As I watch a couple of congresswomen pushing for student loan forgiveness – one owes “over $70,000” and complains about it being “mostly interest”, while the other owes $17,000 and wants her loans forgiven.  Congresscritters are paid $174,000 annually.  Now I don’t have any experience at being paid $174,000 per year.  Despite that lack of experience, I’m pretty sure I could live frugally on a mere $100,000 each year until I had paid off my own loans.  I may be wrong – but the evidence I have makes me believe that I could.

I’ve had a career in the academy, and financial aid has always been on the fringes of my world, beginning with the first competitive scholarship.  I can make a pretty good argument that the Basic Educational Opportunity Grants (renamed Pell Grants in 1980) and the Guaranteed Student Loans have driven the increased costs of tuition and fees – heck, even dormitories – in the past 50 years.  As I recall, my first year of college saw $1304 go through my checkbook – tuition, books, dorm, pizzas – total cost.  At 18, I was paid $2.50/hour for a summer job – $100/week for 12 weeks.  It could be done.  You can dig out your own college cost estimates – the universities all have them – and contrast them with 12 weeks pay.  College costs have increased far faster than wages.  It isn’t easy – but signature loans are available.

A few years back, I was assigned an advisee who was hanging in with a 1 point something GPA on probation.  Lacked any academic strengths, but explained that she needed to be enrolled to keep the student loan that was paying the rent on the apartment she shared with her boyfriend.  Earlier that week I had listened to a new Ph.D. telling how her student loans – a bit over $40,000 were her boyfriend’s reason for not marrying her.  The Guaranteed Student Loan had become a bride price he was unwilling to pay.  She was employable.  My new advisee was not nearly as employable as she had been the day she graduated high school. After two years of college, she had added transcripts with a D average to her resume.  I’m pretty sure she flipped me off with both hands as she walked down the hall after I suggested she evaluate things and come back later.

Glancing at UM’s page on the costs for an undergrad, I see $22,258 per year.  Tuition and fees are $7,412 for Montana resident students.  If we figure 16 credits per semester, 32 credits per year, that amounts to about $230 per credit.  College is not an inexpensive place to find yourself.

I’ve known students who graduated from a land-grant who had $140,000 in student debt.  Unusual, yes – but Congresswoman Tlaib talked about graduating with almost $200,000 in student debt. I’m used to students getting by on the cheap – but the world has changed.  It’s easy to have a Bachelor’s diploma that includes half the cost of a house purchase as existing debt.

As a demographer, I’m kind of used to working with numbers about jobs.  There are unyielding equations – one is that it takes a population of about 30,000 to provide a job for one Ph.D.  sociologist.  There’s roughly one position in Congress for every 750,000 people – it does give perspective.  Those simple numbers should be available to anyone who is enrolling in college.  The principle of compound interest should be a required class.  I recall another student – bright woman who had started school in her 40’s.  She was ABD – all but dissertation.  At 52.  When we worked the math on her student loans the unyielding equations said that she would not be able to make more than minimum payments.  When we looked at the life expectancy charts, she could anticipate her funeral before the debt was paid off.  And it is a lot easier to get a student loan than a car loan or home loan.

A table from studentloanhero.com shows 1.71 trillion dollars total in student loans.  Loans owed to the government are:

Direct Loans	$1.32 Trillion	35.9 Million Borrowers
FFEL Loans	$245.9 billion	11.0 million borrowers
Perkins Loans	$5.2 billion	1.7 million borrowers
Total (All Federal)	$1.57 trillion	42.9 million borrowers

I can still (barely) handle the math.  My calculator can’t handle all the zeroes.  A trillion is a thousand billion.  A billion is a thousand million.  Just for the record, there are a few less than 330 million people living in the United states.  Basically one out of eight Americans has student loan obligations.  Go ahead.  Work the math.

I noticed a meme this morning, stressing the well known Finnish Sniper Simo Haya.  Like all memes, it is partly true – Haya’s rifle was a Mosin-Nagant.  It was also worked on to be competitive in target shooting, and he also used a submachine gun in racking up windrows of dead Russian invaders. 

