The student loan crisis will end, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” After the presidential election, student debt will remain an embarrassing and thorny issue. Both parties have DNA at this crime scene. Neither party is in control. The prime mover in all of this is the “Nanny Campus” and a captured Education Department. Universities are the engine room of this education industrial-complex. Once accepted to university, FAFSA makes few assessments of the student’s ability to carry the loan forward all the way to paying it off. Most students do not comprehend the costs of signing up for a $30,000 debt to complete a degree in four to six years. Students cannot comprehend how long twenty to twenty-five years this debt plus interest will take. Loan payment terms may exceed the borrower’s

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

My wife and I comprised an “Oreo family” at one time. We were the filling between raising children and helping parents age. The Kids are good, they are happy, and have satisfying careers that fit their talents. All our parents have passed.As our parents aged, one with Alzheimer’s and another with Lewie Body Syndrome, we shared parents on the dementia spectrum. We shared the collective grief and dismay of watching our parents pass with extraordinarily little self-awareness. It is gut wrenching watching the people you knew and loved fade away. The helplessness drives you to tears and prayer.I described it once as watching a parent, in a boat at the shore, slowly drawn out to sea. Your vision of who they are changes as the time and distance move them further away. The distance makes them less

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

The federal student debt loan amount is $1.7 trillion. This debt portfolio is an installment personal loan. Payments occur monthly. Active students have loan totals not due this year. We have no idea how much of the total will be repaid.The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan is President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s reply to the Supreme Court, who ruled the administration’s original sweeping forgiveness program was unconstitutional. The SAVE plan was announced in August 2023. The White House bulletin included a table of payment amounts, indexed by the number of dependents and size of loan.It is the greatest gift for all income-dependent student-debt payoff plans. It is a Trojan horse for the state to control higher education.The “original” student loan

On January 14, the White House issued an emotionally charged bulletin on overdraft fees. It outdid itself, packing the release with vituperative claims that overdraft fees were sneaky, hidden, just plain wrong, and exploitative, that they raked in excessive profits for the wealthy and padded the banks’ bottom lines, all at the expense of hardworking families.“Junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most folks in homes like the one [Greek, Jewish, and Puerto Rican] I grew up in,” Joe Biden said in March. “They add up to hundreds of dollars a month.”In his homage to class warfare, and imaginary ethnic experiences as a child, Biden promised in a January 2024 presidential statement to curb or slash junk fees in banking: “This is about companies that rip-off hardworking

The canary in the coal mine, is the consumer in our current economic period. We can still hear it, but it is growing weaker.We clearly hear Janet Yellen telling us in a March interview that rapidly increasing credit card use by consumers is normative. Is it normative to use credit card debt to offset “transitory” inflation?America has used credit to promote a recovery. Household debt rose to 17.5 trillion in the 4th quarter 2023. Debit and Credit card balances increased by $50 billion to $1.13 trillion over the quarter. The average credit card balance increased 10 percent for 2023. In 12 months, serious delinquency status on credit cards increased by 50 percent. Auto and car loans are transitioning into delinquency higher than pre covid levels.The average credit card interest rate for the

Congressional Democrats are trying to intervene in a complex and varied market they know little about but that consumers navigate without need of help. This will not end well.
Original Article: Washington’s Planned Theft of Credit Card Benefits

Our vacation airline tickets in September were funded by accumulated miles on our Alaska Airlines credit card. While on vacation this summer, my brother-in-law graciously hosted eight of us for dinner. He tried to downplay the generous hospitality by saying he had just gotten his “cash back” award from his credit card company. The “cash back” credit card had accumulated a tidy sum of money, paying for a very nice dinner.
At home in Brookfield, a takeout restaurant advised a 3.5 percent surcharge if paying by credit or debit card. Shopping later, our favorite farm market added a dollar to all card transactions. It is not unusual in Brookfield to see two prices for gas: one price is for cash, and the slightly higher gallon cost is for credit. These actions offset the cost of interchange

Headline math is a simple percentage expressed as a fact without context. Its design is to create an emotional response, support an opinion, or generate a click past the paywall. Once articulated, it exists in speech as a noun. W. Brian Arthur’s paper “Economics in Nouns and Verbs” explains the use of nouns to express a conclusion as fact, excluding further discussion. Student loan statistics for women are presented as facts, needing no further thought or understanding. However, these facts are instead mistaken assumptions presented without explicit context. Consider the compounding of these facts:
Women in 2021 hold 66 percent of all student loan debt.Following graduation, women will earn 81 percent of what men can expect.Following graduation, 91 percent of men, but 85 percent of women,

The student loan program is descending into chaos and the Biden administration is clueless about what to do. Furthermore, the value of a college education continues to fall while college costs increase.
Original Article: Student Loans: The Continuing Crisis That Is Getting Worse

