More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
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Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#2>unemployment is low
Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them.
Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc.
>the economy has improved
For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, dividends, and business equity.
The average person with student loans has almost none of these things. They are relying on a wage from a job that requires them usually to pay rent, own a car, buy a monthly transport card, and so on.
When you are only making $1400-2000 per month after tax, and $1,000 of that is out the door on work-related expenses alone (rent, transport, insurance, phone), there isn't much left over for a $300 per month student loan payment.
Disclaimer: Don't shoot the messenger. These are merely my thoughts on what is happening. Please reply with criticism.
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#3>unemployment is low Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc. >the economy has improved For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, d…
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Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#4>unemployment is low Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc. >the economy has improved For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, d…
Well put.
It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#5>unemployment is low Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc. >the economy has improved For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, d…
Those numbers are all computed, and they've all been getting better as core unemployment has (that is, they are trending together). The only number that is getting worse is the number of people retiring out at 65/67.
I do agree that we have to look more at wealth equality to see what's going on.
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#6>unemployment is low Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc. >the economy has improved For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, d…
For further reading on this, look to articles about how the Phillips Curve (the theoretical link between inflation and underemployment) is broken (if it ever worked).
e.g. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/inflation-canada-outlook-1.4...
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#7>unemployment is low Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc. >the economy has improved For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, d…
Well put. It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.
It used to be that when someone at the top got a bit richer, they would invest that money. Which meant opening up a factory, creating jobs as a side effect. Now, it seems the better investments happen to be things that don't create as much jobs.
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#8Is it possible that some graduates are realizing that for all that money, their education was not what they were promised, and a bit of resentment has led them to make the decision not to pay?
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well put. It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.
It used to be that when someone at the top got a bit richer, they would invest that money. Which meant opening up a factory, creating jobs as a side effect. Now, it seems the better investments happen to be things that don't create as much jobs.
Well why would anyone invest in companies that cater to the middle and lower classes? Those people don't have any money to spend.
Re: More Americans Are Falling Behind on Student Loans, and Nobody Quite Knows Why
#10>unemployment is low Yes, but many people have been designsted as "having stopped looking for work", which means the statistic doesn't count them. Additionally, those who are employed perhaps are underemployed, working as an Uber driver or bartender or chipotle or etc. >the economy has improved For the top 6% of Americans that are millionaires, it absolutely has improved. Most of their income is from capital gains, d…
Besides all that, I'd add that the unemployment rate is an aggregate measure. There's no guarantee that the unemployment rate for arbitrary subsets of the population (e.g. college graduates) is the same as the aggregate unemployment rate defined over the whole population. So, supposing that college educated workers actually were more likely to be unemployed than the average worker (they aren't), looking at the national unemployment rate would be just ... looking at the wrong place.
But here's a "nice" graph (the graph is nice, but the trend is worrying): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662. Labor force participation for college educated workers fell by 3.9 percent points since 2009. This is rather massive compared with the actual unemployment.
I really wish the people at statistics offices would come up with some new measure of unemployment. Sometimes I feel a scalar doesn't cut it.