The utter uselessness of centrism

by: Eric B.

Thu Feb 02, 2012 at 17:31:25 PM EST

Very Serious Person Phil Power has penned another of those Op-Ed pieces that suggests that he isn't terribly aware of how the political grounds have shifted. It's all, "The solution can be found in the center." His latest topic? University funding and student debt.

Not surprisingly, student debt in our state has ballooned to $1.8 billion for last year alone. Talk to university officials, and they have no doubt why this is so: They say it's the result of our governors and legislatures choosing — for decades — to shortchange higher education.

The less state support, the argument goes, the higher schools have to push tuition.There is, indeed, evidence for this: In the 1970s, the state covered around three-quarters of total university costs; today, the numbers are reversed. Not surprisingly, tuition has soared.Consequently, it's not unreasonable to conclude that Michigan has imposed a stiff "college use tax" on hundreds of thousands of Michigan students and their families.

Power's own outlet, The Bridge, has accurately reported this, and pointed out that the burden of costs for a degree have shifted from three-quarters of it being paid for through state appropriations to one-quarter of it. In other words, the state has for decades rolled back its support for its university system in a way that is quantifiable through data. How long is it going to be before Phil Power takes seriously the reporting of his own outlet?

He goes on.

But the folks in the current legislature, particularly the House of Representatives, sharply disagree. They think the universities are constantly whining for more state money while asserting that their constitutional autonomy immunizes them from legislative attempts to cut costs, boost productivity and enforce graduation standards.

There are two major fixed costs in our universities, labor costs and energy. Labor study after labor study have concluded that when compared to private sector employees, those in the public sector -- and this includes university faculty -- are not compensated as well. In other words, we're already underpaying our most important university employee pool ... tenured and tenure-track faculty (i.e. the people responsible for teaching the kiddos). And, that represents one of the two major fixed costs that eat up a university's budget. As for energy costs, the university system is largely leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else in energy efficiency and finding newer and cheaper ways to create energy and reduce those costs.

The problem here isn't that a solution exists in the center that no one can agree one. The problem here is that one of these parties exists in a fantasy world, where the solution to everything is to cut spending. The other problem is that it is no secret that this party exists in its fantasy world, because it's solution for the last decade has been to cut spending ... long after it's become obvious that continued cuts to spending is the lunatic course. These are the same people who don't believe that economically-useless tax cuts amid two wars exploded the deficit, that the housing crisis and near collapse of the financial sector in 2008 was the product of unchecked Wall Street greed (they continue to assert that it was somehow Fannie Mae's dalliance into subprime lending, ignoring that it was illegal for Fannie Mae to do so until long after everyone else had gotten into it), that refusing to pay off loans will damage the nation's credit, and that global warming is a hoax.

Again, the problem here is that Phil Power has correctly identified the problem ... student debt caused by university budget shortfalls. His outlet's reporting correctly identified the most likely culprit ... a massive shift in the cost burden of universities from society as a whole to individual students. His solution ignores that, however, and once again posits that the real solution rests somewhere in the middle of ironclad facts and unfounded fantasy. Why again does this sort of thing get treated with the gravity of the Word of God?