HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Chicago Startup Invests Directly in Students.

One idea for dealing with the student debt problem that has been kicking around for the past few years is “equity-based financing.” It’s a system in which people “invest” in college students, helping them pay for their tuition in return for a percentage of their future earnings. The idea sounds good on paper in other ways: markets funding certain degrees could end up being a powerful signal as to which programs are worth their sticker prices.

But the idea has remained largely untried. Until now. Enter Educational Equity, Inc., a Chicago startup that is dipping its toes in the water. As the company’s founder said in an interview with Forbes, he prefers to focus on a narrow range of degrees with steady returns and students who have demonstrated commitment in their previous endeavors.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

NOW THEY TELL US: National Journal: Obama Handles Russia Like Republicans: Overpromise, Under-Deliver and Write Off; Democratic ally says of Obama: ‘He’s just not a natural leader.’

ED DRISCOLL: Punks, Meet The Godfather.

AT AMAZON, 59% off on Leave It To Beaver, the complete series. On DVD. And there are a lot of them.

Also, shop Mother’s Day gifts in Home & Kitchen. Everybody likes kitchen stuff.

SHOCKINGLY, BOOK ATTEMPTING MARXIST RELAUNCH is “all wrong.”

There’s a persistent tension between the limits of the data he presents and the grandiosity of the conclusions he draws. At times this borders on schizophrenia. In introducing each set of data, he’s all caution and modesty, as he should be, because measurement problems arise at every stage. Almost in the next paragraph, he states a conclusion that goes beyond what the data would support even if it were unimpeachable.

This tendency is apparent all through the book, but most marked at the end, when he sums up his findings about “the central contradiction of capitalism.”

When people start talking about contradictions of capitalism, I can’t help but think that the biggest contradiction is how many people have gotten rich spouting warmed-over failed economic doctrines from the 19th Century.

BASICALLY, THEY’RE TOOLS: Sharyl Attkisson: CBS News too “ideologically entrenched” to air stories critical of the Obama administration.

SOME DEMOCRATS LEFT TWISTING IN THE WIND: Roll Call: Good Friday News Dump Riles Keystone Supporters on the Hill.

WHY NOT BOTH? Legalize Prostitution or Marijuana? Puerto Rico Is Looking for Ideas to Solve Debt Crisis.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO READ THIS: The Black Book of Tom Steyer: Allegations of fraud plague hedge fund of Democratic super-donor.

CHANGE: Fracking foes cringe as unions back drilling boom.

WELL, THAT MAKES SENSE: Texas Model of Low Taxes and Low Regulations May Lure Sriracha Maker East.

HOW CONVENIENT: With Keystone XL’s delay, another controversial issue hits pause before the midterms. Maybe we should have just delayed Obama’s entire presidency until after he left office.

JOEL KOTKIN: Stop favoring investors, speculators over middle class.

I, like most members of the middle class, particularly in California, just paid a tax bill that seemed less like my fair share than a shakedown by the Mafia. Increasingly, for people who run small businesses or earn a decent income, the tax bite is becoming ever more like in Europe, with total bills in high-tax states like ours reaching upward of 40 percent. It’s like paying the bill for a big dinner without eating the food – we get hammered like Swedes but without the free education, health care and other benefits of a more conventional welfare state.

Most galling is that, while the middle class has endured ever-higher taxes, those who have benefited most from the Bernanke-Obama “recovery” continue to get the biggest tax breaks. This is largely the investor class, who have been able to reap the benefits of the stock-market boom and, in some areas, including coastal California, the steep rise in real estate prices.

Of course, the rich and corporations have all sorts of ways to avoid taxation – like offshore accounts – but the real class divider is capital gains. Today, long-term capital gains are taxed at the federal level at a maximum 20 percent, while the small-business owner, writer, consultant or professional, if they do relatively well, are stuck with income tax rates up to 39.6 percent, approaching twice that level.

Overall, you don’t have to be super-rich to be hit. The portion of the tax burden absorbed by the top 20 percent of earners has grown – a California family with an income of $150,000 would qualify – from 65 percent to 90 percent. Even worse off are younger families, which generally have less to invest and have been stuck with a tepid job market; from 2007-10, households of people under age 40 have seen their net worth drop, while older Americans have now recovered most of their losses from the economic downturn.

You know what else helps investors and speculators but not the middle class? Open borders. Plus:

[I]ronically, one wonders where the class warriors of the Left are on this. They have become increasingly bold (or honest) in stating that we should continue raising taxes on the middle and upper-middle classes, as a recent New Republic piece suggests, but seem less than vehement about equalizing taxes on capital gains and other income.

This may have something to do with the shift in backing for “progressive” causes coming from the very people – Wall Street traders, venture capitalists and tech executives – who benefit most from the capital gains scam. The confluence of big money and populist rhetoric is epitomized by New York’s powerful senior senator, Charles Schumer, who has made a career of both raising money from Wall Street financiers and defending preferential treatment for their outsized profits. Their growing power over the party of ever-expanding government leaves only one place to finance Democrats’ ambitious plans – the middle and upper-middle classes.

