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Spot the bullshit:
"On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education announced its new plan to help tackle debt for those who borrowed federal money to pay for student loans.
In a new streamlining process, borrowers who have approved claims that confirm their college or institution defrauded them or engaged in financial misconduct will be able to apply for full relief.
Officials estimate that this could help about 72,000 borrowers receive $1 billion in loan cancellation."
from https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/544090-us-secretary-of-education-cancels-1-billion-of-student
on https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-announces-action-streamline-borrower-defense-relief-process
What counts as your institution "engaging in certain misconduct?" Would raising tuition to pay administrators the institution doesn't need count? How about putting covid-19 positive students in "quarantine" housing without beds, cleaning materials, or methods for cooking or obtaining food? Seems a little misconduct-y that money doesn't actually go toward services for students or hiring faculty to improve student-faculty ratios when the money for that is there.
So, what is the definition of misconduct the DOE is working with, and which institutions have carried out this kind of misconduct?
Who even gets to decide what is considered financial misconduct?
Most institutions are guilty of financial misconduct as far as I'm concerned. It seems the DOE puts the onus on the borrowers to find out what kind of misconduct and whether the DOE will count it as misconduct before they can apply for loan forgiveness consideration. This isn't justice.
DOE approximates 72,000 people to be eligible for this loan forgiveness. Based on what? Presumably they are aware of an intersection of borrowers (of the one specific loan mentioned) and institutions. Since this is a federal loan, there should be ways to reach those borrowers, and possibly automatically apply this forgiveness and reimbursements.
I don't know. |
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| Noam Chomsky |
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It's a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can't get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. |
| Nick Ferguson |
We played a lot of sandlot ball, so we were used to tackling each other, or falling on the concrete, things of that nature. And nine times out of 10, our flag games turned into tackle anyway. So when I got to high school, tackle football was kind of natural. |
| Orison Swett Marden |
Your outlook upon life, your estimate of yourself, your estimate of your value are largely colored by your environment. Your whole career will be modified, shaped, molded by your surroundings, by the character of the people with whom you come in contact every day. |
| Gary Ackerman |
There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying in to Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. There's a message there. |
| Eugene Fama |
State constitutions typically provide that the state first has to service its debt, then make it pension payments, and then pay for services. What we don't know is whether that order will be enforced. And ultimately, the busted state is going to be looking to the federal government for a bailout. Think Greece, but on a much bigger scale. |
| Lisa Caputo |
Citigroup has the opportunity to be the largest financial institution and to serve us well. What we decide to do is not what everybody else does. Other companies sponsor women's events and put a woman's face in advertising. This is financial services wrapped in pink. |
| Lisa Caputo |
Go out and interview people to find a partner whom you can trust. Find somebody who subscribes to the same view that you do. I'm happy to tell you that I practice what I preach. I would have never thought I'd end up in financial services. I'm happy to tell you that my debt is retired. That happened because I got a good financial adviser. |
| Lisa Gansky |
Those projects most successful on Kickstarter - those that receive funding completely and quickly - do so largely because the creator has a strong social network and invites people to be engaged. |
| Kim Campbell |
On the same day I was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada, I announced the most sweeping reform ever undertaken in the structure of our federal government. |
| Ralph Hall |
I support both a Fair Tax and a Flat Tax plan that would dramatically streamline the tax system. A Fair Tax would replace all federal taxes on personal and corporate income with a single national tax on retail sales, while a Flat Tax would apply the same tax rate to all income with few if any deductions or exemptions. |
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https://studentaid.gov/sites/default/files/BD-General-Application-Form.pdf
"It is also important to understand that to be eligible for full or partial federal student loan relief through borrower defense to repayment, you must also have suffered monetary harm. The act of taking a loan or holding student debt is not, by itself, considered to be monetary harm."
So, it's okay if your institution commits misconduct if you cannot prove a causal link between the specific misconduct and monetary harms ...
This post is a comment.
