Ben Stein is a sane conservative and a professional humorist. In this article, he explains why Donald Trump’s economic ideas are a threat to the stability of the global economy. Trump recently said he could save billions by making a deal with the nation’s creditors and not paying back 100 cents on the dollar on bonds–in other words, abandoning the “full faith and credit” that maintains the trustworthiness of the American dollar. Stein explains why this is a terrible idea that shows that one can’t import the finagling of the businessman into world economics. His view: Trump was not a good businessman, and he needs to find some experienced advisors fast and listen to them.
What has this to do with education? This too is a realm where non-educators have imposed ideas that come from the business world. Our children are not “products,” test scores are not profits or losses, and education leaders are not CEOs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What has this to do with education?
Well, we might want to track down his professors at the Warton School and ask for a big dose of accountability for this particular product of the program.
Let us see Trump’s test scores, the texts he was required to read and master, the VAM ratings of his professors, and so on.
Get the evidence of performance, then ignore it.
Just apply the logic of corporate reform. Close the school, fire the professors.
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Trump went to NY Military Academy, was named Captain and of course did well. But as you say, ignore it.
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He also declared bankruptcy four times. Being captain at the Military Academy doesn’t qualify him to be commander in chief.
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Diane,
Trump never declared personal bankruptcy, but his businesses have declared bankruptcy many times. He thinks that is different, but it is the same.
On the other hand he is a perfect example of one who is mentally bankrupt.
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Trump has had children with 3 different women. He allegedly took his mistress on a family vacation, where she was stashed for assignations, in a different room of the hotel. Nice role model, for respecting women.
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Pundits love to paint both Sanders and Trump as outsiders. They forget that Bernie has been a respected member of Congress for decades. He has more than paid his dues. The big difference aside from being from the opposite sides of the political spectrum is that Bernie understands consequences. Unlike Mr. multiple bankruptcy, Bernie would not treat our economy like a game of high stakes poker. He will not pick up red phone in a hissy fit with Kim Jong Un. Bernie understands consequences. Unfortunately, Bernie will probably not get a chance to share his vision with us, but it is possible that Donald Trump may.
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I wonder what he is going to pay with? Take out another bond of course. This is what got Puerto Rico into a big mess.
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You betcha…. Krugman said much the same today . Remember Trump roguery defaults on his debts and BETRAYS people who trust his snake-oil pitches.
“First of all, Mr. Trump obviously believes that America could easily find itself facing a debt crisis. But why? After all, investors, who are willing to lend to America at incredibly low interest rates, are evidently not worried by our debt. And there’s good reason for their calmness: federal interest payments are only 1.3 percent of G.D.P., or 6 percent of total outlays.
These numbers mean both that the burden of the debt is fairly small and that even complete repudiation of that debt would have only a minor impact on the government’s cash flow.
So why is Mr. Trump even talking about this subject? Well, one possible answer is that lots of supposedly serious people have been hyping the alleged threat posed by federal debt for years. For example, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has warned repeatedly about a “looming debt crisis.” Indeed, until not long ago the whole Beltway elite seemed to be in the grip of BowlesSimpsonism, with its assertion that debt was the greatest threat facing the nation.
A lot of this debt hysteria was really about trying to bully us into cutting Social Security and Medicare, which is why so many self-proclaimed fiscal hawks were also eager to cut taxes on the rich. But Mr. Trump apparently wasn’t in on that particular con, and takes the phony debt scare seriously. Sad!
Still, even if he misunderstands the fiscal situation, how can he imagine that it would be O.K. for America to default? One answer is that he’s extrapolating from his own business career, in which he has done very well by running up debts, then walking away from them.
But it’s also true that much of the Republican Party shares his insouciance about default. Remember, the party’s congressional wing deliberately set about extracting concessions from President Obama, using the threat of gratuitous default via a refusal to raise the debt ceiling.
And quite a few Republican lawmakers defended that strategy of extortion by arguing that default wouldn’t be that bad, that even with its access to funds cut off the U.S. government could “prioritize” payments, and that the financial disruption would be no big deal.
Given that history, it’s not too hard to understand why candidate Trump thinks not paying debts in full makes sense!
The important thing to realize, then, is that when Mr. Trump talks nonsense, he’s usually just offering a bombastic version of a position that’s widespread in his party. In fact, it’s remarkable how many ridiculous Trumpisms were previously espoused by Mitt Romney in 2012, from his claim that the true unemployment rate vastly exceeds official figures to his claim that he can bring prosperity by starting a trade war with China.
