Paperback News

The paperback version of Generation Debt will make its debut in January (not February) 2007. There is a new gorgeous cover and a new awesome subtitle: Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold out for Student Loans, Credit Cards, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back.
There will also be a new chapter, full of activist tales from the road, and an action guide to taking control of your own finances.
I am really excited about this relaunch, I think it's going to be a smash.

On Tubbs Hill

Greetings from gorgeous Coeur d'Alene, Idaho where I am appearing as a featured speaker for the Kootenai County Financial Literacy Week. I talked to about 200 high school students yesterday about how not to get in trouble with credit cards& why it's fun to invest--really!--'cause compound interest and the Rule of 72 can work either for you or against you.
Brad Dugdale, a certified financial planner who invited me here, is also really excited about getting people to opt out of pre-approved credit offers, which you can do here. I could stand to get less junk mail.

My message is in an interesting new context here where real estate values are rising, but you can get a 3-bedroom house for just over $100K, and where kids are skipping out on community college for construction and tourist jobs.

The Nation Editor on the 2006 Election

I think there are three issues that matter in such an election. There's the Constitution - defend it; there's Iraq - get out of it; there's universal health care - pass it. Hillary Clinton on the Constitution, not there. On the war and universal health care, terrible.

Student Debt Alert Clock

A counter, courtesy of Student Debt Alert, that shows the total amount current and past students are on the hook for, WITHOUT interest. It was at $413 billion last I checked. Pretty close to the 2004, 2005 and projected 2006 budget deficits, all around $400 billion.
That's less than 25% of the nation's total consumer debt, a little over $2 trillion,
5% of the national debt, north of $8 trillion,
and 0.7% of the figure that dwarfs them all, the $53 trillion projected bill for Social Security and Medicare.

Name Check in the NYT

"The Bank of Mom and Dad." Shallow, but relatively sympathetic, take on 20somethings whose lifestyles are subsidized by Boomer parents.

Making College Affordable

Rep George Miller, D-CA, sponsored an online forum this week on college affordability, for which I submitted some "expert" testimony. If you are a student or parent, you can submit testimony here. Miller is the sponsor of a bill along with Senator Dick Durbin that would, quite simply, cut student loan interest rates in half, thus saving the Typical Student Borrower $5,600.

Wedding Day Blues

My newest story in the Voice is about Tariq Rivzi, one of approximately 2500 South Asian immigrants to New York City who have been detained or deported since September 11, many seemingly without reason.
Secret prisons and unexplained imprisonments...

UPDATE: Tariq Rivzi was released April 20, I learned. On parole, no explanation. Amazing coincidence, no? Go to the Council on Peoples' Organization if you want to get involved and help more New Yorkers in his community, with legal clinics, afterschool programs, ESL classes, or a donation.

U Michigan Speech Today

Big props to the Michigan Organization of Students, who are trying to start an undergraduate union and are staging a three-day teach-in called Tent State University. I spoke today on the steps of the library in Ann Arbor about the French example and why students should encourage others to fight for their own economic interests--and provide a positive alternative.
For more about the Tent State movement, go here.

Mom to Kid: You're On Your Own for College

An amazing story climbing the NYT most-emailed list: the laissez-faire economic order has finally reached the family, with parents leaving kids on their own more and more to pay for ginormous college costs. Don't take my word for it:

"What I've really seen in the last 10 years is a generational shifting of the responsibility" to pay for college, said Ellen Frishberg, director of student financial services at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Our parents helped us pay for school. These parents are not as willing to help their children pay for school."

"It's such a new phenomenon that there's not a lot to compare it to," said Christine W. McGuire, director of financial assistance at Boston University. She said changing attitudes about debt were behind the trend. "We're so comfortable with debt burden now as a society, and the parents already have a significant debt burden of their own, they may not see it as a big deal if students are also taking on large amounts of debt," she said.

