go 600 miles on a tank of fuel. But it’s ridiculous to talk of “economy” when the car itself costs so much that any savings you realize by driving it are negated by the cost of purchasing it.

It is worth a mention in this vein that GM has quietly stopped selling the diesel-powered version of the Chevy Cruze sedan.

Though it cost significantly more than its VW analog – the $21,640 Jetta TDI – the 2015 Cruze diesel’s MSRP of $25,660 was still plausibly affordable.

As Inspector Clouseau used to say – not anymore.

Not at all, actually.

The Cruze diesel sleeps with the fishes. And it’s not just because the car has been redesigned for 2016. GM is still selling the 2015 Cruze – leftover last year’s models – as the 2016 Cruze Limited.

But not with the diesel engine.

Because Uncle.

That leaves… no one.

VW’s out. GM – which had its toe in the water – has pulled out. Mazda, which had planned to bring diesels to the U.S. – isn’t coming in at all.

And still, no one in the industry will say what needs to be said. That Uncle has made it impossible to sell affordable diesels by imposing tailpipe emissions standards – and tests – that are unreasonable and which cannot be complied with without watering down the main reasons most people consider buying a diesel-powered car.

The cars are not “dirty,” first of all.

The “up to 40 times” stuff you’ve been hearing the crows in the media squawk about is never put into context, never defined. “Up to 40 times” is a scare term, fundamentally dishonest – because it implies that the output is in fact “40 times” rather than “up to“… which is a hell of a spread.

What if the actual output of objectionable-to-Uncle stuff is just 2-3 times? And what if that “2-3” times more represents a fraction of a percent?

Why can’t – why won’t – anyone in the car business call Uncle’s bluff and bluster on this? Explain the fact that the tailpipe emissions of news cars (all of them) are nearly emissions-free?

Literally.

The feigned wailing and gnashing of teeth is over percents of a percent … 95-plus percent of any new car’s exhaust stream having been rendered “clean” years ago. VW is accused of “cheating” on a percent of the remaining 3 or so percent of the exhaust stream that could – theoretically- be further “cleaned.”

The problem now is one of cost vs. gains.

To get at that remaining 20 percent of 1 percent (to toss out a number, or a fraction of a number) will not be inexpensive – or easy. The question that must be asked if we are not to leap over the cliff like out-of-our-minds lemmings is, simply:

Is it worth doing?   

By any sane standard, the answer is – no!

There comes a point called diminishing returns. It is the point at which people who aren’t crazy begin to throttle back, pursue more effective gains elsewhere.

For example, if we’re really sweating these minuscule emissions, why not relax the federal “safety” mandates that have made cars so got-damned heavy that even subcompacts now weigh on average 2,500 pounds?

Yes, they are “safer” to be in, if you happen to run into a tree. But they are also heavy and that means more engine to lug them around and that means you use more fuel and – wait for it – the resultant total emissions output of the car (grams per mile) will be higher, even if the PPM is low on the test stand.

All else being equal, an 1,800 pound car with a 1 liter  diesel that averages 60 MPG will produce less of everything (including CO2, Captain Planet) than a 2,400 pound car that needs a 2 liter engine to heave its bulk and so only averages 40 MPG.    

But we live in an insane – and cowardly era.

Despite the cruel experience of the past several months – absolutely no mercy having been shown, the company kicked in the guts like a cur dog as it writhes on the floor –  VW is begging for more.   

It caves to every ridiculous demand. Challenges nothing Uncle says. Leaves the impression that Uncle was right, that VW deserves to be kicked in the guts like a cur dog for trying to build cars that would be what buyers were interested in rather than what Uncle was demanding they be.

The likely result of this will be the ruin of VW, which maybe VW deserves – though not for reason of “cheating” Uncle.

Rather, for not having the balls to tell Uncle to pound sand…

And for not going to bat for us – the people who buy the cars.

http://ericpetersautos.com/2016/04/04/vw-says-thank-sir-may-another/

The Future of Money - by Charles Hugh Smith

The cartels and state organs are frantically trying to co-opt, outlaw, corral or control this disruptive technology.

To say that the future of money is blockchain-based crypto-currencies and payment platforms is to state the obvious nowadays. If this wasn’t the case, then why are Goldman Sachs et al. (i.e. the global too big to fail banks) rushing to patent their own proprietary versions of blockchain technologies? Why are banks investing heavily in companies that are trying to establish a global blockchain platform for banks?

