I’m sure anyone over the age of 30 can remember exactly where they were 20 years ago this Saturday. It is a day that will live forever in infamy. Several people I knew died that day. I have always tried to be careful when saying that; our readers know how I feel about hyperbole. I did not lose any loved ones – no close friends or relatives. However, one could not be in the investment management profession and not know people who had offices in the towers. I had been there for training on new manager research software just a few weeks before. Two of my close colleagues were right down the street as it was happening. It was very real to me. 

Everyone I have ever talked to about that day always has the same observation. It was a stunningly beautiful early fall day up and down the East Coast. There is something about that disconnect that sticks in our mind. I was running late that morning and rushed into my office. As I said good morning to one of my colleagues, she just looked up and said, “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.” We all started talking about what kind of plane it was. We assumed this must have been some private plane that got off course and lost control. 

Then it was confirmed that it was a passenger jet, and the mood changed. Shortly after the second plane hit and there was no doubt, this was an attack. All work stopped and everyone on our floor went to the big-screen TV in the executive conference room. We sat there watching in silence, except for my boss who had been in the towers just days before seeing an investment consulting firm on the 102nd floor (after all these years I can’t remember which tower). Everyone who was in that office when the plane hit, died. He kept saying, “I was just there.” 

We kept watching and then we heard about the Pentagon and Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. Conspiracy theories started blooming immediately. Finally, the word got out that all high-rise buildings in metropolitan areas must be evacuated. We walked down the stairs from the top floor, and a colleague and I went down the street to grab a sandwich and sit outside at Joe’s on Juniper. Everyone was eerily quiet. 

When I got home, my nephew who was living with me at the time was there. He was in the Army Reserves, and already wondering when he would get called up. I briefly considered enlisting, but he suggested that this would be over before I even got out of basic training, and then what? I thought he was probably right. He went on to serve two tours of duty in Afghanistan, two in Iraq, and a further two stateside. 

For the next several days at work my job was to call all the investment firms we traded with and confirm that they would be able to operate when the market opened once more. In other words, I was to find out who was still alive and who wasn’t. It remains the hardest thing I have ever done in my career. I dreaded every single phone call. Of course, as always seems true with human beings, where there was the most suffering, I also witnessed the greatest strength and resilience. Fred Alger Management had lost most of its management team, but former partners, including founder Fred Alger, came out of retirement to save the firm. 

My two colleagues were okay, they were able to rent a car and drive home to Atlanta. Another colleague from our Denver office was not able to rent a car, so he bought one and drove it back to Colorado. The market opened back up and continued the downward spiral that had started with the dot-com bubble bursting. Slowly life went on, but what had happened was real. 

That is my September 11, 2001 story, and I am sure you all have yours. Some of you may have been closer to it; to others it was just a scary news story. For a little while afterward it was actually wonderful. Our country came together as one nation. American flags were everywhere. That did not last long. 

Twenty years later our military has left Afghanistan. Reuters reports that before that exit, President Biden had a phone conversation with Ashraf Ghani, the then-President of Afghanistan. According to Reuters, Biden’s focus on the call was the Afghan government’s “perception” problem. “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.” 

Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal wrote about an excerpt from George Packer’s book, Our Man, about diplomat Richard Holbrooke. The excerpt describes a meeting between Holbrooke and then-Vice President Biden. In his diary Holbrooke described the meeting as “quite extraordinary.” Biden is reported to have dismissed Holbrooke’s arguments for protecting Afghan women’s rights as “bull –.” Biden went on to tell Holbrooke that he didn’t understand politics. 

This year our theme for this Perspective blog has been: If you care about people, then you have to care about the actual results of policy. In other words, reality must mean more to you than perception. What happened on 9/11 was no perception; people jumping from the burning towers were not a perception problem, nor were the people falling from our military planes as they took off from Afghanistan. 

This is not about Joe Biden, it is about our culture. We now care more about perception than we do about reality. Biden is simply a living example of what a lifetime of politics does to one’s soul. To some degree that has always been true for politicians, which is why they are so often compared to scum. Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks and 14 years after the introduction of the iPhone, our entire culture is consumed with perception. Personal branding – what image is she putting forth on social media – has become more important than who she actually is as a person. Recently someone I know commented that you never know what someone actually looks like anymore because all of the images on social media are doctored. Is it any wonder that we have record levels of depression and anxiety? Living a lie is hard. 