None of this should be taken as an excuse for Mr. Trump. He really is frighteningly uninformed; worse, he doesn’t appear to know what he doesn’t know. The point, instead, is that his blithe lack of knowledge largely follows from the know-nothing attitudes of the party he now leads.
Oh, and just for the record: No, it’s not the same on the other side of the aisle. You may dislike Hillary Clinton, you may disagree sharply with her policies, but she and the people around her do know their facts. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom, but in this election, one party has largely cornered the market in raw ignorance.
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I’m sorry, but I just do not think that Ben Stein is a “sane” conservative.
He thought that “Deep Throat” was a fake. He didn’t think that Richard Nixon was so bad at all. He gave a commencement speech at Liberty University in 2009, when he was awarded an honorary degree and where, among other things, he spoke about creationism (he doesn’t “believe” in evolution). Right before the Great Recession in the late 2000’s, he was vehemently insisting that the economy was going into a recession, and that the housing market and the subprime housing lending would have no impact on the broader economy. He is an opponent of legalized abortion.
And on and on and on.
Sure, he has said that taxes should be increased on the wealthy, but that’s simply not enough for me to call him a “sane” conservative.
So he thinks that Trump’s ideas threaten the stability of the world economy. He’s right on this, but even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile.
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Agree with you Zorba…Stein has always been more a whacko than a measured “sane” Right Winger. Thanks for this list which can easily be googled to read up on his well publicized belief system.
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Ellen, I meant to say that Stein was “vehemently insisting” that the economy was NOT going into a recession. Ah well, no editing of our comments.
Yes, Stein is indeed more of a whacko. I’m old enough that I have followed Stein’s whacko beliefs for years.
He was funny, in his droning way, in “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off,” and occasionally interesting in the game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” But that’s about it, and it doesn’t make him a political or economic genius.
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Zorba, okay, call him a garden-variety insane conservative.
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LOL! Okay, yes.
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“He thought that “Deep Throat” was a fake.
Zorba
Which movie was he referring to?
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LOL! 😀
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Agree. When Stein, hits the stump, to demand greater income equality as THE solution to national economic growth, he will qualify as understanding the field of economics. Usually, he spouts mumbo jumbo, from the right-wing.
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This is shaping up to be one of the saddest elections ever. One one side we have a candidate that we flat out know will be bad for the country. She’s 100% predictable. Despite what she might say at any given moment, her track record is consistently pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-privatization, anti-democracy.
On the other side we have a wild loose cannon firing in all directions with people lining up to cheer him on. We can’t really know exactly what he’ll do but given his slew of bankruptcies, bad business deals and general level of offensiveness, it’s nearly guaranteed to be terrible.
So do we go with the slow and sure poison or the unpredictable but fast acting poison? What a choice.
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You nailed it. That’s it in a nutshell.
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“You won’t be surprised to hear that freescore.com is not free: in order to get any information out of them at all, you have to authorize them to charge you a $29.95 monthly fee. They even extract a dollar out of you up front, just to make sure that money is there.
Stein, here, has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.
The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason — as if the case for the prosecution weren’t damning enough already — for the NYT to cancel Stein’s contract forthwith. It’s simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its “Everybody’s Business” columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/16/ben-stein-predatory-bait-and-switch-merchant/
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Chiara, you might say that “it takes one to know one.”
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“Economic Stability”
Economy must be stable
Or else the billionaires
Will simply not be able
To sell us all their wares
We simply must maintain
Unequal status quo
To change would put a drain
On those who run the show
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Those supporting Trump are in for a rude awakening when he picks a V.P. and starts getting/taking advice from the Good Old Boys in the GOP. The GOP WILL get behind Trump, and it will be the bait and switch – whatever it is about Trump that people find appealing will disappear and be replaced with republican same old same old.
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The “full faith and credit” that maintains the trustworthiness of the American dollar
came with the “key-stroke” dollars issued by the Fed for the banksters. The bond
holders get the same magic…Full faith in the Fed key strokes…
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I wanted a Bernie Sanders presidency. It was a Berning desire. …Help me, Bernie Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope… Now that that’s so unlikely to happen, I feel my old, Generation X insouciance creeping upon me again, like it’s 1996 all over again. It’s conservative economic policy versus conservative economic policy. Again.
I’m still fired up to fight privatization and Big Data, though. My focus is on states and cities. Defending public education is becoming my only viable issue, and it seems to me that voting for president has little or nothing to do with it anymore. It is a sad day.
