Three Things I Think I Think, Weekend Edition

Here are some things I think I am thinking about:

1. Bernie Sanders does economics…. Here’s a very strange Tweet from Bernie Sanders showing that even potential leaders of the USA don’t need to understand economics 101:

It makes no sense that students and their parents pay higher interest rates for college than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 15, 2015

Yikes.  Actually, it makes perfectly good sense that a borrower with no collateral and no income pays a higher interest rate than most auto or home buyers.  In fact, it doesn’t make sense that someone with no income and no collateral can even get a loan.  But the government ensures that going to college, which is actually a wonderful investment, is an option for zero creditworthy borrowers.  As Pew Research has detailed in excruciating detail, the biggest cost in one’s life might just be NOT going to college.

This isn’t the point I am so concerned with though.  The payoff of college is a pretty granular discussion and one that can’t really be generalized.  But what’s concerning here, for me, is that political candidates seem to lack basic monetary knowledge and worse, will intentionally misconstrue important points just to gain favor with potential voters.  Either way, it doesn’t seem good to me.

2.  No.  Make it Stop.  Not the debt ceiling again.  The US Treasury is about to run out of money again.  Well, not really.  This entity can sell bonds at 0% interest rates so they literally cannot “run out of money”.  But Congress is basically telling them they aren’t allowed to sell those bonds at 0%.  Which is really weird because Congress is the entity that voted to allow the spending that resulted in Treasury needing to sell bonds in the first place.  As I’ve described in the past, it’s as if I ate a whole pizza and then tied a knot in my intestine and threatened my stomach not to digest that pizza: “don’t you even think about digesting that food I already ate!”.  Yeah, that’s not really how that works.