I don’t hold all that much hope that reform will be pushed by most Republicans either, since they for far longer have been the party of accumulated wealth. But, as far as I can see, it is mainly conservatives, such as retiring Congressman Dave Camp, who seem ready to embrace the notion that taxes should be equalized between income and investment within the context of a flatter revenue system.

While we’re at it, can we repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Texas Leads the Way on Higher-Ed Accountability.

Related: Texas’s ‘Impossible’ $10K Degree Marches On.

THIS IS COOL: “British Pathé, the U.K. newsreel archive company, has uploaded its entire 100-year collection of 85,000 historic films in high resolution to YouTube.”

TRANSLATION: John Paul Stevens Joins The Campaign To Get Ruth Bader Ginsburg To Retire Before The Election.

PETER WOOD ON climate change and “consensus.”

THE RISE OF “MEDICAL HOMELESSNESS” UNDER OBAMACARE: ConsumerWatch: Some Covered California Patients Say They Can’t See A Doctor. Thus illustrating the difference between “coverage” and “care.”

JOHN FUND ON HARRY REID, ET AL.: The Increasing Desperation of Democrats: Slanders and lies may be part of a deliberate strategy to drive up turnout in November.

Increasingly, journalists who cover the White House are concluding that the smears are part of a conscious strategy to distract voters from Obamacare, the sluggish economy, and foreign-policy reverses; the attacks are intended, the thinking goes, to drive up resentment and hence turnout among the Democratic base.

Major Garrett, the CBS White House correspondent, has talked with White House aides who confirm that the administration is working from the theory of “stray voltage,” as developed by former White House senior adviser David Plouffe. “The theory goes like this,” Garrett wrote. “Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness,”

Deliberately misstating information about key issues in order to keep certain issues before the public is often a premeditated strategy. “The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama’s journey in office,” John Dickerson wrote at Slate. “Facts, schmacts. As long as people are talking about an issue where my party has an advantage with voters, it’s good.”

Frank James of NPR is another mainstream journalist who has concluded that the use of incendiary rhetoric is part of an electoral strategy.

If mainstream journalists have noticed, will they play along, or call them out?

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Ukraine threatens to undermine Obama’s delayed Asia ‘pivot.’ I’m pretty sure this isn’t an accident, either. At least, you know the Chinese are happy about the way Vladimir is keeping attention pinned on Eastern Europe.

HISTORY: “The last secretary of State to become president was James Buchanan. He gave us the Civil War.”

AS MICKEY KAUS NOTES, I eagerly await the “Voxsplaining” on this bit of news: Health Care Spending’s Recent Surge Stirs Unease.

CATO PODCAST: Highly Profitable “Nonprofit” Universities. “Nonprofit universities make money, but they expense those profits away in various ways that don’t help students or taxpayers.”

Yes. In the absence of shareholders, the returns go to those who control the institutions, which largely means administrators.

AT CAFE HAYEK, Spontaneous Underpinnings of Spontaneous Order.

Voluntary institutions such as surety and assurance embody norms of reciprocity, trust, honesty, fellowship, and thrift without which no stable social order is possible. The evidence shows that when these norms are articulated and expressed through voluntary action, they are enhanced and strengthened to everyone’s benefit. Attempts to mimic the invisible-hand process that has generated them will not only fail; they will actively undermine and destroy these norms. Theory and empirical research combine to suggest four things: first, that such norms and institutions are needed for the successful functioning of any society; second, that the more complex the social order, the greater the need for them; third, that such institutions may appear spontaneously but cannot be deliberately created; finally, that much state action will undermine or destroy these norms and institutions, with potentially catastrophic effect.

Sounds a bit like Reynolds’ Law.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The Administration Isn’t Stonewalling To Hide Good News:

It comes as no surprise today that Obama’s defenders are sparing no invective for Fox News in the wake of that survey. But it was the president, not Fox News, who repeatedly and knowingly misled the American people with two infamous Obamacare lies: “You can keep your health insurance if you like it. Period. You can keep your doctor. Period.” For better or worse, Obama will forever be known as the president who chose repeatedly to propagate two falsehoods. Those two lies were profoundly significant because they were designed to hide the truth about how Obamacare would affect the daily lives and health of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Since it became painfully clear in 2013 that Obama had lied about Obamacare since 2009, it has been increasingly difficult for many Americans to continue accepting at face value his statements on other major public issues. In both the Benghazi and IRS scandals, for example, Obama claimed to have known nothing about them until they were reported in the national media.

But if that were true, why has the president’s attorney general and so many other of his most prominent appointees withheld thousands of documents subpoenaed by Congress and requested by journalists under the Freedom of Information Act? Are there passages in those withheld documents that make it clear Obama knew much more than he has admitted?

Such questions go to the heart of the issue of the president’s probity. If he lied about keeping health insurance plans and doctors, why should fellow citizens believe his claim that nothing else could have been done to save four Americans in Benghazi, or that there isn’t “a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS? That is Obama’s legacy and his burden.

“President Asterisk,” indeed.