Is This The ‘70s All Over Again?

Most economic numbers paint a dire picture for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. Steve, Jonah, ...

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Most economic numbers paint a dire picture for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. Steve, Jonah, and David discuss who is exactly to blame for that. Then the trio wade into the debate over forgiving student loans. (Spoiler alert: They aren’t fans.) Will the woes in the Democratic Party produce a Ronald Reagan-type figure on the right? Plus, what is everyone’s opinion of the White House Correspondents Dinner?

Show Notes: 

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  1. Pelican

    Same concerns about Steve's audio.

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    WKDawson

    Well, Biden did put Jerome Powell, a student of Paul Volcker, on the FED (just as Carter put Paul Volcker on the FED), so it may be Biden taking the heat for something that everyone else would kick down the road.

    I guess you all are people who aimed to make money and lots of it, but not everyone who seeks an education has that goal. Consider pastors. Some megachurch pastors make six figure salaries, but most pastors, who often have to seek a graduate degree, do not. I'm not sure about synagogues, but I wouldn't expect every rabbi is a rich man.

    I don't know if any of you have appreciation for classical music, but to achieve the level where you could maybe play in something like the Emerson Quartet, you would need to have quite an extensive amount of training, including university. It is not just a trivia to learn to play music in the way it was intended. For a rock/fusion band, you work it out as you go and find your own thing, but within classical music, in addition to talent, you need a deep education to know the music literature, and extensive training, and that means schooling.

    The same is for literature, and other arts and humanities.

    Most of that stuff doesn't make that much money, but we lose something if we throw it away. When we are ignorant, we don't appreciate the knowledge of the past, we neglect it and we lose something as a result.

    Mind you, I don't think that we should just cancel the loans. What needs to change is that at least for state colleges, we should make them accessible to anyone who really wants to learn. This is an advanced nation where we depend on a population of educated people to make decisions. Your own frustration with the asininity that goes on in Congress and sometimes the Senate is partly the fault of people who didn't want to educate themselves. Yes, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink, but at least make the water available for the horses that are willing to drink. This college system with its cancer of permanent administrative positions, at the expense of making lots of adjunct faculty is just nonsense. It is time we fixed the system in the state universities and made education something that people can afford if they are serious about learning.



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  3. Joe O

    Suggest you test your equipment before recording.

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    Jay Larson

    Great podcast! Good analysis on the varied topics.

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    Andy Napoli

    RE: Uhtred son of Uhtred -- I absolutely LOVED "The Last Kingdom." I've watched the entire series. I thought the final season was pretty good, all things considered.

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    Andy Napoli

    RE: Reactions from the House GOP Conference to REP Kevin McCarthy. You guys pretty much nailed it. All House GOP reactions need to be seen through a Tribalist lens. The only reaction that matters is Trump's.

    The parallels to today's GOP to the Soviet Communist Party (Brezhnev-through Andropov era) are very striking. The Soviet leadership back then knew full well that their system was ideologically, morally, and economically bankrupt. Yet they still threw people in prison for openly questioning it. They still ranted and raved at "The West" and dutifully quoted the right passages from Marix, Lenin, Stalin, etc. They still rallied to defend Soviet Communist power and the privileges of the Party whenever it was attacked (especially from abroad). They did this because at root, all they cared about was maintaining power for its own sake. Whatever sacrifices they had to make regarding their own dignity and integrity, they made because power was not just everything -- it's the ONLY thing. The Soviets justified this because they assumed that the US and NATO was just a mirror image of themselves. The Soviets assumed that the West made the exact same moral compromises -- they were just more hypocritical about it.

    Negative partisanship pretty much explains all of it. It's pathetic.

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  7. Chestnut

    On several occasions recently we’ve tried to listen to the Dispatch pod in the car without success. The audio levels constantly change. Steve’s audio here is not possible to hear especially in a noisy environment like a car and it keeps changing throughout the pod. I assume you guys are using mastering software on your podcasts but whatever it is, it’s not working. Actually it sounds to me like a bad automatic gain control or a compressor that is set wrong. This seems to be a new problem over the last couple of months and we’ve noticed it on the Remnant several times as well. I hope you get it fixed. It’s really frustrating because we just have to listen to something else. (BTW, Honestly with Bari Weiss sounds great). EQ and compression software can do the normalization automatically so something is way wrong in the processing.

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    Holly

    If you think democrats are college-educated liberals you haven't been to Pittsburgh lately, where the democrats tend to be some combination of: Roman Catholic, socially conservative/moderate, in a labor union.

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    Jon McKinney

    Why isn't anyone talking about student loan reform instead of forgiveness. We all know that the cost of higher education is far outpacing inflation and that a bachelor's degree is equivalent to the earning potential of a high-school diploma in 1970. The interest is the bad part, why not eliminate interest during repayment or remove excess interest on loans of borrowers that have been in extended forbearance? Technology is only getting more advanced, we need to make education affordable and attainable. Blaming millennial who were given loans that cannot be discharged thru bankruptcy right after they got out of high-school with no credit is not the answer.

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    Mulecanter

    Steve's audio was into a mic with four wool socks over it. Muffled, I was turning volume up and down to hear.

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