Student Loan Debt a Lifetime Burden for Middle Class but Major Money Maker for Goldman Sachs

Kids today still screwed – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com

Just in case anyone decided to “scam” themselves some free higher education by going to college and then declaring bankruptcy, Congress decided in 1998 to make sure that student loan debt had no statute of limitations and could not be discharged except in the event of extreme (and effectively unprovable) hardship. Then tuition began skyrocketing, players like Goldman Sachs got into the student lending business, and middle-class job opportunities for people without college degrees disappeared. The result, naturally, has been extremely profitable for certain people (Lally Weymouth) and basically awful for everyone else in America. Now, Eric Pianin is in Lally Weymouth’s Washington Post saying that student loan debt might be “the next debt bomb.”

Kids today still screwed – Student Loan Debt – Salon.com

My poor students are getting battered by an economy where there are few jobs in a nation where last year’s college graduates owed an average of $24,000 in student loans.

Other nations do not place the burden of higher education on the students. It is a matter of public expenditure. The United States has long been the leader in college graduates worldwide and no we are fourth. I see no prospect of that getting better but only worse. Education is not a commodity. It is a public good necessary for a successful society.

We can do better than this. We are a better people than this.

James Pilant

 

 

 

 

 

Related articles

• A Look at the New Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012: HR4170 (loans.org)
• Report: Student Loan ‘Debt Bomb’: America’s Next Mortgage-Style Economic Crisis (yubanet.com)
• CFPB Wants to Hear Student Loan Complaints (loans.org)
• 80 Percent Of Bankruptcy Lawyers Report A ‘Substantial Increase’ In Clients Buried By Student Loan Debt (thinkprogress.org)
• 46% of people under 30 have outstanding student loans averaging $23,000 (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

Should We Go Back to the Good Ole Days with Women’s Health?

It is so obvious to me that women should have access to birth control that I find it hard to take the opponents seriously. I agree with Martha Plimpton that the opposition to it is based on the bizarre idea that women do not know how to manage their lives and therefore need to be regulated. Women’s freedom is just as important as men’s. When it comes to rights, all humans are important.

James Pilant

Martha Plimpton: Stop undermining women’s health with personhood amendments and ultrasound laws

But we don’t live in caves anymore. And it has long been known that where women have the ability to control their own reproductive lives, standards of living rise, children are healthier, education levels rise, and women’s contributions to society increase. This is true in developing countries around the world, and in countries across Europe where low rates of teen pregnancy and infant mortality put ours to shame. When you keep women from exercising their right to physical self-determination, the actual consequences reveal themselves. It’s long past time we started focusing on the solutions that actually keep women healthy, instead of using basic aspects of women’s health as a tool of cultural, moral, and political control.

Martha Plimpton: Stop undermining women’s health with personhood amendments and ultrasound laws

In addition, here is Susan Fluke and the testimony she would have offered to Congress had the Chairman of the Committee allowed it.

Sandra Fluke Speaks: The Republican War on Womens Health

Related articles

• GOP’s War on Women’s Health (crooksandliars.com)
• Women Fight Back: House Dems To Hold Own Hearing With Woman Issa Excluded; Virginia Gov. McDonnell Ducking? (news.firedoglake.com)
• Buchanan To Republicans: You’re Overeaching On Birth Control (thinkprogress.org)
• Nancy Pelosi offers to ‘explain biology’ as Republicans deny birth control is a women’s health issue (dailykos.com)
• Female Democrats tout female witness at alternative contraception hearing (thehill.com)
• Rush to the Middle Ages – The Attack on Women’s Health Rights (blueingreene.org)

Will Rogers – Mortgage Relief

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I am a big fan of the American humorist, Will Rogers. I have a first edition of one of his biographies, (Will Rogers, Ambassador of Good Will, Prince of Wit and Wisdom – P.J. O’Brien) and hope to collect a complete set of his newspaper columns.

The mortgage foreclosure crisis has  long been a concern of mine. I’ve written about it many times.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that Rogers had his own views on the subject -

… Why my lord, there is dozens of different things that will help the farmer on his land, besides water, or fertilizer, either. There is the interest on the first, and second mortgages. Why don’t they introduce a bill in Congress to help the farmer by paying off his mortgages? That’s what eating him upon the farm, it’s not lack of irrigation, or lack of fertilizer – it’s abundance of interest payments; that’ s the baby that is there every minute of every day. Talk and sing about “Old Man River,” but it’s old man “interest” that keeps the farmer running to town every few days. He has to have a bookkeeper to keep a set of book to keep track of when his various Notes and Mortgage interest comes due. It’s the thought of the old mortgages that keep him awake at night.

But if you notice, they are always trying to put through some kind of bill in Congress, but nobody ever puts one through to do something about interest. No sir, you couldn’t do that, because then you are getting into the business of the boys that really hold the hoops while the jumping is going on. You could no more get a bill through to whittle the old interest down, than you could get a politician to admit a mistake.

(The column was written in 1928 and is found on pages 134-135 of A Will Rogers Treasury, compiled by Bryan B. Sterling and Frances N. Sterling, Crown Publishing 1982)

Rogers was not a big fan of Congress or the big banks. In 1928, the farming depression was in its tenth year. American farmers had prospered during the First World War and had borrowed heavily to increase production by buying more land, mechanizing their farms, fertilizing and irrigating their crops. When the war ended and the soldiers of that war returned home and resumed farming the price of every kind of agricultural commodity dropped dramatically. The farmers were left on the hook for large mortgages that were difficult to pay. Believing in their way of life they doubled down getting further into debt but the agricultural depression did not let up until the Second World War. I wouldn’t be until the Roosevelt Administration that the farmers began to receive significant aid.

Will Rogers was a member of the one percent, the highest paid film star of his time but he never forgot where he came from and who was important even though they didn’t have that much money.

James Pilant

Related articles

• Beau Jennings Celebrates Will Rogers in Song and Film (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Will Rogers on Occupy Wall Street (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Help Save Dixie’s Home … Stop foreclosur e on a 71-year-ol d cancer survivor (ynative77.wordpress.com)
• Will Rogers Was a Great Man. Ron Paul Is Not Yet Will Rogers. (businessinsider.com)
• Where is the increased Mortgage Interest relief promised? (politics.ie)

Adding Insult to Injury – America’s Debt Ceiling Crisis & Who is responsible for the financial crisis in America? (via Tucson Blonde)

This is a explanation of why the rich are gaining ground and the middle class losing it. It cites statistics on a regular basis. No statistic cited is anything that I have heard contrary data on. So, I think the report was written with considerable research. I would note that there is not just a little passion in the post which is delightful to me but not always to my readers.

This blogger wrote a lengthy, well written and thoughtful article. Please visit the web site and reward those efforts.

James Pilant

Whose side is Congress on? In November 2009 the New York Times published an article about the number of US Senators and House members who were millionaires.[i] At the time two-thirds (66%) of the senate and more than half (55%) of the house were also millionaires. That year recorded an estimate of nearly 7% (ca. 21 million) Americans who were, at least, millionaires. If our “representatives” truly reflected the current state of our great Nation w … Read More

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