Ugly

Bill Weld and Rudy Guiliani seem to be very close to a very nasty scandal about defrauding the Federal student loan program.

A crooked for-profit vocational college fleecing poor students and the Federal college loan program. An investment company chaired by Rudy Giuliani as the prime stockholder. Bill Weld, a partner in the investment company, as the interim CEO of the school, drawing a salary of $700,000 a year, including two months when, by his own account, he wasn’t even at the school, having gone back to New York to run for Governor.

I’m acquainted with both Bill Weld and Rudy Giuliani. I’m not surprised to find Giuliani close to this sort of mess. I am surprised about Weld. Both of them deserve to be hurt politically by this. The kids who took out loans to pay tuition at a college that went out of business still owe the money they borrowed, and those debts are generally not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com