The New York Times ran a fascinating article yesterday on soaring student college debt. To make a long story short—and at 4,500+ words it was a long story—students are taking on a lot more debt to get themselves through college and finding it harder to pay back what they borrowed. That trend is worrying. Because if the system for financing American higher education breaks down, one of the country’s primary mechanisms for Read more »

Above the Fold. President Obama got himself into hot water this week when he was overhead telling Russian president Dmitri Medvedev he would have “more flexibility” on issues like missile defense after the November election and that incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin should give him “space.” The incident added to a long list of presidential and vice presidential “open mic” gaffes. During a sound-check before a 1984 radio interview, Ronald Reagan warmed up by saying,  “My fellow Americans, I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” That got people’s hearts pounding. Vice President Biden famously called the signing of Obama’s health-care bill in 2010 “a big f***ing deal.” Parents of young children were not pleased. Read more »

I had the great pleasure to spend the past two days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  (Oskee Wow Wow!) To walk the Illinois campus is to see American education at its best. Whether it’s the work being done at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology on electronic nanostructures, or the high-end software being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or the efforts by the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Program to turn biomass into fuel, to name just a few outstanding research initiatives underway at Illinois, it’s easy to see how education improves our lives, creates jobs, and keeps the United States competitive. Read more »

Above the Fold. President Obama used his speech to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last Sunday and his White House press conference to take his critics to task for “beating the drums of war.” The president is certainly right that there has been far too much “loose talk of war.” Problems always look much easier from the vantage point of the campaign trail where “folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities.” Read more »

Last week President Obama held a science fair at the White House. More than 100 students showed up. So too did Bill Nye the science guy. The student-crafted projects ranged from a new cancer therapy to a marshmallow cannon. Read more »

Rick Santorum deserves credit for trying to draw attention to the fate of U.S. manufacturing. As he pointed out at last night’s GOP presidential debate in Tampa, manufacturing has long been a source of good middle-class jobs, helping to build “that ladder of success all the way down so people can climb all the way up.” The problem is, as the chart below shows, that manufacturing hasn’t been the source of job creation in the United States for a very long time. Indeed, the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen by about a third over the past decade. Read more »

Earlier today I noted the obvious: college costs are skyrocketing. But cost growth is only half of the equation when it comes to deciding whether college is affordable; the other half is income growth. If your costs go up, but your paycheck goes up even more, you are fine. The problem for most Americans is that their real incomes (that is, adjusted for inflation) haven’t even begun to keep pace with rising tuition costs. Over the past thirty years, real median household income has risen only 13 percent. Worse yet, real median household income is actually lower today than it was in 1999. Read more »

I have one child in college (Wahoowa!), another set to start this September, and two more who will join them within the next four years. So my ears perked up during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address when President Obama said that once kids graduate from high school “the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college.” Read more »

Above the Fold. My BlackBerry buzzed this morning with email alerts informing me that President Obama intends to ask Congress for authority to merge several of the federal government’s trade- and commerce-related agencies. The decision fulfills a pledge he made in last year’s State of the Union address to give Americans “a government that’s more competent and more efficient.” The news alert appealed to that part of me that likes nice, clean organizational flow charts. (I once co-authored an article on how to restructure the State Department for the twenty-first century. Have no fear, foreign service officers, my blueprint has no chance of ever being implemented.) And as the Government Accountability Office found last year, the U.S. government has plenty of redundant and overlapping government agencies. But what the White House is offering up is pretty small potatoes. The plan, assuming Congress blesses it, would cut 1,000 jobs and save $3 billion over ten years. To put that in perspective, the federal government has about 2.8 million civilian employees, and the Bowles-Simpson Commission concluded that the federal government needs to reduce the projected budget deficit over the next ten years by $4 trillion to get the national debt to level off. So today’s proposal isn’t going to make much of a difference in how Washington works. So why didn’t the White House put forth a truly ambitious plan to remake the federal government? Probably because such a plan would almost certainly be dead on arrival; virtually everyone would find something in it that they did not like. There’s the rub: it is easy to propose new ways to organize the federal government; it is nigh impossible to get people to agree on which one makes the most sense. But lest I leave you disillusioned about the future of American politics, here’s a piece of good news: while the population of the United States grew by nearly a third over the past three decades, the number of federal civilian employees actually declined by a few thousand. Read more »