Simo Haya is a well-known name compared to Aimo Lahti.  Of course, Finland is a small country, and allied itself with Germany in the second world war, so even the name Simo Haya doesn’t have a huge amount of recognition in the US 80 years after the war.  So I will write on Lahti.

I have no doubt that John Moses Browning was our nation’s top gun designer.  Likewise, it isn’t hard to put him above Mauser or Schmeisser – Browning worked with everything but bolt actions.  Mauser perfected the bolt gun.  Still, I would put Aimo Lahti at about the same level as John Moses Browning – an impressive gun designer, limited by his nation’s small size, and more impressively, forced into retirement as part of the deal to end the Finnish-Russian war.  In the English language, Kevin O’Brien probably said it best

“The spiteful Soviets, whose troops had been shot full of holes by many Lahti designs, demanded that that the Finn retire from arms design, and he did, living on a pension until 1970. His only child became a Finnish Air Force aviator and perished during the Continuation War.”  

The sentiment has probably been better written in Finnish, but I don’t read the language.  O’Brien has a lengthy post about Lahti and his accomplishments at https://weaponsman.looserounds.com/?p=15260 .

I’ll include another quote from O’Brien – more to encourage folks to click the link and read the rest of the story.  It includes photographs – and does a good job of explaining why I rate the man as the closest to John Moses Browning.

Aimo is little known in the Anglosphere, but his name rings a bell because two of his best-known guns bore his own name: the Lahti M/35 automatic pistol (also adopted in Denmark and in Sweden as the M/40) which combined the natural-pointing grip angle of the Luger with a completely different mechanism, and the Lahti M/39 semiautomatic antitank rifle, advertised for years in the pages of American Rifleman and other 1960s gun magazines. The M/39 was the object of every boy’s envy, later, even if by 1939 it was already marginal medicine on tanks. Lahti would use the same basic mechanism in the beefier VKT 40 anti-aircraft gun, usually seen as a twin mount.

He also co-designed the standard Finnish light machine gun of the Winter and Continuation Wars, the Lahti-Saloranta L/S 26. (It would be replaced by Russian DP LMGs which were captured in vast quantities). He was also responsible for some of the Finnish improvements to the Mosin-Nagant rifle, and for a modified Maxim for aerial and AA use called the VKT. All in all he designed over 50 weapons, counting designs like the M/27 rifle (a modified Mosin).

Lahti’s most influential gun did not bear his name at all. It was the Machine Pistol (“Konepistooli” or KP) 31, the famous “Suomi” (a word which just means “Finland.”) While by 1931 this submachine gun was not entirely revolutionary, we need to bear in mind that the 1931 model was an update of a 1926 model, which in turn was an update of a 1922 run of prototypes. That makes the Suomi, for all intents and purposes, a contemporary of the early Thompson, yielding primacy only to the Thompson and the German MP18.”

There is something I can really appreciate in a designer who comes up with a submachine gun capable of a minute of angle shots at 100 yards – particularly doing it with the tools available 90 years ago.

The EPA has spoken.  All non-electric cars made after 2026 have to average 55 miles per gallon.  I remember how I felt back in the Nixon days, when someone explained, “It’s no big deal.  I’ll just trade the V-8 in on a four cylinder.”  I was already driving a 4 cylinder, and it got over mpg.  It was a 1960 Borgward, with a tall fourth gear.  2,469 pounds, and the factory stock specs were 22.3 mpg.  The blued and balanced engine helped for fuel efficiency as well as speed.  I once made the Bozeman to Trego trip on exactly 10 gallons of gas. 

Still, the easiest way to improve gas mileage is to lighten the car and shrink the engine.  The garage project is a 1988 Yugo – the Borgward engine had 91 cubic inches.  The Yugo measures in at 55 cubes and 1643 pounds curb weight.  I usually drove it with my right foot pushed into the carb – but on one trip from Libby to Havre, I kept it below 50 all the way, and almost coaxed 50 mpg out of the little beast. 

