Great column out today by Michael Barone.  He nailed it when he pinpointed the main culprit behind the skyrocketing cost of college education:

Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That’s right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

These people get paid to “liaise” and “facilitate” and produce reports on diversity. How that benefits Cal State students or California taxpayers is unclear.

It is often said that American colleges and universities are the best in the world. That’s undoubtedly true in the hard sciences.

But in the humanities and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, there’s a lot of garbage. Is a degree in religious and women’s studies worth $100,000 in student loan debt? Probably not.

Just like the housing market, college prices are being bid up and up and up, in many cases out of proportion to the actual value of the product.  Like the housing market,  you can trace this hyperinflation to a number of factors:

• the notion that having it is a fundamental right for everyone,
• the influx of public money to pay for people to attend college, with no regard to whether the degree sought is of any value or not,
• the increased reliance on debt-financed dollars to pay costs for (a) necessities that previosuly were paid for out of family resources, and (b) luxuries that were previously done without.
• the tendency of universities to find heretofore unknown “needs” for all this money, including departments and VPs of Diversity who do nothing to make the campus more diverse—at most colleges, diversity means the full range of political expression, from the far left to the extreme far left—LGBT indoctrination programs, etc.

Individuals have no choice to pay the inflated prices, because they must operate in a market that is dominated by government- and debt-financed dollars that have bid up the prices way out of proportion to the market.

Click here to see the rest of Barone’s article.

Can you tell the difference between a conservative, a liberal, and a progressive?

When a conservative wants to buy your vote, he puts his hand in his own pocket and pulls out some cash.  Maybe a pint of whiskey.

A liberal sticks his hand in your pocket, looks you right in the eye, and promises to fight for “your fair share.”

A progressive

1. insults you,
2. grabs your money from the liberal,
3. borrows even more from the Chinese,
4. hands the bill to your children, and then
5. sneers at you as he walks away.

Insightful op-ed piece by Victor Davis Hanson, regarding California and it’s debt situation.

Yes, we are proud that we have changed the attitude, lifestyle, and demography of the state, made it “green,” and have the highest paid public employees and the most generous welfare system—and do not have to soil our hands with nasty things like farming, oil production, or nuclear power. And now we are broke.

click for more …

In 1848, the United States paid $15 million for California, Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo).  Somebody call the Mexican government and offer to return California.  They can keep the $15 million.