Someone recently called me a miserable so and so

 because I want to get a lot of people off of the gvernment tit and accused me of trying to take opportunity away from the poor and disadvantaged. This is nothing new. I get called a lot of things.

That is a bunch of hogwash.

I want people to be successful and reap the rewards that go with getting up off your dead ass and onto your dying feet. Government should help create opportunity. They can start by treating businesses like something other than a cash cow, but let's not go there today.

One of the things I think government should do is make things like job training and college loans available to those that simply want them.

What? Piccolo want's to give government money away?

Guess again. The operative word I used in that statement is 'loan'.

You have to pay it back.

I swear by things like the GI bill that gives a young person a shot at getting ahead and a while back I was chatting with a grunt that is presently enrolled in a bachelor's degree program whereby he attends classes between deployments. He's majoring in public relations which is par for an infantryman. American grunts are well know throughout the planet for their talents in PR. When they punch a hole in an enemy soldier's torso they always do it while wearing a warm smile. Grunts always seem to know that you go further with a gun and a smile than with only a smile. That sounds like solid Public Relations to me. He's now using some army program to pay his tuition which is fine by me. It's a perc of serving.

While there are a lot of student loans out there, there seems to be a shortage of people that remember that the loan they took out is simply a loan. A while ago I read about some crybaby that took a degree in something that didn't pay very well and she found out that her degree and $2.95 bought her a cup of coffee at Starbucks. She found out about this by getting a job there because that was all her degree in Underwater Gay Rights in East Pakistan (or whatever useless major it was she blew her loan on)qualified her for.

While she was probably qualified to work at Starbucks serving coffee to high school dropouts that had somehow learned a useful trade and as a result could afford their overpriced coffee, she seems upset that Uncle Sam wanted their loan repaid.

I really do not have a whole lot of sympathy for her because she wasn't forced to pursue a worthless major. She could have probably become an investment banker or even tried her luck at getting into Law, Medical school, nursing or something else that pays a little more than minimum wage.

It was her choice as to what field of studies to pursue and she simply chose poorly. Nobody forced her to choose her major. It was strictly up to her. She has her degree and now Uncle Sam simply wants the loan repaid.

Still, she has a few opportunities to pay her loan back quickly if she wants. She could cut a deal with Uncle Sam whereby she works for them for a while. With her degree she qualifies to be commissioned in one of the services if she desires and there is a program that will forgive all or part of her student loan. If she is overweight she might have to pay a little visit to the fat farm first, but it is a viable option.

Then again, maybe it is not an option for her. The services have little use for stupid and the fact that she took out a loan for a worthless degree might prove to be a tip-off and maybe the services don't want her.

If so, I may be mistaken but I think there are a couple of other loan forgiveness plans out there, but I'd bet she's not interested because they require some sort of commitment.

OK, she blew her opportunity but there are a lot of other people out there that probably would find a student loan to be a pretty good ticket to success.

Once I took a tanker into the shipyard and stayed the entire time she was in the yard for a pretty good sized overhaul. It was interesting and I met quite a few people there. There was one welder I watched that was so talented he was astonishing. The man was an artist with a torch and a stinger and one day I couldn't resist. I tossed him a cold Coke to go with his lunch and asked him where he learned to weld.

He told me he had learned in a government program somewhere and had simply worked at his trade after the program had taught him the basics. An interesting man. He had come from a pretty grim background and had dropped out of high school. A few years later he saw an ad for job training and went for it. He went through every class they had to offer and got out of the program with a few basic certificates and went straight to the nearest shipyard that was hiring and went to work as an entry-level fabricator.

It didn't take him long to get damned good at what he did and there were pay increases that went along with his growing skills. He had gone from one shipyard to another and finally got hired as a top level fabricator where they could put all of his talents to work and was now earning a pretty hefty wage.

While the work was hot, dirty and uncomfortable and kept him out in the weather, the pay allowed him to have a fairly comfortable life. I respect people like him.

This is a very useful person. He can take steel and make it into useful things which is a lot more than I can do. This man is worth his weight in gold and it is interesting to note that I asked him if he had any idea of what his government funded education was worth. He replied that it cost the government about as much to train him as he had paid in taxes for the past two or three years.

A few of his other certifications like ABS certification had been paid for by his employer, and I think he paid for some other certification out of his pocket.

Now this is one of the few intelligent investments I have ever heard of government making. They sure turned a profit on this guy.

Someone in Washington probably got fired for that one.

I have no problem with that guy. Even though he got somewhat of a free ride in the educational department he had paid it back by using his skills to get ahead and cough up repayment in the form of taxes. He is a tax payer and not just another tax liability.

This guy had enough sense to get himself a marketable skill and now he can afford to go to Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee and be served by a college graduate that owes a fortune on a student loan because she didn't have enough sense to get a useful degree.
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my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/