It’s another unyielding equation – gas mileage relates directly to the size and speed of the vehicle, with comfort also reducing mileage (neither the Borgward nor the Yugo had air conditioning, power steering or automatic transmissions).  If I remember correctly, the General Motors EV1 battery weighed in at 1150 pounds and a Tesla is about 1200 pounds.  There’s a lot of energy involved just in pushing those vehicles down the road (the lightest Tesla weighs about 3,550 pounds).

I recollect an all-electric skid steer built by our ag engineering department.  It didn’t pan out as practical compared to diesel – but weight on a skid steer isn’t a bad thing, and speed isn’t necessary.  Mentally, I toy with the idea of a little electric pickup charging on a couple solar panels and working around the place.  We have the technology to build the unit I envision – it’s just that few potential buyers share what I want the rig to do, and it is built in China, not the US.

The thing is (without checking my memory and sources) somewhere between half and five eights of US electrical generation comes from fossil fuels.  It’s not enough to say gasoline is bad, electric is good in this situation – every time you convert the power, the conversion takes power. 

Treehugger provides a chart of gasoline gallon equivalents, calculated by the same EPA. 

Gasoline Equivalents
Fuel Type	Unit of Measure	BTUs/Unit	Gallon Equivalent
Gasoline (regular)	gallon	114,100	1.00 gallon
Diesel #2	gallon	129,500	0.88 gallons
Biodiesel (B100)	gallon	118,300	0.96 gallons
Biodiesel (B20)	gallon	127,250	0.90 gallons
Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)	cubic foot	900	126.67 cu. ft.
Liquid Natural Gas (LNG)	gallon	75,000	1.52 gallons
Propane (LPG)	gallon	84,300	1.35 gallons
Ethanol (E100)	gallon	76,100	1.50 gallons
Ethanol (E85)	gallon	81,800	1.39 gallons
Methanol (M100)	gallon	56,800	2.01 gallons
Methanol (M85)	gallon	65,400	1.74 gallons
Electricity	kilowatt hour (Kwh)	3,400	33.56 Kwhs

Using my own power bill, I come up with $0.314 per Kwh (the total bill, divided by kwh – the demand charges, etc make the 0.04957 charge shown on the bill unusable for comparison)

Basically, if I were charging my non-existent Tesla at the old gas station, the price of electric power would be roughly equivalent to $10.53/gallon regular.  Kicking out the demand charges and other additions, and just using Lincoln Electric’s .04957 it’s $1.66/gallon regular. 

It’s useful information – if my hypothetical solar cell (powering my equally hypothetical electric vehicle) produces 400 watts per hour, and does so for 12 hours a day, it’s pumping 4.8 Kwh into my battery – so every week it produces the equivalent of a gallon of gas – something on the close order of a trip to Eureka and back every 10 days – ignoring clouds.

I’ve been fortunate to live in the gasoline powered era.

The Gregorian year is 365 days in 3 years out of 4, then 366 in the leap year.  The tropical year – the time it takes the planet to circle the sun is 365.242199 days.  That difference from 365.25 is why we had a leap year back in 2000 but didn’t in 1900.  It’s complicated, but the shifting dates on solstices and equinoxes provided the data for development of the Gregorian calendar. 

The Roman calendar, prior to Julius’ corrections, worked with a 355 day year, with some extras thrown in every so often.  It was a hard system to know what year it was.  Julius wasn’t a great astronomer or mathematician, but he did want to get his supplies on time – so calendar reform was important to him.  The Julian calendar consisted of 365 day years and a 366 day leap year every fourth year – essentially the same as the calendar we’ve known all our lives (despite the fact that we live under the Gregorian calendar – where a year is 365.2425 days.

