As a mature and prosperous nation (Trump being a hiccup along the way), higher education has moved from a luxury and the domain of the well-to-do to a career requirement for a larger and larger number of people and jobs. Colleges and Universities have responded to this change and opened their doors enthusiastically to increasing numbers of students in search of necessary and required credentials.

I wish to emphasize here the phrase “opened their doors enthusiastically” because that is what they have done, year after year. And, why not? They are a huge monopoly controlling access to an essential requirement for ever larger numbers of job seekers. What set of institutions would not want ever greater numbers of customers?

With everyone seeking to get in, America’s colleges and universities haven’t needed to change all that much. Flush with ever increasing tuition income as a result of greater and greater demand for entry, the institutions have carried on business as usual without significantly adjusting curricula and operations. Their courses and programs are much as they have always been and the education and even politics of their teachers are largely unchanged as well. Indeed, their entire modus operandi in almost all respects is much the same as decades past.

And, even more important, they have not adjusted their costs to accommodate larger and larger numbers of people begging for entry but without the wherewithal to pay for what had heretofore been a luxury item for the few. The result has been the emergence of ever larger public and private student loan programs requiring huge numbers of students to assume and carry significant debt for years beyond their time in college.

Indeed, higher education institutions have pushed tuition and related charges up with abandon year after years. Costs are now exorbitant and going higher and higher. In only a few more years, cost of higher education at many good private colleges or universities will top $100,000 per year!

These costs are ridiculous and the institutions should be forced to bring them down. Times have changed, clientele have changed, needs have changed. The institutions must change too.

It doesn’t take a genius to see lots of places and ways the institutions can meet their new challenges and provide an important service at the same time as they not only hold the line on increasing expenditures, but bring costs down significantly.

Below is a list of just six ways costs can be markedly and quickly reduced. There are many other equally effective ways as well.

1. Drop such silly, politically correct programs as ethnic studies, interdisciplinary studies, naval gazing studies, and the like.

2. Cease building luxury, expensive dorms and other facilities to create unnecessary atmospherics.

3. Operate on a twelve-month calendar instead of the present eight to nine.

4. Get rid of bloated administrations, filled with vice presidents, deans and vice deans without legitimate portfolios.

5. Drop requirement that all faculty need to or should do research, and by so doing increase teaching responsibilities and greatly reduce the amount of silly and irrelevant output by, at best, mediocre thinkers.

6. Employ technology and high tech approaches to teaching general education courses, and reduce the number of student options in the first years .

Were colleges and universities forced to do many or all of these, costs of higher education could be greatly reduced, loan programs minimized or eliminated, and student debt a thing of the past.

During Watergate and the lengthy process of getting Richard Nixon to resign, political instability weighed all sorts of havoc on the US economy with the S&P 500 falling from a high of 142, when Nixon assumed his second term in January 1974, to a low of 86 just after his August 9, 1974 resignation.

Watergate involved a crime and a tremendous breech of the public’s trust, and a significant erosion of the business climate and market values.

As difficult as Watergate was for the US, it did not involve the election of a President without political experience. It did not involve an assertion that the an adverse power interfered with an election, an assertion of collusion or an assertion of a coverup. It did not involve a Republican Congress so subservient to a President that all checks and balances inherent in the government needed to be quickly reestablished and strengthened, at the public’s insistence, for impeachment proceedings to begin.

The US likely faces a difficult and uncertain next couple of years as the entire process around Trump, and the 2016 election, is sorted out. History shows us that the stock market is unlikely to escape these challenges ahead without real damage.

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BestCashCow first projected that Trump’s extreme and malignant narcissism would cause him to fail properly to divorce from his assets in a way that would call into question his independence, his freedom from the emoluments clause, and his and his family’s liability.

Many well-versed in the law and in trusts maintained that Morgan, Lewis and Bockius, Donald Trump’s law firm, would put together an air-tight, yet complicated, ownership structure. A smart ownership structure would use his ascendency to the presidency as an opportunity to pass his assets to his children and grandchildren with limited tax liability, while assuring that he would have all of his needs met for the rest of his life should he be removed from the presidency.

Following this weekend’s release of the trust documents under the Freedom of Information Act, it is very clear that everything, including the lease on the Old Post Office Building in Washington, has passed into the Donald J. Trump REVOCABLE Trust. President Trump is the only beneficial owner of the trust, but the trust is run by his son and chief financial officer. There is no legal impediment to Donald Trump’s receipt of information on the trust assets and their performance (as Sheri A. Dillon proclaimed in her January 11, 2017 news conference) and the trust is revocable at any time.

In short, Donald Trump’s law firm has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to separate Trump from his assets and the ethical liabilities that those assets create, save to introduce a single legal entity, wholly owned by Donald Trump himself.

The new administration – and the Republican Congress – are bent on exploiting the government for their own self-interests. Inherent in that goal is an assumption that the majority of the population at large is totally indifferent to, or unable to understand, the color of the wool being pulled over their eyes. In this case, there is no smoke, no mirrors, and the wool can be seen right through.

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