We have substituted opinion polls for substantive debate. Trump, and now Biden, wanted out of Afghanistan because polls say Americans are war-weary after 20 years of “Forever War.”  Where is the leadership? Americans are tired of hearing about our soldiers dying. They wanted the battles to end.  That does not mean they wanted to just abandon the Afghan people and create a power vacuum after 20 years of sacrifice. We have military bases in Germany and Japan. Does anyone think that World War II is a forever war? We have military bases in South Korea. One could argue that this is a forever war since the country is still split into North and South and North Korea is still an issue. Do Americans want to finally end the forever war in Korea? Have the pollsters bothered to ask? 

I was fortunate to go to a military high school in the 1980s. All of our military instructors were Vietnam veterans. From their perspective, one of the lessons from Vietnam was that we should never again allow politics to cause us to fight a war where we have to continuously fight for territory we had already fought for and won. I can only imagine what they are thinking watching the Afghanistan retreat. 

Biden wanted a photo op. He was going to get on stage somewhere this Saturday and say, “Look at me, I have ended the twenty-year war that started this day in 2001.” That was to be the perception, and all the Afghans had to do was hold off the Taliban until our TV cameras left, but they couldn’t do it. In reality, leaving Afghanistan doesn’t end the war, it escalates it. We just gave the enemy the one thing they really have not had in almost 20 years: Hope.  

A lot has changed since 9/11. Personally, I left Invesco and co-founded Iron Capital. I met my wife, got married, and had two wonderful children. My nephew I told you about? He is retired from the Army, married, and has four beautiful girls. I’m sure things are much different in your lives as well. One thing, however, has not changed: The Taliban controlled Afghanistan then, and our perception was that we were in a time of peace. This is once again the case. The reality of 9/11 was that we were wrong, and unfortunately, we are likely wrong once more.  At least that is my perspective. 

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director 

~The Reality of 9/11

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  – The Captain, “Cool Hand Luke” 

My daughter is about to turn 11 years old. Puberty has begun and she is stepping ever closer to middle school, which means our household is about to enter the unique hell that is coming of age for young women. To paraphrase a line from “Heart of Darkness:” “…the drama, the drama.” 

We are beginning to get glimpses of she said/she said, inferred meaning, and misinterpretation. Recently another parent informed me that my daughter had hurt his daughter’s feelings. He recounted what he heard my daughter had said as if it was the gospel truth. There was no asking if I was aware of any incident, or any benefit of the doubt, even though he has known my daughter for a several years now. Luckily for both of us he hit me with this at a very good time and I did not take it personally or react. I know this man’s daughter much better than I know him and felt the situation just needed defusing, so I just apologized. I spoke with my daughter, who was very upset. She said she had no recollection of any issues between them and claimed that she never said what she had been accused of saying. 

I have no way of knowing what really happened, but knowing both of these girls well, I strongly suspect this is a case of what my daughter said and what her friend heard were two different things. We have a simple miscommunication. That this would happen between two pre-teen girls is in no way surprising, but that it spread to two grown adults is indicative of what is wrong with our culture today: We have forgotten how to communicate. There are three drivers. 

First, we no longer believe in giving one the benefit of the doubt and fact-checking. It seemingly never dawned on the other father that perhaps this could have been a miscommunication. We unquestionably believe messages we want to believe without any consideration, then immediately attack anyone who questions. 

My wife and I have been watching “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV. It is a great show about an American football coach who goes to England to coach a soccer team. In a recent episode, one of the Nigerian players received a text from his father suggesting that the parent company of the team’s corporate sponsor was guilty of illegally dumping oil and paying off the Nigerian government to look the other way. Without any question or research of his own, he decided to protest by covering the sponsor’s name on his uniform. In the show’s defense, it is a 30-minute sit-com, but still I thought the situation is indicative of our culture today. His teammates ask what he is doing and with only his word, based on one text, they all decide to cover the sponsor’s name on their own jerseys. 