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Hebei, a Northern Chinese Province, Unveils an App That Triggers a Notification When You're Near Someone in Debt
China is gearing up to launch a social credit system in 2020, giving all citizens an identity number that will be linked to a permanent record. Like a financial score, everything from paying back loans to behaviour on public transport will be included. One aspect of this social credit system is a new app in the northern province of Hebei. From a report:
According to the state-run newspaper China Daily, the Hebei-based app will alert people if there are in 500 metres of someone i...
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Amazon Will Pay $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits (fortune.com)
Those wondering how many zeros Amazon, which is valued at nearly $800 billion, has to pay in federal taxes might be surprised to learn that its check to the IRS will read exactly $0.00. From a report:
According to a report published by the Institute on Taxation and Economic (ITEP) policy Wednesday, the e-tail/retail/tech/entertainment/everything giant won't have to pay a cent in federal taxes for the second year in a row. This tax-free break comes even though Amazon almost doubled its U.S. profits from $5.6 billion t...
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In addition to the psychological literature there is some information about the psychology of money
available in the financial literature. Close to the beginning of her best selling book, The 9 Steps To
Financial Freedom, financial planner Suze Orman states ? most of my clients biggest problems in life
today - even those that appear on the surface not to be money related - are connected with their early
formative experiences with money.? She recommends to her readers, as the first step toward financial
...
This post is a comment.
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One Year After Data Breach, Equifax Goes Unpunished
"It's been a year since Equifax doxed the nation of America through carelessness, deception and greed, lying about it and stalling while the problem got worse and worse," writes Cory Doctorow. Equifax's new CSO says they've spent over $200 million on security upgrades, in work being overseen by auditor from eight different states. An anonymous reader quotes Doctorow's response:
This all sounds very good and all, but it's still monumentally unfair. The penalty for Equifax's recklessness should have been the corporate death penalty: charter revoked, company shut down, assets sold to competitors... The fact that Equifax's investors and exec...
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Amazon Is Finally Profitable, Earns $2.5 Billion Over the Last Three Months
Amazon topped $2 billion in quarterly profit for the first time in its history, an impressive run fueled by continued growth in Prime subscriptions, cloud computing and its nascent advertising business. Amazon said Thursday that it earned $2.5 billion in profit for the three months ending in June, a staggering jump from the $197 million it posted in the same period last year. It marked the third consecutive quarter that Amazon has topped $1 billion in profit, a remarkable feat for a company once known for investing so much in its business that it often lost money. "The profitability trajectory appears to be accelerating quicker than expected," Daniel Ives, an analyst with GBH Insights, wrote in an investor note ...
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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review:
Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roa...
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Steve Ballmer's New Project: Find Out How the Government Spends Your Money
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn't satisfied with owning the Los Angeles Clippers and teaching at Stanford and USC. On Tuesday, the billionaire announced USAFacts, his new startup that aims to improve political discourse by making government financial data easier to access. A small "army" of economists, professors and other professionals will be looking into and publishing data structured similarly to the 10-K filings companies issue each year -- expenses, revenues and key metrics pulled from dozens of government data sources and compiled into a single massive collection of tables. From a report on The Verge:
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On Thursday, US authorities announced the seizure of the largest dark web marketplace AlphaBay. Europol and Dutch police also claimed seizure of Hansa, another popular market. In their dark web investigations, law enforcement have increasingly turned to hacking tools, including the deployment of browser exploits on a mass scale. But tracking down the alleged AlphaBay administrator was much more mundane, officials said. Alexandre Cazes, who US authorities say used the handle alpha02 as administrator of the site, allegedly left his personal email in a welcome message to new AlphaBay members, according to the forfeiture complaint published on Thursday. The news echoes the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the convicted creator of the original Silk Road, who made a similar security mistake. "In December 2016, law enforcement learned that CAZES' personal email was included in the header of AlphaBay's 'welcome email' to new users in December 2014," the complaint reads. Users received this message on...
This post is a comment.
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Another psychological approach to understanding people?s involvement with money was offered in
a financial magazine. This article (Sullivan, 1994) presented a classification of money personalities based
on a survey of 2,000 people?s ?inner financial life.? It divided people into seven personality
classifications as follows: 1) Hunters, who are characterized by an aggressive attitude toward the making
spending and investing of money and who tend to have unsettled personal lives and a higher than average
...
This post is a comment.
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