Maggie Walsh, a senior at McIntosh High School in Peachtree City, Ga., said that although her top choice for college this fall was New York University, she was worried about the cost, which could come to more than $30,000 a year for tuition alone, according to N.Y.U.'s Web site. As a Georgia resident, she said, she could take advantage of a state scholarship program that offers full tuition at any public state university to any high school student with a B average.
"I've been thinking about it," Ms. Walsh said. "If I don't get any financial aid from such-and-such a college, is it worth going into years and years of debt? It's starting to look like more and more of a bad idea."

French Young People Win--But for What?

An amazing demonstration of youth power--they got that discriminatory law overturned. But what now? They're still 22% unemployed. Entreprenueurial incentives? Liberalize somewhere else? Do they have an alternative?

Newsday Reviews

Check it out

Gen-Clash

Some funny blog-reviews of my Canadian radio debate on "The Current" today with Leonard Steinhorn, author of The Greatest Generation, about how grateful we should all be for the Baby Boomers and their contributions to diversity and tolerance. Steinhorn has a conversation-stopping habit of quoting shocking instances of retro racism and sexism to bolster his argument. He seems especially offended by the fact that African-Americans once used toxic bleaches to lighten their skin and hair. True but what of today's tanning-salon craze? Turnabout is fair play I must say.
A more serious problem was that he didn't engage either my argument (Boomers are leaving America quite a mess to clean up) or Professor MacMillan's (the 60s were complicated, and besides, where did all those conservatives come from?) but instead kept repeating his talking points.
ps he was 20 minutes late keeping me waiting in Boston and MacMillan in Toronto.
pps. I know my voice is a little high and girlish. I was getting over a cold yesterday so it was prob breathier than usual. Working on it though.

Imagining the Future of Global Warming

I think this is a brave, important piece. It's about envisioning what we need to do--not just wringing our hands.

Climate change should be the primary driver in our biggest decisions over the next 20 years. It should define our major economic investments, tax policies and foreign policy. It is that big. It is that big of a threat, that big of an opportunity. It is not merely one of many important issues -- it is the issue that will define our generation. It is our destiny.

Wages Up, Workers Scarce in China

Fascinating. It had to happen I guess.

The shortage of workers is pushing up wages and swelling the ranks of the country's middle class, and it could make Chinese-made products less of a bargain worldwide.

They say lower down that the number of Chinese people enrolled in college has tripled since 1999, to 14 million (US has 15 million). And minimum wages are up 25% in three years in the big cities.

Reprint in the Times

A little article I wrote last month for Men's Health on "What's Your Spending Style?" rated a mention in the Saturday business section of the NY Times.

..And A

I was recently talking to a Democratic strategist who believes in a strong progressive majority among Gen Y (born starting in 1978 or 1982 depending on who you ask); under-30s were the only age group to vote for Kerry, 54-46, and they have become even more progressive according to polling since then. This is a large generation and will make up a larger proportion of the electorate in 2008 than in 2004. (For more info on the 2004 youth vote, go here).

Ideally, this could translate into support in 2008&beyond for candidates who offer a new New Deal to American workers: portable, affordable health care benefits, a federal living wage, and a retirement system that really works, protecting the most vulnerable workers while fairly distributing resources among the generations. Oh, and reining in of the predatory credit industry that drives so much misery. This is the largely economic progressive vision shared by groups like ACORN, Jobs with Justice, Jobs for the Future, and many others. The "new generation" I referred to means not only groups I talk about in the book, like Working Today, TechsUnite, Young Workers United, but a whole cohort of college-educated progressives who came up through programs like Union Summer, or were exposed to union organizing by graduate students on their campuses. They believe in social movement unionism as an outlet for progressive action.
Of course, this progressive dream runs smack up against America's precarious strategic and financial situation: the record deficits, growing trade imbalances, outsourcing, losing ground in education, and demographic shift. It could be that the New Deal analogy is all too apt: it could take an economic collapse to spur a radical expansion of economic protections.
In the long term, I believe that America will finish out the century as a great power, but not the Great Power.

