Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Government money teat is cut off to ITT

In a blatant act of self-serving whining, ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit technical college, complains that a curtailment of free government money is forcing it to close its doors.  You can read the article for yourself but here is the bottom line: the easy money era has peaked and those who were the recipients of the easy, debt based funding are now going to actually have to compete in the market place with the rest of us or they will be out on the street.  If ITT was a cost effective program then it would not need government money in order to survive.  It would simply provide a service that was so good that people would be beating down its doors to get in.  Instead it is a top heavy bureaucracy which could only exist outside of real market forces.  Thus the whining about how mean and stupid government is for not continuing the free payday indefinitely.

Institutions like ITT went on the rise at the same time that corporations began to stop their apprenticeship programs.  I was among the very last to receive big internal cross training from IBM, for example.  For decades IBM was known to be a leader in apprenticeship work (even though they did not call it such).  But then the free and easy government funding of everything began to distort these old norms and as government took more responsibility for funding these things, corporations got the benefit without the bill.  So corporations shut down apprenticeship programs.  But now the ability to fund debt forever is being questioned.  Anyone with a brain knows that Trump meant what he said about defaulting on the national debt just as soon as payment became difficult due to recession or rising interest rate.  Hillary is too smart to say it out loud but she knows the score as well.

Watch for more and more government funded programs to be curtailed or shut down.  I expect the national park service to take a huge hit.  We do not need a small army of park cops ruining the tranquility of our back to nature experience with their zero tolerance agenda.  By that, I simply mean it is not important to the economy to employ these parasites and it is these nonessential services which will be hit the first and the worst. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It should be interesting when the federales attempt to pull a fast one on the people with the tried and true Washington Monument Strategy (v. http://bit.ly/2c2Gqzo ) and the people not only shrug it off, but actually storm the parks.

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