His calendar was instituted in 45 BC, and was the standard until 1582.  After 1627 years, that extra 0.0075 had added up to 12 days – and that would not have been a big deal if it weren’t for the solstice and equinox.  Even with poor equipment and cloudy days, the error showed up (reliable clocks just weren’t around yet).  Add in about sixty years of a math error calling every third year a leap year, the problem became too big to ignore.

Still, Julius Caesar’s calendar was almost the same as our own – the thing is, every time the century turns over, it’s only a leap year if the year can be divided by 400.  Since 1900 wasn’t a leap year, and 2000 was, for our lifetimes, there has been no difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars.  Some of our youngest readers will live past February 28, 2100 – and experience the Gregorian calendar.

As for why February gets the extra day?  Those old Romans started the year with March, not January.

I heard the comment that Joe Biden would replace Jimmy Carter as our worst President.  I have to stick up for Carter – we had extreme inflation on his watch, and the Iranians took over the embassy – but his accomplishments are insignificant compared to James Buchanan.  In Buchanan’s single term.  He came in as “Ten Cent Jimmy” – believing that ten cents was adequate pay for a day’s work.   He enforced the Fugitive Slave Act.  He tried to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state.  Before he was replaced by Lincoln, 7 states had seceded.

Buchanan retired to Wheatland, secure in his belief that posterity would vindicate his decisions.  It never did – though Secession is more associated with Lincoln than Buchanon.  Admitted, I voted for Carter, but in my analysis Buchanan owns the title as America’s worst President.

And Buchanan has some runners-up that may keep Carter out of second or third place in the “Worst President” race.  Referred to as “His Accidency,” John Tyler was the nation’s first vice-president to move into the presidency when the President (William Henry Harrison) died of pneumonia. He ran for VP as a Whig, and as President, the Whigs tried to impeach him. 

We call George Washington the Father of His Country – though Tyler’s record of fathering 15 children may put him in second position there.  After the presidency, he was elected to the Confederate Congress, but died before being installed. 

Jimmy Carter banned hard liquor from the White House – John Tyler kept two barrels of whiskey on hand.  Buchanan, as a Senator, bought 10 gallons of whisky each week from Jacob Baer.  Some scholars have suggested that his whisky (and wine) habits influenced sending federal troops west for the Utah war (aka Buchanan’s Blunder).

Replacing Buchanan as the nation’s worst president is going to take some effort.  I guess getting 8 states to secede would do it, but it seems a pretty high bar. 

Generally, inflation is a product of governmental monetary policy.  Stable currency isn’t often the goal of the politicians, so we wind up with inflation.

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations wrote: “The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”  If you just print more currency – whether in the Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, or Washington DC, you’re devaluing the currency – there isn’t much toil and trouble in acquiring it. 

If you travel into a third-world country, and tip in one dollar bills, you will see that even a single yankee dollar is valued above the tip in the local currency.  There are some nations that have gone through enough inflation (their local monetary policy) that they no longer print their own money.  Zimbabwe’s currency is worthless.  Ecuador uses the yankee dollar.

Gresham’s law simplified says “Bad money drives good money out of circulation.”  Since there are just under 200 nations in the world, and all politicians like to print more money, the simple answer to beat inflation is to have the best money.  A century ago, it was probably the British Pound.  We replaced that with the US dollar – and over the 20th century, removed the silver and gold backing.  Basically, during my lifetime, the US dollar has been the best money available – but not due to monetary policy.

The problem is, long term outlooks only run so far as the next election to most politicians.  We need a monetary policy that recognizes the advantages of being the world’s best reserve currency.  The dollars that circulate in Zimbabwe or Ecuador aren’t coming home to be cashed in.  It’s not like we need to eliminate inflation – we just need to have less than anyone else.

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that value is produced by labor.  Marx wrote something to the effect “Capital is dead labor.”  The monetary policy is fairly simple – make sure you have the lowest inflation rate and the highest opportunity for production.  The problem is teaching our political leaders to look further than the next election. We can’t do it as individuals. If our dollar remains the world’s best currency, a lot of Franklins will be stashed in pillows overseas.  If it drops, those dollars will come home.