Tag Archives: debt

Michigan rep. introduces a stimulus bill for the rest of us: the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012

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Back in 2007, as I was thinking about my little Dr. Sammy in 2008/EdF1rst project, I conceived a heresy. It went like this: What would happen if, as a massive economic stimulus, you forgave all outstanding student loan debt in America?

I knew from experience the impact that loan debt has on consumer spending. You have, at this point, a couple of generations who can’t afford to spend (or save) in service to the debt racked up getting their degrees (degrees, which, by the way, didn’t position them to pay off that debt in anything like a timely manner). My generation is and will continue to be underwater. The Millennials are well and truly fucked in ways that us Xers couldn’t have imagined in the 1980s. Read more

The lesson that bin Laden learned from Reagan

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There is a particular narrative about Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War that has always struck me as compelling. I bought the argument at the time and I think I still do, to some extent, even though I’m hardly a Reagan fan.

The story goes like this: Reagan was able to finally win the Cold War and drive a stake through the heart of the Evil Empire because he realized that the Soviet economy was already badly overextended trying to prop up the war machine. All he had to do was accelerate the arms race, dramatically increasing military spending (while also amping up the sabre-rattling rhetoric) and that would force the Russkis to bankrupt themselves trying to compete. Read more

Reality is making us sick, and fantasy can’t cure us

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You’re honey child to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
Well slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

– U2

Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have been with us for a very long time. Science fiction, as well, has been with us since Mary Shelley found herself in a bet with Lord Byron about the possibility of writing a new kind of horror, one not grounded in the gothic.* So the presence in our popular culture of stories based in unreality of one form or another is certainly nothing new.

It seems to me that there’s been a lot more of it lately, though. Read more

Ten years on: was Columbine the rule or the exception?

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Part two in a series

How did it happen? Why did it happen? There’s simply no way to measure how many hours have devoted to these questions in the ten years and four days since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, and while we don’t (and never will) have all the answers, we do have some of them. Obviously a good bit of the discussion focuses on the individuals themselves, and other analyses cast a broader net, examining the social factors that shaped the individuals. In a way, the question we’re still debating perhaps boils down to nature vs. nurture. Were Harris and Klebold Natural Born Killers? Or are they better understood as by-products of deeper social trends and dynamics?

The answer is probably “All of the above,” but we can’t simply check C and be on our merry, uncritical way. Read more