Fucking duh. Just wait til the student loan bubble bursts. We. are. fucked.

I ran into a woman I was in graduate school with some 20 years ago. She took out loans a plenty and never really planned to pay them back.

Well, as time went on, those same loans have grown and grown and grown.

That $20,000.00 she borrowed is now about $40,000.00+.

She has no way to pay on it and she is now so old that she is on Social Security and guess what? They are taking the money she owes on these defaulted loans out of her Social Security checks.

Do I feel sorry for her? No, not really as she had never intended to pay that money back and her "plan" sort of backfired on her and now she in stuck in a very bad situation of her own making IMO.

There are many others just like her out there. They too will soon reap what they have sown.

Life is not a free ride. Student loans are a huge problem alright and it is hitting some people hard already -- those that defaulted are indeed screwed and broke as well as they cannot get a loan for any reason at all now as they have credit scores that likely suck badly is my guess.

to get an education. "Life is not a free ride". No it's not, but education should not be a "for profit" business. Education is an investment in the future. Most intelligent countries have figured this out already.

eom

It stated that manufacturing was the lowest it has been since 2008. This means that there is supply but no demand to make more. The reason there is no demand is because I believe it is because most people have nothing at all to do w/Wall Street. What money they have is likely in the bank or in CDs and the like. CDs are paying just over 1% long-term at best. Why bother?

Wall Street is not for everyone and some folks out there have no damn business at all having a thing to do with it, especially people that are on fixed and/or limited incomes, may be elderly and/or have health problems and they may not have a lot of money coming in but may have a few bucks saved. They get nothing at all for their savings accounts these days. This is plain disgusting.

It is easy to see why the economy is in a stalemate and dwindling away as rates are so low now I cannot see who would buy a 5-year CD at 1.10% at best. Why bother to lock your money up into such an investment when an online bank might gives you .85% and there are no penalties to be had? Its a no go for me, that much I can guarantee (as is the case for many others out there).

People don't spend when they don't have money to spend. So, lets face it, we're screwed. This whole economy is a sham, a huge sham!

When you have an economy like this, people tend to sit tight on what they have and spend as little as possible. They are like myself, fixing up a 12 year old car because it costs a lot less than get roped into buying a new one that they really cannot afford nor do they necessarily want the expense of having to deal with.

That same 1% is being catered to, not the middle nor lower income folks but they are just as important as that top 1%, if anything far more important because they outnumber the top 1% and while this same other 99% has to spend just as much if not more money just to survive and they are indeed what drives the economy world wide.

In the case of housing, values have gone up for those living in their million dollar homes. In my case, my house has dropped in value and the value it once had will never be seen again best I can tell. Such is the case in many other parts of the USA.

Recently I was at a discount grocery store buying groceries and some fool is there bragging about how he was buying food for the "food bank" at work while sporting a huge grin on his face and boasting about the 100K he has in the stock market. Events like this tell you something unless you are an idiot -- as I see where we are headed in this country and I do not have a very optimistic view on where that is. I could never imagine referring to my co-workers and what food may be on hand at work for them as being their "food bank". What an arrogant fool this man was and he was not a solitary individual, he was one of the upper 1% if his bragging was in fact real.

You can't keep having all of these non-stop, very costly wars without end for free. I figured that out a long time ago. When will the rest of the sheeple awaken to this fact?

I do not believe this $4.30+ a gallon gasoline economy has recovered at all. There are still no jobs and prices on everything that a person needs to survive have shot through the roof and shopping at the grocery store is a joke as you pay more for less!

& recommend.

And we have been wallowing in bullshit for at least 40 years.

And down sizing the wages of the jobs still here? You have to be an idiot to think there is any kind of lasting recovery.

But since multi-national corporations control the media the narrative has been focused on the debt. Republicans will push for more austerity, and Dems will cave.
Passing the Jobs Act and Bring the Jobs Home Act would have been a start, but the media has convinced everyone that we don't have the money to spend on job creation.

John Boehner:

"The American people want jobs, not more of the same ‘stimulus’ spending."

"It’s time to stop and listen to the American people: They are saying ‘enough is enough."

from what really needs to be discussed.

When are we ever going to learn that Trapitalism benefits NO ONE but the Very Wealthy Men?

I have known for a long time that the system is for the advancement of the interests of the wealthy, and their interest is not necessarily in increasing the prosperity of the country, but just in acquiring a larger portion of whatever wealth is available, thereby increasing the disparity between themselves and us serfs.

shopping malls are packed, entertainment venues are full and new vehicles are every where.
Our property appraised this month for $105,000 more than it did 2 1/2 years ago.

That said, I know it is moving ahead slower than many communities need and I believe a
Strong Democratic Congress could make the decisions that would spur the economy in a
better direction, to recover stronger and quicker.


Tikki

All GDP growth is due to Fed quantitative easing policy (aka money printing), and every penny of that has gone straight into the pockets of the very people who crashed the economy in the first place. Those people have never had it better; indeed for them there has been no recession or depression. For everyone else though, the economy continues its trend to increasingly take more from them in rents than it gives them in compensation for their labor. Come next year, you can add to the usual rent extraction which the people must endure the new govt enforced rent extraction of Romneycare (also called the Breathing Tax).

has been the policy of this country since Reagan.

And unemployment over 10% in one-third of its counties.

And where vicious (and proud of it) Republicans are pulling the plug on emergency UI benefits effective June 30. And not expanding Medicaid under Obamacare.

And where more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans in the past two elections, but thanks to gerrymandering, Rs still took over.

This is ONE FUCKED UP STATE.

[P ALIGN=Center]
MORAL MONDAYS
[P ALIGN=Left]

Just a slow recovery, instead of what everyone was predicting - a strong bounceback from a very deep recession.

It's certainly preferable to being in recession! And everyone was always fooling themselves about the strong bounceback thing. After the early 80s recessions, yeah, we came roaring back. Since then every following recession has been followed by an increasingly slow recovery.

But in the 80s, coming into the recessions we had high inflation and very high interest rates. When interest rates dropped, that really fueled the recovery. Demographics were also very favorable. Fuel prices were much lower. And we didn't have the huge build up of debt, both public and private, that is still retarding this recovery.

The whole economy and circumstances are very different now.

Manufacturing is a smaller component of our economy now. Manufacturing provides a sharp rise out of recoveries; service-weighted economies are slower to go into recessions but slower coming out of them.

thats the definition of a recession.... right...... so that means we've had a double dip and a triple dip.

I remember reading references to 'jobless recoveries' all through the Bush years. Our economy has been hollowed out for more than three decades; now it's all falling apart.