Now, perhaps the text was 100 percent accurate and the protest justified; that is not the point I’m making. The point is that those players have no idea whether any of what they are saying is true. The show ends with the player accusing the Nigerian government of corruption, and a reporter verifying that this is what the player meant. The headline in tomorrow’s paper will be “Nigerian Government Corrupt,” and that is based on a quote from a professional soccer player who received a text. 

In all likelihood the story will end up being true (we have not yet watched the next episode, so don’t tell us), but wouldn’t it be great if it turned out that was not the case? What a great lesson: Don’t believe everything you hear. Give people the benefit of the doubt, check the facts, and seek the truth. 

That is especially true when we focus on the second problem: hyperbole. Jesus taught us in Matthew 5:37, “But let your ‘yes’ be yes, and your ‘no,’ no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” My family watched an interview with US Olympic gymnast Simon Biles this summer before she dropped out of the team competition. The reporter asked something to the effect of, “What is it like being the greatest of all time?” No pressure. I will freely admit that everything I know about gymnastics is from watching it once every four years; I have no idea is Simon Biles is really the greatest of all time. I do know there have been a lot of really good gymnasts, and that with any sport it is nearly impossible to compare one generation to another, because sports evolve. I also know that even if is true, it isn’t helpful. Obviously, it was not helpful to Simone. 

Unfortunately, “Happy Birthday to my perfectly suitable spouse” is not going to rack up the likes as fast as “Happy Birthday to the most beautiful women to ever walk the planet!” While buttering up one’s wife might be harmless, the habit of exaggerating everything is certainly not. When one makes a mountain out of every molehill, he becomes easy to dismiss. 

Why do so many people not believe in climate change? Because its biggest believers exaggerate to the point of being ridiculous. Steven Koonin, a physicist who served in the Obama administration, recently wrote a book on climate change entitled, “Unsettled.”  He argues not against current climate science, but that what the media and politicians say about the science has drifted so far out of touch with actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.  

Of course he has been attacked for saying so, mostly by people who likely didn’t read what he wrote or who pick out one detail they believe he got wrong and blow that out of proportion to dismiss the entire message. Lost on them is the irony of the fact that their hyperbolic response only proves his point. 

When we exaggerate, we become far easier to dismiss and we lose our ability to respond correctly to real emergencies. We have an actual crisis going on in Afghanistan, but when everything is a “crisis,” how do we get anyone’s attention? 

Finally, for people to communicate with one another they must agree on the meaning of words. Last week a Wall Street Journal article described how the younger generations have changed the meanings of emojis. The smiley face is actually an insult. You can’t make this up. 

I won’t even get started on the use of emojis to communicate in the first place, but when the receiver can just decide that the emoji means what she thinks it means at the time, and evidently this is subject to change, how can any communication take place? While it is true that language evolves, this is a process that occurs over time. We cannot just decide that a word now has a different meaning, and if more than one meaning is possible then we should seek first to understand. Ask for clarification before assuming the worst and going on the attack. 

Which brings all the faults together: If one decides that a smiley face is an insult as opposed to an expression of joy, he can’t then just assume the sender has made the same illogical leap, and even so this certainly is too minor of a thing to get worked up about. 

To communicate properly we must give each other the benefit of the doubt and look for the facts. We need to speak plainly and avoid exaggerations, and we need to use our vocabulary in a way our audience understands. If we all work on these things individually, who knows, we might make the world a little less polarized. At least that is my perspective. 

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA 
Managing Director 

~Failure to Communicate

According to all the experts, the United States has become a deeply divided nation. Perhaps I’m just a romantic but I believe the divides are not nearly as great as they seem. I say that in part because of you. We have been blessed to have a wonderful and very diverse set of clients with very different life experiences and perspectives. 

I recently had a wonderful conversation with one of those clients. He told me that he loved reading my Perspectives. He went on to explain that he usually disagrees with me, but he loved getting a glimpse of how I think. What I appreciated most about that conversation was the fact that two adults are able to disagree and still work together, and more than that, be friends. 