The reason is that banks understand their core reason to exist is threatened by peer-to-peer, decentralized payment platforms and currencies. If payments no longer need to be routed through a centralized trusted institution, then one core function of banks disappears.

If peer-to-peer lending and securitization become easier and cheaper due to the blockchain, then banks’ function of allocating capital also vanishes.

Gordon White and I discuss The Future of Money (and its connection to meaningful work) (1:11 hrs; be forewarned we cover a wealth of topics, from philosophy to higher education to gardening to creating value in an economy that is being disrupted.)

Since money– the currency that serves as a medium of exchange–no longer needs to be issued by central banks/states, central banks/states are also in danger of being mooted/bypassed as enterprises and people realize they can escape the relentless destruction of their purchasing power by inflation-seeking central banks/states.

If you aren’t familiar with blockchain technologies and crypto-currencies, and how these innovations are disrupting centralized banking and state-issued currencies, here are a few articles to start with:

Why Wall Street Is Embracing the Blockchain—Its Biggest Threat

The premise of the Bitcoin platform—a decentralized, trustless, replicated ledger of transactions—is the virtual opposite of the centralized, trusted, guarded, model of modern securities processing, which has long relied upon DTCC, among others, as a central authority,” reads a treatise the organization released alongside that canned quote from its CEO. In other words, the DTCC realizes that it’s embracing an existential threat.

Read the Whole Article

Banks Are Terrified - LewRockwell

Critics complain Trump's deportation plan would cost $500 billion: - Cheap at the price by Vox Day

Cheap at the price

Critics complain Trump's deportation plan would cost $500 billion:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants would cost between $400 billion and $600 billion and take at least 20 years to implement, according to a report from the American Action Forum.

The report estimates that there are currently 11.3 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. To deport them, these individuals would have to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and transported back to the country they originated from.

In order to do this in two years like Trump has proposed, the report estimates that there would need to be 90,582 federal immigration apprehension employees, 348,831 immigration detention beds, 1,316 immigration courts, 32,445 federal attorneys to process undocumented immigrants, and a minimum of 17,296 chartered flights and 30,701 chartered bus trips.

“If the federal government were to remove all undocumented immigrants in only two years, it would require a massive expansion of the federal government’s immigration enforcement personnel and infrastructure,” states the report.

The report says that if the federal government began enforcing mass deportation, about 20 percent of undocumented immigrants would begin to leave voluntarily which would leave about 9 million illegal aliens in the country. Currently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement only has the capacity to remove 400,000 undocumented immigrants in one year.

“That means if ICE were to operate at its current maximum capacity, it would take over 20 years to remove 9.04 million undocumented immigrants,” states the report. “To remove those 9.04 million immigrants in two years, ICE would have to remove 4.52 million immigrants per year. That is 11.3 times larger than ICE’s current maximum capacity.”

I can solve those problems easily. The answer is private enterprise. The AAF estimate claims a cost of $55,555 per individual deported. So, the cost can be cut to less than $100 billion by simply offering a $10,000 bounty on every illegal immigrant delivered to a station on the Mexican border. Assume that it costs $5k to do a quick identity check to confirm their status and transport them home.

That means the USA would be saving nearly $250 billion per year based on the $346 billion per year that illegal aliens cost as estimated by the National Research Council. Trump is not only right to call for deportations, but America can't afford NOT to round them up and repatriate them.

Vox Popoli: Cheap at the price

The People are Right: It’s Time to Balance Trade - By Howard Richman, Raymond Richman and Jesse Richman

Although Donald Trump (Republican) and Bernie Sanders (Democrat) have both made opposition to U.S. trade policy a major plank of their surprisingly successful presidential campaigns, most elite “opinion leaders” in the media and politics continue to at-best condescend to these messages as a working-class phenomenon -- a movement by the “losers” in trade that fails to recognize the counterbalancing winners.

Few in the elite have yet begun to question their faith in free trade. And, as a result, it is unlikely that Congress, the executive branch, and other power centers will engage in the important rethink of U.S. trade policy that the public is calling for. Like Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz in the current campaign, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Barack Obama in 2008, they give lip service to trade concerns, while planning to continue “free trade” policy once elected. But the voters are right, the elites are wrong. The trade jobs ‘winners’ are vastly outnumbered by those who lost millions of jobs. Why the mismatch? Our massive trade deficits.

