There is a wonderful, probably apocryphal story about a fellow who comes to a little town in Vermont. After a few days there, he notices that when a particular guy walks down the street, people quickly move to the other side; mothers shield their little children and window shades are drawn. "Who is this person", the fellow thinks. A murderer or traitor; something terrible for sure.
So, curious, he eventually comes to ask a new friend he has met in the town, "Who is this person everyone is hiding from? What did he do?" The friend looks shocked, and says quietly, "That's Eustace Barron. We don't talk about him 'round these parts." More curious, the fellow persists -- "But what did he do?", he asks. The friend looks up and down the street and then surreptitiously brings him into his house. He quickly locks the door, walks to the window, pulls down the shade and closes the blinds. He then takes the fellow into an interior room and tells him what this evildoer has done to prompt village outrage.
"Eustace Barron", he whispers, "dipped into his capital!"
_ _ _
Now that, friends, is the Vermont those of us of a certain age remember; a state of abundant maple syrup and pure, rock-ribbed fiscal conservatism, of people who can squeeze a nickel until the buffalo howls and would sooner pour Karo syrup on their flapjacks than touch their savings.
So what do we make of Bernie Sanders? That would be Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and the "I" which he fondly claims to stand for "Independent" would seem to stand more for "Incoherent", or perhaps "Idiotic", or if the topic is economics, apparently "Ignorant." Else how does one explain this professed socialist's proposal, presented this week, for free college educations at public universities?
Yes, the good senator, said this: "We live in a highly competitive global economy and, if our economy is
to be strong, we need the best-educated workforce in the world ... That will not happen if, every year, hundreds of thousands of bright
young people cannot afford to go to college, and if millions more leave
school deeply in debt.”
Now, I'm as big a fan of avoiding debt as the next guy. In fact, if the "next guy" is Bernie Sanders, I'm a lot bigger fan of avoiding debt. But how did he actually say that, and propose that, without explaining who is supposed to pay the over $40 billion annually he proposes for it? And worse, how did the citizens of the once-great state of Vermont turn from the apocryphal shunners of Eustace Barron, to people who could actually put Bernie Sanders in the Senate?
Really, let's start with the most absurd part of the proposal. I don't argue that we need the best-educated workforce in the world. But right now, fewer people are employed in the USA than were gainfully employed when Barack H. Obama became president. As a country, we are hemorrhaging jobs and growing nothing but the number of people unemployed or underemployed (the so-called "U-6" figure) exceeds 11% of the work force.
So you would think that the very, very first thing that the Government should be worried about is providing gainful employment to those 11%, taking them off unemployment insurance, the welfare rolls, or out of their part-time status and into actual full-time employment, paying income taxes. Nope, there's none of that.
Since we're already borrowing trillions from China to cover our profligate spending as a government, we certainly can't have those new jobs come from government. No; they have to come from the private sector economy.
Labor is an economic balance all its own. The more expensive it becomes, the fewer jobs are created and the higher the unemployment as job-creating businesses follow the money. They use fewer people, people who can do more -- three employees doing the work of four, value in flexibility and breadth of skills, as it were.
Labor becomes more expensive when any of several things happen, one of which being the raising of the education of the workforce. So it naturally follows that if we spend taxpayer dollars to provide free college education, several things will happen in an economy large enough to show the effects -- like, of course, ours.
1. We have to borrow more money from China to pay for it, or cut other spending (yeah, right)
2. We flood an already-saturated labor market with more educated, and therefore higher-priced folks
3. We, in short, increase the competition for an unchanged number of jobs, lowering wages
4. We shove a few hundred thousand more students through the leftist indoctrination camps we laughingly call "colleges and universities" -- which is, of course, the primary but unstated goal of the proposal.
That's pretty much it. Instead of the peak of available unemployed workers being on the less-educated side of the curve, the peak will move to the more-educated side. We haven't created any actual jobs by doing this; no, all we've done is to make a better-educated class of unemployed, and borrowed billions more from China to do that.
What an insane waste of money this proposal is -- shortsighted, misdirected, and absolutely useless for solving the problem of the unemployed, by increasing the wrong side of the labor balance. But the citizens of Vermont, a state well-known for the frugality and economic conservatism of its households and citizens, continues to elect a senator who fritters our tax dollars away without a thought as to how it might actually help the citizens he purports to represent.
Something has clearly changed in the mindset of the citizens of Vermont to have put a guy like that in one of their Senate seats, and it boggles the mind to think that what we used to think of the citizenry of Vermont could ever have approved of this. Talk about "dipping into your capital" -- Bernie Sanders is dipping into ours -- and trying to tell us it's a good idea.
Somewhere, Eustace Barron is thinking "And they shunned me?"
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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