I am often accused of having very strong opinions, which I actually find humorous. While I will concede that I am often perceived that way, the truth is my opinions change often. I am extremely open to being persuaded. Most of the time when I get this feedback it is due to a symptom of our modern dialog, where opinions and facts get confused. I hold on loosely to my opinions but I do insist on being factual, and nine times out of ten when someone tells me they agree or disagree with me, it is after I have stated a fact, not an opinion. We have grown accustomed to accepting or dismissing facts based on our perspectives. 

One of the greatest compliments I ever received came from a co-worker and friend. He met my father at my wedding and told him that I was the most honest person he had ever met. I attribute that in part to going to a school with an honor code, where lying would get you expelled. The other part came from my father, who repeatedly told me that, “The truth hurts.” It would usually come after someone had said something mean that hurt my feelings and be accompanied by “only,” as in, “It only hurts if it’s true. Is it?” Most of the time it wasn’t, and he would utter the old adage, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” If it was true, then maybe I had work to do. 

When I was young my honesty was often too blunt. I needed to learn that given the choice of being right and being kind, I should choose kind. One can be loyal to facts without being rude. I sincerely try to do that and hope I am successful. 

In the last few Perspectives I have been bluntly honest about the current state of our nation’s universities, which have been taken over by the post-modernist idea that facts don’t really exist. That is neither an opinion or a perspective, it is simply a fact. It is my opinion and perspective that this is extremely dangerous and is a root cause of our seeming division, which brings us back to our theme for this year: If you care about people, then you have to care about the results of policies. This requires an acceptance of facts, even if we don’t like them. 

Both political parties have abused the economic realities of taxation. I wrote about this in a 2010 issue of The Quarterly Report, “A Taxing Debate,” which I encourage you to read. The Biden administration has proposed raising the capital gains tax to more than 40 percent. They have also proposed taxing unrealized gains. 

The first question we get is, what impact will this have on the stock market? The answer is, not much in the long term. The news of it will likely scare people, but the reality of the market is that the vast majority of stocks are bought and sold inside tax shelters. That is simply a fact; the market is dominated by institutional endowments, foundations, and retirement plans. Even individual accounts are largely in retirement vehicles that do not pay capital gains tax. 

For those who are subject to capital gains tax, it is largely a voluntary tax. It occurs only when one decides to sell an asset and actually pocket the money.  If the government makes the cost of doing so outrageous, then history tells us people simply won’t do it. Tax revenues from capital gains will decrease. This isn’t an opinion, it is an empirical fact; which is why they now propose taxing unrealized gains. 

That thought is frightening. For most people, their largest asset is their home. So, what happens when one’s home is appraised for twice what she paid for it? Under the current rules, nothing, because this isn’t income. The house being worth more does not put money in her pocket. However, if we now must pay up to 40 percent tax on that unrealized gain, where is that money actually going to come from? Most people don’t have it. 

The examples used by the proponents of such policy are people like Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, but the Bezoses of the world are what statisticians call outliers. The fact is, all tax increases ultimately hit the middle class, because the Jeff Bezoses of the world have teams of lawyers and accountants playing the game. History tells us the rich find loopholes or pay for them in the form of political contributions. Tax increases like these ultimately hit the middle class because it is only the middle class that has the combination of enough money to tax but not enough to play the game and avoid taxation. That is a fact, whether one wants it to be or not. 

We can have different perspectives on what the tax system should look like. However, we need to accept the facts of what history tells us works versus what doesn’t work. Raising the capital gains tax is one of the least effective ways to raise revenue, and changing the rules to include unrealized gains is going to cause a great deal of unintended pain to middle class Americans. 

Regardless of party or perspective, we should all agree that the tax system’s goal is to fund the government in the fairest and most efficient way possible. We may differ on what the government should or shouldn’t do, and therefore how much funding is required, but the actual collection of taxes should be based on what is fair and effective. Fairness may be in the eye of the beholder, but effectiveness is a cold hard fact. Raising the capital gains tax is not effective, and that is not my perspective, it is simply a fact. 

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA 
Managing Director

~These Are Taxing Times

Fraud noun: a) deceit, trickery; specifically: intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right  ~Merriam-Webster Dictionary

My son learned about the Russian Revolution in school this semester. He was fascinated by the story, as was his father many years before him. I explained to him that I had the good fortune of being a college economics student during the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I studied the two great economic theories of capitalism and socialism, I was able to watch in the real world in real time as the greatest socialist experiment of all time completely collapsed. 