If there is a single statistic that shows the major cause of the current malaise -- and surely it has many causes -- the trade deficit is foremost. It has worsened since 1975, as shown in the following graph:

In 1980, the U.S. trade deficit was $32 billion (in 2015 dollars). In 2008, it reached $800 billion (in 2015 dollars), no doubt contributing to the 2008-2009 recession. As a result of the global recession, the trade deficit shrank in 2009 to $434 billion (in 2015 dollars), and then it expanded again with the modest economic recovery to $530 billion in 2015. Had trade been in balance in 2015, our GDP would have been $18.5 trillion instead of $17.9 trillion. Had we kept trade in balance over the last four decades, we would now be experiencing great prosperity, not malaise.

Another problem is that trade deficits slow economic growth. The following graph shows U.S. annual GDP growth by decade:

Since 2006, U.S. economic growth has averaged a measly 2.1%, whereas, for the 50 years before 2006, the average growth rate was 4.0%. The U.S. economy has stagnated for an entire decade because hundreds of U.S. companies have moved some or all of their production of goods abroad and millions of productive manufacturing workers have lost their jobs.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released on Friday, U.S. manufacturing employment has dropped by 47,000 workers during the first two months of this year, and manufacturing employment has dropped by 12 percent over the last decade. U.S. median income in 2014 (adjusted for inflation) was only $351 dollars above that of 1989 -- an average increase of only $14 a year over a quarter century. From 1999 to 2014, median income dropped 8 percent. No wonder the economic malaise led to a popular revolt in the 2016 primaries.

To be fair, other factors have also reduced jobs in the manufacturing sector. In fact, technological change and higher productivity reduced jobs in manufacturing in all of the advanced economies. But U.S. trade deficits made U.S. job losses especially severe. From 1997 to 2011, according to BLS data, the proportion of the U.S. workforce employed in manufacturing declined by 33%, while in trade surplus Japan the decline was only 22%, and in trade surplus Germany it was only 16%.

Trade deficits don’t only hurt a country’s workers and diminish its economic growth. The harm that they do goes much deeper. For instance, there’s the problem of the foreign debt. In order to import more than it exports, a country has to borrow from abroad or sell its assets to foreigners. When the U.S. began negotiating the General 

Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, it was the world’s leading creditor. By the time the ninth round of negotiations had concluded in 1994, it had become the world’s leading debtor.

As a result of buying more imports than we export, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data released on Thursday, the net foreign debt of the American people at the end of 2015 was $7.4 trillion, 47% of our National Income. In other words, we have run up debt on foreign credit cards amounting to 47% of our annual income. We are already making interest payments and dividend payments on that debt, and, eventually, our older selves or our children will either have to default or pay it back.

The push toward globalization that began under FDR has in recent decades turned into a disaster for U.S. workers. The ideology called “free trade,” which accompanied this push, was the unique instrument of that disaster. But as our own studies have shown, free trade only works when trade is relatively balanced. Once trade gets out of balance, a country’s primary goal needs to be “balanced trade,” not “free trade.” The ideal prescription is “free and balanced trade,” as is the case of trade between the U.S. and Canada.

Unfortunately “free trade,” has become an ideology that is not backed by economic science. History teaches us that countries often engage in mercantilist practices, imposing barriers on imports and subsidies to exports and manipulating their exchange rates, actions that the noted economist John Maynard Keynes called “beggar-one’s-neighbor” policies. Japan, Germany, China, Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and South Korea are some of the countries that have “beggared” and continue to beggar the United States.

During this decline, our leaders, Republican and Democrat, did nothing about the deficits, believing that increased trade, balanced or not, was good for all trading partners. But economics shows only that balanced trade is always advantageous to all trading partners and that free trade is only an appropriate policy when neither partner employs mercantilist practices. U.S. trade with Canada is balanced because neither country engages in practices that are designed to give itself trade surpluses, while giving its trading partner trade deficits.

The Congress, having learned nothing from the trade deficits of the preceding decades, gave fast-track authority to President Obama to negotiate the pending Trans Pacific Partnership, a multistate trade and regulatory agreement which permits currency manipulation. Like our previous trade agreements, it encourages American manufacturers to move production abroad by reducing uncertainty if they do so.

The TPP agreement is so unpopular that every presidential candidate still in the race, save John Kasich, has objected to it.

