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American Households Not as Reckless as You Think

American Households Not as Reckless as You Think: "Everybody knows that household debt in America has increased dramatically over the past few decades. But why? One possibility is that we've all been borrowing recklessly and living wildly beyond our means. But there are other possibilities too. Your debt-to-income ratio will go up if (a) your debt increases or (b) your income declines, and that can happen in several ways...."

Is Congress Going to Double the Interest on Your Student Loan?

Is Congress Going to Double the Interest on Your Student Loan?: "Millions of young people may have a much harder time paying for an education.

Unless Congress acts soon, millions of college students could see the interest rate on their federal student loans double this summer—adding $5,000 to the cost of an education for students who pay off their loans in 10 years, and around $11,000 over 20 years.

Yet Republicans are claiming that keeping those rates low costs too much and isn't the federal government's job. Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the Higher Education Subcommittee, even argued that it's unnecessary for any student to borrow money to go to college in the first place....."

For my story of how bad things got while I was in college, click here. It explains why this is such a bad idea. Things aren't as bad as they were, but things still aren't great. I can only hope that once I start my new job in my field, things will finally turn around.

How Much Money Can One President Spend?

Occupy Student Debt #1

"I Cannot Eat Your Prayers": How Student Debt Changed One Woman's Mind on "Christian Charity"

"I Cannot Eat Your Prayers": How Student Debt Changed One Woman's Mind on "Christian Charity": "From an evangelical home to over $100,000 in student loans and healthcare debt, one writer faces the ways in which even progressive Christianity comes up short.

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s the story of a good girl from a quiet town who prayed, studied hard, said no to drugs, and otherwise did everything she was told—and then went on to become Sallie Mae’s bitch and lost just about everything. This story is mine.

I grew up in an evangelical home, and was an earnest “liberal-evangelical” into my early twenties. Now I think that my former religious faith—not unlike my faith in the U.S. higher education system—gave me a warped sense of optimism about the way the world works. I believed in faith-based platitudes, plus a few secular ones...."

Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act

Bill Maher: College is the next bubble

Bill Maher: College is the next bubble

The Story of Broke

The $1 Trillion Student Loan Rip-Off: How an Entire Generation Was Tricked into Taking on Crushing Debt That Just Enriches Banks

The $1 Trillion Student Loan Rip-Off: How an Entire Generation Was Tricked into Taking on Crushing Debt That Just Enriches Banks: "USA Today says that at some point this year, student loan debt will exceed $1 trillion, surpassing even credit card debt. Felix Salmon says the number is closer to $550 billion. Either way total student loan debt is rising as other debts have tailed off. Delinquency has increased, too, since the height of the financial crisis.

It’s a huge mess....."

Student Loan Debt Crazy!

Sex Work to Pay Off College Loans? How the College Debt Racket Sucks Young People Dry -- And Led Many to Occupy Wall St.

Sex Work to Pay Off College Loans? How the College Debt Racket Sucks Young People Dry -- And Led Many to Occupy Wall St.: "Student loan debtor: "Kids are told to get this expensive degree and you’ll get a job. You end up owing too much and owning nothing."

The young man standing next to the “Jail Sallie Mae, Cancel All Student Loan Debt” sign in Liberty Plaza last night could very well end up in jail himself – not for protesting economic injustice and marching on Wall Street, but for doing sex work to pay off his student loans. "My loans are $1,300 a month," he said. "My rent is $1,300 a month. My salary is $2,600 a month. You can see the problem. So I work as a prostitute for food and utilities."

Though he works a day job in the tech sector, it’s not enough to get by. "But it could be worse," he continued. "I could have to do sex work for all of it." ..."

How Killer Student Debt and Unemployment Made Young People the Leaders at Occupy Wall Street

How Killer Student Debt and Unemployment Made Young People the Leaders at Occupy Wall Street: ""That we're young only means we have the most to lose by standing idle," say the young protesters mocked by mainstream media.

The sign has a clever double meaning. The young have the most to lose by standing idle and not having their voices heard in the political process, and they have the most to lose by actually being idle — or unemployed.

The media hasn’t learned the lessons from the 1960s, as there is still a tendency to dismiss young people protesting because they are young. You can see this phenomenon in the original New York Times coverage, and it appears in much of the rest. But at the heart of dismissals of young college kids in the 1960s was the idea that they had a very bright future ahead of them that they were taking for granted. For instance, here’s President Nixon in the New York Times, May 1970...."

Is the Near-Trillion-Dollar Student Loan Bubble About to Pop?

Is the Near-Trillion-Dollar Student Loan Bubble About to Pop?: "Student loans have been going up since the recession began--and now defaults are up too. Something has to be done, but what?




If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt.” -- Economic anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years




Tarah Toney worked two full-time jobs to put herself through college, at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, and still has $75,000 in debt. She graduated in six years with a Bachelor's in English and wanted to go on to teach high school...."

What They Won't Tell You about the National Debt

Thom Hartmann & Professor Richard Wolff: S&P Downgrade of U.S. Debt: What It Means

Mainstream Media Protects Republican Economic Terrorism

Rachel Maddow Debunks GOP Talking Point That S&P Downgrade Was Due To Debt

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Debt Deal's Failure

The Debt Deal's Failure: "In narrow economic terms, the debt deal is actually not a big deal, neither as good as its advocates claim nor as terrifying as its opponents fear. The actual cut to the 2012 budget, the only budget over which this Congress has control, is $21 billion out of total expenditures of $3.7 trillion—a pittance. Everything else can and will be changed by future Congresses. What the deal does is kick tough choices down the road, this time to a congressional super­commission that will have to come up with a larger plan to reduce debt. And it does nothing to spur growth, without which the debt will expand well above projections. That’s why the usually circumspect Mohamed El- Erian, head of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, grades the deal somewhere between an incomplete and a fail. “Other than eliminating default risk emanating from a self-manufactured crisis,” he writes, “there is nothing good about America’s debt ceiling debacle.”..."

Bill Maher: Democrats Need Their Own Psychos To Take Out The Tea Party