The Monitor:
A California advocacy group that tracks student loans said last October that the average debt level of New Hampshire college and university graduates in 2007 was $25,211, second highest in the country.
I'm well past my undergrad, and grad school days. My student loans at the time, while necessary, were outrageous. Today they seem like peanuts.
And I'm still paying them off with no end in sight.
When the elites on CNBC and elsewhere wonder why no one can spend right now, maybe it's because we have generations of Americans in their 20s, 30s, 40s, who fork over a much greater percentage of their paycheck to debt servicing on student loans, car loans, mortgages, and credit card balances than, say, thirty years ago. And what's left goes to out-of-control health care costs and rising food prices.
The breadth and scope and sheer activity coming out of the new Administration toward the economy is hugely welcome, and a sea change from Bush, who gave us about two years of drift following another six of an activist government frighteningly hostile to ordinary Americans. This, for example, is a sight for sore eyes.
But I'm still waiting for them to internalize the ongoing emergency that Americans are drowning in personal debt, a danger to the American Dream far greater than the budget deficit or the daily Dow Jones roller coasters. That the next wave of economic hardship, accelerated by cascading unemployment, will roll off of home foreclosures and move into credit card defaults.
This is not some self-righteous moral fable about personal responsibility being less than what it was back in the Good Olde Days. This debt is a forced by-product of thirty years of ideologically driven wealth redistribution.
That there are Senate Democrats who are more concerned about returning the wealthy to Reagan-era tax rates than a drowning middle class debt is infuriating.
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