Given the disaster our mismanaged trade policy has been, it is no wonder that voters are rejecting their party’s leaders’ choices for presidential nomination. If policy elites listen and learn, they will adopt the policy of balanced trade, the policy position that has only been advocated by one candidate, Donald Trump. He has called for trade to be “fair and balanced” and has threatened tariffs upon trade surplus countries to bring this about.

anders has also attacked past trade deals and advocated for telling “corporate America in a very forceful way that they are no longer going to throw American workers on the street and build shiny new plants in China, Mexico, or low-wage countries." How he plans to more than talk on this issue is unclear.

If trade is balanced we don’t need to be concerned about our trading partners’ wage rates, nor do we need to be concerned about their environmental policies, nor do we need to be concerned about whether they manipulate exchange rates. Every trade agreement that we sign should require that trade be kept balanced.

The best way to balance trade is to apply tariffs or import limitations solely upon countries that have trade surpluses. We urge the application of a single-country-variable-tariff, which we call a scaled tariff, because its tariff rate would rise or fall automatically as the U.S. trade deficit with a trade surplus country rises or falls.

It would give trade surplus countries an incentive to buy more from us, or they would lose market share for their exports in our markets. Donald Trump said he would threaten tariffs upon the countries with which the U.S. has large chronic trade deficits (including China, Japan, and Mexico) in order to force them into negotiations.

The scaled tariff conforms to international rules which authorize trade deficit countries to impose trade balancing tariffs. President Nixon used that rule to impose an across-the-board 10% tariff in August 1971 which led to the negotiations that balanced U.S. trade by 1973. But the U.S. elite has failed to invoke this rule for four decades, despite exploding trade deficits.

If the U.S. is to prosper, U.S. international trade has to be brought into balance. But our nation’s leaders of both political parties have been doing next to nothing.

The Richmans co-authored the 2014 book Balanced Trade: Ending the Unbearable Costs of America’s Trade Deficits, published by Lexington Books, and the 2008 book Trading Away Our Future, published by Ideal Taxes Association.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/the_people_are_right_its_time_to_balance_trade.html#ixzz44yQ0MFRD
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

WHAT TRUMP HAS WROUGHT - Pat Buchanan: Candidate unleashed 'the mightiest force of the 21st century: nationalism'

As Wisconsinites head for the polls, our Beltway elites are almost giddy. For they foresee a Badger State bashing for Donald Trump, breaking his momentum toward the Republican nomination.

Should The Donald fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot, 1,237, there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race.

But this city of self-delusion should realize there is no going back for America. For, whatever his stumbles of the last two weeks, Trump has helped to unleash the mightiest force of the 21st century: nationalism.

Transnationalism and globalism are moribund.

First among the issues on which Trump has triumphed – “We will build the wall – and Mexico will pay for it!” – is border security.

Republican candidates who failed to parrot Trump on illegal immigration were among the first casualties.

For that is where America is, and that is where the West is.

Consider Europe. Four months ago, Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year for throwing open the gates to the “huddled masses” of the Middle and Near East.

Merkel’s Germany is now leading the EU in amassing a huge bribe to the Turks to please take them back, and keep them away from the Greek islands that are now Islam’s Ellis Island into Europe.

Africa’s population will double to 2.5 billion by 2050. With 60 percent of Africans now under 25 years of age, millions will find their way to the Med to cross to the Old Continent where Europeans are aging, shrinking and dying. Look for gunboats in the Med.

If immigration is the first issue where Trump connected with the people, the second is trade.

Republicans are at last learning that trade deficits do matter, that free trade is not free. The cost comes in dead factories, lost jobs, dying towns and the rising rage of an abandoned Middle America whose country this is and whose wages have stagnated for decades.

Economists who swoon over figures on consumption forget what America’s 19th-century meteoric rise to self-sufficiency teaches, and what all four presidents on Mount Rushmore understood.

Production comes before consumption. Who owns the orchard is more essential than who eats the apples. We have exported the economic independence Hamilton taught was indispensable to our political independence. We have forgotten what made us great.

China, Japan, Germany – the second, third and fourth largest economies on earth – all owe their prosperity to trade surpluses run for decades at the expense of the Americans.

A third casualty of Trumpism is the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus among liberal interventionists and neoconservatives.

Trump subjects U.S. commitments to a cost-benefit analysis, as seen from the standpoint of cold national interest.