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Ben also says of Mr. Trump: “There are many likeable aspects to Mr. Trump. He is non-PC. He is not afraid of Hillary and her friends in the media. He is not afraid to stand up for keeping America a real nation by enforcing the legal status of immigration. He plans a much bigger defense. That’s his single best point.”
And then this: “He said he had not meant to imply he would not pay 100 cents on the dollar. What he meant, he said, was that if times got really tough and the government needed to save a few shekels, he would borrow at low interest rates to buy back and retire high interest Treasury debt. He had learned such maneuvers, he said, because he was “the king of debt” when he was building his business empire.”
And finally this about a book a friend of his has written: “Phil offers us the example of the peerless Mr. Warren Buffett, the most successful investor of all time. Mr. Buffett accomplished this in large measure by transmuting ordinary income into something less heavily taxed. There is no one who cannot learn from Mr. Buffett — and there is no one who cannot learn valuable lessons in investing and harvesting returns by buying and reading The Overtaxed Investor.”
Ben Stein is also the notorious movie maker of Expelled, claiming to document how scientific atheists persecute scientists who like to do research on Intelligent Design, vs. the evolutionary theory of nature.
I am, of course, all in favor of “sane conservatives.”
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Randi Wengarten is a superdelegate. That’s the kicker.
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Good for Stein. However, several years ago he produced a 2-hour film, shown in theaters, denigrating the teaching of evolution, one of the worst, most irresponsible films ever made.
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Trump Selects a White Nationalist Leader Johnson as a Delegate in California
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/donald-trump-white-nationalist-afp-delegate-california
“The SPLC’s Potok says Trump has “legitimized and mainstreamed hate” in ways we haven’t seen since the days of George Wallace. Though nobody can say for sure how many people belong to America’s largest hate groups, the SPLC has found that the number of such groups grew by 14 percent in 2015, reversing years of declines. Potok worries that Trump could fuel the spread of the AFP’s ideas for years to come.
Johnson, a White Nationalist Leader selected by Trump to be his delegate in CA, is a corporate lawyer who grows persimmons and raises chickens at his 67-acre “ranch” in a Los Angeles suburb. [..] When the author of the article met him Johnson suggested to get lunch at a nearby Korean restaurant. As we sat next to a table of immaculately coiffed Korean Air flight attendants, I mentioned that some might find it surprising that a guy who wrote a book advocating the creation of an all-white ethno-state was eating a plate of bulgogi beef with kimchee. “Koreans don’t have to make Korean food,” he said matter-of-factly. “One of the best Chinese restaurants I went to in the Bay Area is owned by a Mormon and cooked by a Mormon. Really great Chinese food.
[..]
In 1985, Johnson published, under a pseudonym, Amendment to the Constitution: Averting the Decline and Fall of America, a book calling for the abolition of the 14th and 15th Amendments and the deportation of all nonwhites. He tried to sound a practical tone, allowing, for instance, that African Americans should receive “a rich dowry to enable them to prosper in their homeland.”
[..]
In addition to promoting Trump on the radio and over the phone, the AFP streams a podcast called the Daily Trump Phenomenon Hour. It has set up a “political harassment hotline” for Trump supporters who wish to consult with an attorney about being attacked or verbally abused by anti-Trump protesters. Johnson has personally spent $30,000 on the Trump promotions, including $18,000 for the robocalls.
[..]
The show allows Johnson to push a Trump-centric version of white nationalism to a potentially receptive audience—up to a point.[..] During a commercial break, Johnson fidgeted. “Are you going to quote any more Scriptures?” he asked Tan nervously. “Has the station said that we’re not Christian enough?” Back on the air, Tan pivoted to 1 Samuel 16, comparing Trump to King David.
[Johnson] ideally would like to give up his practice and serve as Trump’s secretary of agriculture.
We ended up in a mirrored conference room to meet with three AFP sympathizers, two middle-aged women and a young man. They talked about how Trump had enabled a new kind of “honest discourse,” how he wasn’t a racist but a “racialist,” and how he had left them feeling “emancipated.”
“”
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Diane – This NYTimes editorial leaves many unanswered questions and their editorial opinions on education have been off base so many times. If you can shed any light on this supposed research, I’d appreciate it. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/opinion/guess-whos-taking-remedial-classes.html?emc=edit_ty_20160510&nl=opinion&nlid=17546779
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