Q...

I got an interesting question via email yesterday and wanted to try and answer it here.
I'm a 28 year-old grad student in Chicago. I'm at Northwestern University's Public Policy program (still living at home, naturally). I'm also a Legislative Aide for the Illinois House of Representatives. I was curious as to where you see the whole Generation Debt scenario headed in the long-term. It goes without saying that this generation may very well end on the losing end of history as we shoulder the Boomer's retirement costs and are out-educated by India and China. How do you see the prevailing politics of the under-30s turning out? Do you think there will be a rebellion against a welfare state that's able look after their parents' generation only at an astronomical cost to themselves? You mentioned "a new generation of labour organisers and advocates" coming up. Who are they?

Great Review/Commentary of Gendebt in the Guardian UK

In the States, meanwhile, there is currently much fuss over Generation Debt, a crisp polemic by 24-year-old Anya Kamenetz, a Louisiana-born Yale graduate who writes with the same elegant indignation that defined Naomi Klein's No Logo.

40,000-strong LA School Walkout Protesting Immigration Reform

And they say kids today are apathetic.

The protests are believed to eclipse in size the demonstrations that occurred during the anti-Proposition 187 campaign in 1994 and even a famous student walkout for Chicano rights in 1968.
"It was my dad's and grandfather's sweat and tears that built the city of Los Angeles," said Marshall High School senior Saul Corona, whose father came to the United States illegally before getting a green card. "People like them did things no one else wanted to do because they wanted me to have a better future."

The protests appeared to be loosely organized, with students learning about them through mass e-mails, fliers, instant messages, cellphone calls and postings on myspace.com Web pages. By contrast, the massive rally Saturday that drew 500,000 people to downtown Los Angeles was highly organized, with demonstrators urged to wear white and bring American flags.

Sallie Mae: "March Toward Monopoly"

Excellent story in the Chronicle on consolidation in the lending industry. Explains the background of what's happening now.

Congress created the Student Loan Marketing Association as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972 because policy makers at the time feared that banks alone would not have enough money to meet student demand for loans. Sallie Mae, as the entity soon became known, was directed to use U.S. Treasury funds to purchase government-backed loans from banks, providing the banks with money to make more loans.
By the 1980s, Sallie Mae was doing so well that it no longer needed direct federal financing to purchase loans; instead it turned to Wall Street. Because of its implicit backing from the government — lowering the risk of defaults because the government would cover nearly any losses — it was able to raise enormous amounts of capital at low interest rates to buy and service student loans. In the process, it racked up tremendous profits.
Sallie Mae's assets multiplied eightfold during the early 1980s and early 90s, as federal student-loan volume soared.

But the financial success also attracted more scrutiny. Reports that the top officers of the Congressionally chartered corporation were pulling in seven-figure salaries led to charges in Congress that Sallie Mae and other loan providers were getting fat off the loan program, at the expense of students and the government.

The Clinton administration and Democrats in Congress pushed to remove banks and other lenders from the federal loan program altogether. Congress approved legislation in 1993 to gradually replace the guaranteed-loan program with direct lending, in which the Education Department provides loans directly to students through their colleges.
Sallie Mae's livelihood was suddenly threatened, and the company's leaders knew that its future depended on cutting ties with the government, so that it could diversify the products it offered. In 1996 the Clinton administration and Congress granted Sallie Mae its wish, allowing it to gradually become completely private.

Some of those who were involved in the Clinton administration's deliberations, however, believe that the government seriously misplayed its hand.
Thomas R. Wolanin, a longtime Democratic aide in Congress who served on a government committee that examined the possible sale, says he felt throughout the discussions that the administration was "giving the store away."
"My basic feeling," he says, "was that we were allowing Sallie Mae to privatize with very little financial return to taxpayers for the benefits they had received as a government entity, and without harnessing them to some public purpose."

Now they're preying on nonprofit loan agencies in a series of hostile takeovers.