What do we get from continuing to carry the largest load of the defense of a rich Europe, against a Russia with one-fourth of Europe’s population?

How does Vladimir Putin, leader of a nation that in the last century lost its European and world empires and a third of its landmass, threaten us?

Why must we take the lead in confronting and containing Putin in Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia? No vital U.S. interest is imperiled there, and Russia’s ties there are older and deeper than ours to Puerto Rico.

Why is it the responsibility of the U.S. Pacific Fleet to defend the claims of Hanoi, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Brunei, to rocks, reefs and islets in the South China Sea – against the claims of China?

American hawks talk of facing down Beijing in the South and East China Seas while U.S. companies import so much in Chinese-made goods they are fully subsidizing Beijing’s military budget.

Does this make sense?

Patriotism, preserving and protecting the unique character of our nation and people, economic nationalism, America First, staying out of other nation’s wars – these are as much the propellants of Trumpism as is the decline of the American working and middle class.

Trump’s presence in the race has produced the largest turnout ever in the primaries of either party. He has won the most votes, most delegates, most states. Wisconsin aside, he will likely come to Cleveland in that position.

If, through rules changes, subterfuge and faithless delegates, party elites swindle him out of the nomination, do they think that the millions who came out to vote for Trump will go home and say: We lost it fair and square?

Do they think they can then go back to open borders, amnesty, a path to citizenship, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and nation building?

Whatever happens to Trump, the country has spoken. And if the establishment refuses to heed its voice, and returns to the policies the people have repudiated, it should take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/04/what-trump-has-wrought/#gqbMV2d715JYxB3i.99

Higher Education Is Morally and Financially Bankrupt - by Charles Hugh Smith

A system that piles debt on students in exchange for a marginal or even zero-return on their investment is morally and financially bankrupt.

Every once in a while you run across an insider's narrative of a corrupt, morally bankrupt sector that absolutely nails the sector's terminal rot. Here is that nails-it narrative for higher education: Pass, Fail: An inside look at the retail scam known as the modern university.

Here are excerpts of the article, which was published in Canada but is equally applicable to higher education in the U.S.:

A university degree, after all, is a credential crucial for economic success. At least, that’s what we’re told. But as with all such credentials—those sought for the ends they promise rather than the knowledge they represent—the trick is to get them cheaply, quickly, and with as little effort as possible. My students’ disaffection is the real face of this ambition.

I teach mostly bored youth who find themselves doing something they neither value nor desire—and, in some cases, are simply not equipped for—in order to achieve an outcome they are repeatedly warned is essential to their survival. What a dreadful trap.

One in particular matches perfectly with the type of change I’ve observed on my watch: the eradication of content from the classroom.

All efforts to create the illusion of academic content are acceptable so long as they are entertaining, and successful participation requires no real effort and no real accountability.

Remove your professor hat for a moment and students will speak frankly. They will tell you that they don’t read because they don’t have to. They can get an A without ever opening a book.

But don’t worry—you won’t go bust because of this failure, not in the modern university. So long as your class is popular and fun, you’ll be favoured by the administration and probably receive a teaching award. This, even though your students will leave your class in worse condition than they entered it, because you will have pandered to their basest inclinations while leaving their real intellectual and moral needs unmet.

There is no clearer example of administrators’ contempt for faculty. But there is also no clearer example of their contempt for students.

As money is siphoned from academic programs through attrition, it is channelled into a host of middle-management positions.

From 1979 to 2014, central administration and staff ballooned by three and a half times, while the size of the faculty merely doubled.

Parents, students, and governments keep supplying them with capital, assuming there will be a genuine return on investment. But since the institution no longer produces anything, no such return is forthcoming.

Spending on the student services sector in Canadian universities increased an incredible six-fold between 1979 and 2014.

The student services cabal is no longer there to support faculty in their work of educating students “but to compete with them to define the student experience.”

Insiders are quiet after they read this, because they know it's true.

The financial burden created by the higher education cartel is immense and expanding:

To mask the enormity of the sums squandered on "education" that has little measurable results, the federal government has purchased most of the debt:

No inflation here--just a 137% increase in 15 years:

A system that piles debt on students in exchange for a marginal or even zero-return on their investment is morally and financially bankrupt.

We can do better and must do better, which is the subject of my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy.

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar16/bankrupt-higher-education3-16.html?fullweb=1