Once into my major, every class I took was related either to capital markets or Marxist ideology. I took a modern Russian history class entitled “The History of Communism,” which was taught by a visiting Russian professor. I was so fascinated by it that I unintentionally ended up with a minor in international studies. The last semester of my senior year I wrote a paper for an independent study on how the Baltic states should transition from socialism to a free-market economy. I argued that they should follow the Poland model, which, simply put, was the rip-the-Band-Aid-off theory. 

My professor was horrified. A full-blooded Keynesian, and perhaps a closet socialist, he told me how disappointed he was and asked how low of a grade he could give me and still allow me to graduate. I told him he could flunk me and I would still graduate. He gave me a C, the lowest grade I ever got in my major. Fast forward almost a decade and Wake Forest got email, so we could write our old professors. In that time, Poland had proved itself to be the most successful former communist state by far; in other words, I had been correct. I emailed my professor to ask if he would consider changing my grade. “Touché” was his response. 

I learned something very important through that experience: The difference between practicing economics or a related field in the real world versus doing it as a college professor is that in college, one must be politically correct, while in the real world, he has to be actually correct. If I am wrong, my clients lose money and I lose my clients and therefore my job. In the academy, as long as one voices the popular opinion of the day it seems not to matter when that turns out to be wrong. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union was, in my opinion, a pivotal event for higher education. Colleges had long been a refuge for Marxists, even if they were in the closet. It is an appealing ideology for the academic as it plays to the ego. It argues that they should be in charge; what is not to like? Its total collapse had to be earth shaking, and I do not believe that it is a coincidence that the collapse of Marxist ideology and the rise of postmodernism within the academy happened at roughly the same time. 

Intellectuals are human beings, with the same psychological weaknesses as the rest of us; they are just better at masking their cognitive dissonance in fancy mumbo-jumbo. An ideology where Truth doesn’t exist was exactly what was needed to avoid the harsh reality that what they believed was wrong. 

Where has this led us? This week The Wall Street Journal reported that California is adopting a new math, because, “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom” includes a focus on “getting the right answer.” This past summer as rioters tore down statues of Ulysses S. Grant, among others, we were told repeatedly that this was the cancel culture that began on college campuses. We read about so-called “safe spaces” where students can go to escape from being taught difficult facts. Courses have to have “trigger warnings” so students know ahead of time that what they believe will be challenged. 

These ideas – a cancel culture, safe spaces, and trigger warnings – are antithetical to education. A truly educated person is an open-minded person who is not afraid of being challenged, and perhaps most importantly is capable of changing her mind and willing to do so in light of facts and reason. An educated person doesn’t burn books or tear down statues; in fact, they do the very opposite. 

An educated person does not erase names off of buildings or the university itself, because an educated person realizes that even great people can do terrible things. Neither of those attributes erases the other. Even King David, the greatest of all the Kings in ancient Israel, had a man sent to his death so that he could sleep with the man’s wife. His flawed sinful nature does not negate his greatness; it simply proves that he was human. Educated people understand that human beings are complicated and that history is nuanced. Further, they know that those who are ignorant enough to erase history are doomed to repeat it. 

We all know that the cost of college today is absurd, and if that were the only issue it would be bad enough. Cost, however, is not the only issue or even the biggest issue. Students are going to college, paying outrageous amounts, and leaving with minds that are closed, not opened. If this was any other industry they would be charged with fraud. People are paying for an education and they are not getting it. 

That is right: the university as we know it today is a fraud, and it will remain that way until we demand that political correctness is replaced with actual correctness; when postmodernism is replaced with an honest pursuit of Truth; and when the goal is once again to open minds instead of closing them. Until that day, parents will have to better prepare their children, as college degrees will likely still be necessary for a job, but an education is something they will have to gain elsewhere. At least that is my perspective. 

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~Academic Fraud

A few years ago, I went to the doctor to see what could be done about a pain I was having in my upper back near my shoulder blade. He sent me to physical therapy; the therapist did message and even dry needling for the overly tight muscles. It helped, but within a year I was back in the same boat. This time I got another therapist, who began by working on my neck. I corrected him saying, “No, the pain is down here.” He said, “I know, but the cause is up here. I’m going to fix the cause.”

