A rhumbline is a direct heading to a point. On a map it's a straight line. It looks like the perfect way to get where you're going. On a globe, though, it may be the long way around. For example, New York and Madrid are about the same latitude. On a map, a course due east from New York is the shortest distance to Madrid. On the round face of the earth, though, a curved path (called the great circle route) passing over Greenland and the northern Atlantic is shorter. Try it with a string and a globe if you don't believe it. That's probably what a lot of the comments on this blog will be like. Random? Disconnected? Circular? Probably. But maybe they will lead to a point eventually.



Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Student Loans

The President announced today that he would start a new program under which the government would buy private student loans and reduce the interest rates and payment amounts.  Even more interesting, he said he was going to change the PPACA (the Obamacare law) to make its student loan provisions effective in 2012 rather than 2014. 

Whether one agrees with these policies or not, my question is "Can he do that?"  Can the President obligate the U.S. Treasury to buy loans without an appropriation from Congress?  Can he unilaterally decide that the effective dates passed into a law can be changed?  This seems to clearly contradict the Constitution's separation of powers.  What am I missing here?
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