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We interrupt our selections outlining the president’s foreign policy disasters to select an item from Time Magazine on the crisis in student loans. A program the administration decided to nationalize in some of the 2,700 pages of the healthcare act. Why not? There is hardly a thing in this country that government cannot make worse.
Chris Rong did everything right. A 23-year-old dentistry student in New York, Chris excelled at one of the country’s top high schools, breezed through college, and is now studying dentistry at one of the best dental schools in the nation.
But it may be a long time before he sees any rewards. He’s moved back home with his parents in Bayside, Queens—an hour-and-a-half commute each way to class at the New York University’s College of Dentistry—and by the time he graduates in 2016, he’ll face $400,000 in student loans. “If the money weren’t a problem I would live on my own,” says Rong. “My debt is hanging over my mind. I’m taking that all on myself.”
Rong isn’t alone. Across the country, students are taking on increasingly large amounts of debt to pay for heftier education tuitions. Figures released last week by the Federal Reserve of New York show that aggregate student loans nationwide have continued to rise. At the end of 2003, American students and graduates owed just $253 billion in aggregate debt; by the end of 2013, American students’ debt had ballooned to a total of $1.08 trillion, an increase of over 300%. In the past year alone, aggregate student debt grew 10%. By comparison, overall debt grew just 43% in the last decade and 1.6% over the past year.
According to a December study by the Institute for College Access & Success, seven out of 10 students in the class of 2012 graduated with student loans, and the average amount of debt among students who owed was $29,400. There’s no clear end in sight. ”The total amount of student debt is growing basically at a constant rate,” Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York tells TIME. “The inflow is much higher than the outflow, which is likely to continue in the future as reliance on student loans for college is expected to remain high.”
Debt is painful for many students, and an increasing number of graduates are unable to pay back their loans on time. Delinquencies on student loans have risen dramatically over the past decade: 11.5 percent of graduates were at least 90 days late on paying back their loans at the end of 2013, compared with 6.2 percent delinquencies on student loans in 2003. Moreover, the Fed’s figures on delinquencies hide more stark data: nearly half of all students with debt aren’t currently in repayment thanks to deferments and forbearances and the fact that students are not expected to pay while they’re in school, according to van der Klaauw. What that means is that for the graduates who are actually expected to pay their loans now, the delinquency rate is roughly double the 11.5% figure. …
… Student debt doesn’t just weigh heavily on graduates. Evidence is growing that student loans may be dragging down the overall economy, not just individuals. Think about it this way: if students have significant debts, it means they’re less likely to spend money on other goods and services, and it also means they’re less likely to take out a mortgage on a house. Consumer purchasing is the primary driver of the U.S. economy, and mortgages and auto loans play a huge role as well. There aren’t any comprehensive, hard numbers yet on how much of a drag student debt may be on the economy, but “the associations definitely suggest that growing student debt is a drag on consumption,” says van der Klaauw. “This is still something we’re discussing. There are a range of views on this. My personal view is that the increasing reliance on student loans for financing college education is going to be a drag on consumption for some time.” …
Andrew Malcolm brings us back to Ukraine.
… Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest Obama’s passivity toward Putin is connected to the American’s overheard promise of post-election “flexibility” to Putin’s predecessor back in 2012. So, we won’t.
Here’s how Col. Putin responded to Obama’s words of warning: He sent more Russian troops into Crimea.
Then, to show how really serious he is, Obama dispatched Secy. of State John Kerry to Kiev to offer cheap symbolic support for the reformers attempting to organize a new, but bankrupt Ukraine government.
Here’s how Kerry quaintly characterized the Russian invasion: “That is not the act of somebody who is strong. That is the act of somebody who is acting out of weakness.”
Kerry is fresh from a series of diplomatic triumphs including alienating Egypt’s new military-backed government, negotiating a Syrian chemical weapons accord that country is now ignoring and agreeing to give Iran six more months to maybe possibly agree to stop its nuclear weapons program, which everyone knows is not going to happen.
Kerry has also failed to reach agreement with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai on a residual U.S. troop presence after December.
Recently, Kerry announced that global warming is “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Just so we — and Russia — know where this administration’s true priorities lie.
The seeds of Obama’s ongoing diplomatic embarrassments — and dangers to this nation — were sown in the Democrat’s early months in his so-called Russian policy reset. …
LIkewise Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor who wants to know why the bien pensants are surprised by Putin’s aggressive instincts and actions.
In 2007, in my 60th post on SWP, I wrote a post about Putin and the Euros, titled “A Man in a Hurry.” If you look at Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and the utterly pusillanimous European response to this aggression, that post from more than 7 years ago is quite clearly prophetic, to the last jot and tittle.
The closing paragraph:
“I think that most Europeans, and those few Americans who seem to pay much attention to these issues, are nonplussed by Putin’s audacity in large part because they are projecting their attitudes onto him. They cannot envision why someone would engage in such seemingly short sighted actions. As a recent Newsweek story puts it, they wonder why Putin is risking severe “blowback.” However, their attitudes have evolved and developed in a completely different institutional, economic, and political environment than Russia’s. The Euro-American environment is much more conducive to taking the longer view that the unsettled (and unsettling) environment that characterizes Russia today. So, the Europeans–and Americans–should be ready for more “surprises” from Putin–which shouldn’t be surprises at all.”
My main question is why a blogger, and amateur student of Russian politics, could figure this out, but the State Department, the intelligence agencies, the national security community, the vast bulk of think tanks, and the editorial pages of every major US paper couldn’t. And why they haven’t been able to do so despite all that has happened since. Georgia. The castling move whereby Putin resumed the presidency. The unrelenting crackdown on civil society. It’s one thing to ignore reality when it’s lying around. It’s another to ignore it when it is hitting you in the goddam face. …
Even the Washington Post’s editors are gagging on the policies of the one they enabled saying his “foreign policy is based on fantasy.”
FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”
That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. …