Sure enough, he was right. I have not had the pain since, and every time I start to feel something in my upper back, I do the neck stretches he showed me, and all is well. Aspirin can make a headache go away, but it won’t cure a sinus infection, let alone a brain tumor. 

Politicians are good at identifying symptoms that bother us – these are the building blocks of campaigns. Schools need improving and taxes are too high…symptoms are easy to identify. It is also easy to identify ways of masking those symptoms, and it is a lot easier to mask them than it is to truly fix a problem. 

The student loan crisis is a great example. Too many young people are starting out their adult lives buried in debt due to the high cost of education. The political solution is to forgive the debt. This is also known as masking a symptom – the problem is not the debt; the problem is the cost of education. I hate to say it, but the truth is the higher education and private secondary education industries have become criminal enterprises. 

The cost of education over the past 30 years has increased at a rate 2.5 times the rate of inflation. I have mentioned this before, but I was privileged to receive a wonderful education, which my father paid for in total. I went to one of the top boarding schools in the country, Culver Military Academy, and to the best (in my opinion) academic institution in the Southeastern U.S., Wake Forest University. It was not just difficult to get into Wake, lots of schools can say that; it was difficult to graduate. Years later I was told that high school students were warned that it is really “Work Forest.” 

Today the cost of attending those institutions is approximately seven times what it was when my father wrote those checks. They did for me exactly what my father had hoped: they provided me an education which, first and foremost, made me think bigger when it came to life goals. They gave me the tools to survive and thrive in a business where one must be smart to begin with and had better be willing to work hard and think his way through problems. Trust me, there were no courses in financial crisis investing, and there certainly was not a class in pandemic financial advice. Education isn’t job training, it is about learning to think, and if one can do that, then she can do anything. 

So, I was asked just the other day if Wake Forest is worth its current cost, and my answer was unfortunately, but honestly, “No.” The same could be said of almost every college and private school in the country. If any other industry had continually raised its cost over this long of a period, their CEOs would be paraded through Congress to answer to their price-gouging ways. 

I want to be clear: I am not suggesting that this was done purposely by criminally minded people. The issue is that it has happened without thought. Schools set their tuition based on cost and competition. So, if one school charges more, the next says we can charge more. Once they charge more, they must justify it. They build new buildings and start new programs, which raises costs, so tuition goes up. Tuition going up one place makes tuition go up at another as schools constantly compare themselves to one another. Then they need more new buildings and more new programs. It is a constant feedback loop that causes costs to spiral out of control. 

On the consumer side, people now borrow money to go to school which allows them to pay more. Schools figure out how to price their spots like airlines price seats, only better. The first thing one fills out for most colleges today is a financial disclosure. They call this financial aid, when really it is a way to maximize the tuition of every student based on what they could possibly pay. I have heard, from well-meaning people, that this is a justification for the outrageous cost. Really? 

What if your doctor charged that way? Would you consider it ethical for her to say, “You make more money, so you have to pay more for your office visit?” Would it be okay is Starbucks demanded a personal financial statement to price their coffee? “She pays $1 and you pay $4…oh no, wait, our records indicate you just got a raise, that will be $10 for your coffee.” Of course not. They would be accused of price gouging. 

In my opinion something does need to be done for the victims of today’s modern education system. However, simply forgiving loans is not the answer. There are too many unintentional problems – what happens to one’s credit? – but more importantly, it does not solve the problem. The proposal for two years of “free” community college gets closer, but it also has the problem of “free” simply meaning the government (aka taxpayers) pay the bill. A better solution would be to go back to tuition costs in 1990, then index those costs by inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Then, for every college that has taken government money (which is just about all of them), refund every dime paid above inflation and cap future increases to CPI. 

That proposal would require enormous structural changes in most schools – too much to discuss today, but these changes are far overdue in my opinion. My cousin paid for his college by working a summer job. That needs to be where the cost of education is today. At least that is my perspective. 

Warm regards,

Chuck Osborne, CFA
Managing Director

~Don’t Mask the Symptom, Fix the Problem