The leviathan does not rest in pursuing free universities, creeping ahead unchecked by either reason, law, or accounting principles. Why is student assessment of their federal-debt-financed degrees so low? Why are 26 percent of past payments delinquent? More than 50 percent of students agree that they either studied the wrong major or wasted time and money. Less than half have found work in their major field of study.
Public dialogue is lured into discussing forgiveness amounts, rationalizations, plans, and terms, without specifics about monthly costs or other options, thereby distracted from asking the following question: How have graduates—assertively promised increased income, personal satisfaction, and positive impact on society—now become a new dependent class?
The Department of

Remember that credit is money.
—Benjamin Franklin
The June 2023 Supreme Court decision to reject the Biden administration’s plan that pandered to those claiming impoverishment by the costs of higher education is a second-act curtain on the student debt drama. A third act in the drama was outlined by President Biden on June 30 using piecemeal administrative decisions.
For more than twenty years, the federal student loan program has been mismanaged. Revolving leadership, congressional pressure, and confusion on what constitutes a loan obligation have led to this predicament. The Supreme Court’s decision has provided a pause so that we can examine the twenty-first-century value of the current program.
Federal funding of student loans originally was intended to encourage human capital, skills,

The State of California, unable to unionize fast food workers, now is trying to create workers councils that will set labor policies for fast food restaurants.

This will not end well.Original Article: "Leviathan Is on the Menu"

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.—Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan
California continues to attack businesses and entrepreneurial freedom. Leviathan has awakened, this time with Assembly Bill 257, promoting a state-controlled trade union for all restaurant workers.
Current United States secretary of labor Marty Walsh has left and become head of the National Hockey League’s players union, perhaps to help in the league’s diversity, equity, and inclusion and pride initiatives. Joe Biden has nominated Julie Su as Walsh’s replacement, appointed by Biden as deputy labor secretary in 2021. She received Senate subcommittee approval on April 27 and will go to the floor for a full vote, and opposition is

Even after two years of "transitory" inflation, America’s ruling classes insist that prices are falling and that all of this is temporary. We don’t believe them.

Original Article: "The Ruling Classes Are Inflation Deniers and the Ship of Fools Sails On"

Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.
—Ludwig von Mises
Consumers’ behaviors cause the consumer price index (CPI) broad heading of food to understate the real or wallet level of inflation. It is much worse than the top line statistic—it is a serious offense to the poor and fixed-income citizens.
The CPI measures nominal dollar changes based on month over month and year over year for 299 items. The year ending December 2021 posted an overall CPI of 3.4 percent. Food at home was up 6.5 percent during this period. For the year ending 2022 the CPI rose 6.5 percent while food rose 10.4 percent. Compounding the two years the CPI rose 11 percent, and the food at home category rose 17.6 percent.
For this same two-year period nominal hourly wages for private industry rose 15

The "first" Children’s Crusade of 1212 ended in tragedy for those taking part. The "second" crusade is not going to produce any happy endings, either.

Original Article: "Climate Activism: The Second Children’s Crusade"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Modern secular society embraces a new religion complete with prophets, crusaders, commandments, contrition, and even a holy land: East Anglia, United Kingdom. These congregants will behave idiosyncratically in the economy. The activist green movement increasingly parallels Western religious structure, even generating a modern version of the medieval Children’s Crusade.
Motivated by hope, the first Children’s Crusade assembled in 1212 under the preteen leadership of two boys countries apart—Stephen of Cloyes (France) and Nicholas of Cologne. One claimed a vision and the other a letter from Christ, sparking a movement to retake Jerusalem from the city’s Muslim conquerors. The boys’ preaching and zealous piety created what some historians have called mass hysteria.
Greta Thunberg of Norway

A student goes into a bank. He tells the personal loan banker, “I want to borrow $7,500 per year for the next four or five years.”
“That’s at least $30,000 over time,” the banker says. “Personal loans have a 10 percent interest factor.”
“For my loan,” says the student, “I need an interest rate close to a home mortgage, like 6 percent. Also, I don’t want to be charged interest for the first four or five years of the loan.”
The banker asks, “How long will this loan be for?”
“A twenty-year payoff after graduation or shorter,” replies the student.
The banker asks, “Do you have any collateral assets to secure the loan?”
The student says, “No collateral, but I promise to pay it off when I get a job.”
The banker is incredulous. “Anything else you want to tell me about your plans?”
“Yes,” the

Media reports claim this debt prevents economic recovery. Chuck Schumer would erase it with the flick of a pen. Elizabeth Warren would remove it to free students’ ability to buy a house and form a family. Janet Yellen opines paying off student loan debt (SLD) will free up venture capital. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims the proposed Biden plan is inadequate.