Average Student Debt Has Ballooned 58 Percent In The Last Seven Years

A new report from the analysis firm Fair Isaac Corp. provides one more piece of evidence confirming that student debt is out of control. According to the report, average student debt grew 58 percent between 2005 and 2012, leaving students buried under more than $27,000 each. Delinquencies, of course, rose along with the debt load:

The delinquency rate today on student loans that were originated from 2005-2007 is 12.4 percent. The comparable figure for student loans that were originated from 2010-2012 is 15.1 percent, representing an increase in the delinquency rate by nearly 22 percent.

While the delinquency rate is climbing, the average amount of student loan debt is increasing even faster. In 2005, the average U.S. student loan debt was $17,233. By 2012, it had ballooned to more than $27,253 – an increase of 58 percent in seven years. By contrast, the average credit card balance and the average balance on car loans owed by U.S. consumers actually decreased during the same period.

“This situation is simply unsustainable and we’re already suffering the consequences,” said Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer of Fair Issac. “When wage growth is slow and jobs are not as plentiful as they once were, it is impossible for individuals to continue taking out ever-larger student loans without greatly increasing the risk of default.” This chart shows how student loan debt has outpaced other forms of debt:

“Our evaluation of credit risk patterns also reveals that high levels of student loan debt are now riskier than before,” the report said. (HT: Zero Hedge)

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DAY'S END ROUNDUP

FROM THE BLOGS:

Catering to both sides on immigration reform
The Plum Line's Greg Sargent asks why the current $18 billion border security budget is not enough.

Sandy Relief Bill still gets 'no' votes in the Senate
ThinkProgress's Josh Israel breaks down 31 senators who voted 'no' to a Hurricane Sandy relief bill after requesting disaster relief for their own states.

Gang of Eight's immigration reform remains questionable
The Daily Caller's Mickey Kaus says "Washington fakery" is at work regarding amnesty in the new Senate proposals for 11 million illegal immigrants.

A fond farewell
"I did not belong at CNN," Erick Erickson said as he bid goodbye to three years at CNN.

OTHER NEWS SOURCES

NRA chief to call for arming schools
Wayne LaPierre, the vice president of the National Rifle Association, will call for strengthening current gun laws and mental health care at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, The Hill's Mike Lillis reports.

Sen. Graham to withhold Hagel nomination
Until Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testifies on the Benghazi attack, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is threatening to block former Sen. Chuck Hagel's (R-Neb.) nomination to succeed the outgoing Defense secretary, according to The Hill's Jeremy Herb.

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Obama signs $50B Sandy relief measure

President Obama on Tuesday signed legislation providing $50.7 billion to help New York, New Jersey and other states hit by Hurricane Sandy, according to the White House.

The Senate approved the measure on Monday by a 62-36 vote.

The bill reached Obama several weeks after supporters had hoped Congress would sign off on the measure. The House did not approve a similar measure in the last days of the previous Congress.

“It was three months ago that Superstorm Sandy blew up the East Coast,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the floor Monday evening before the vote. “Sandy’s wrath was wide and it was deep. Nearly 300,000 families had their homes damaged. ... We can’t wait any longer, because nothing about this was a game for those families.”

The House passed its bill earlier this month in a bipartisan 241-180 vote.

--Ramsey Cox contributed to this report. 

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Mississippi Tea Partiers Seek To Nullify Any Federal Laws They Don’t Like

Nineteenth Century nullificationist Senator John C. Calhoun

Responding to President Obama’s plan to issue 23 executive orders on gun violence prevention, radical lawmakers in a number of states have re-upped their efforts to exempt their state from federal gun laws through the insidious and unconstitutional practice of nullification. Now, Tea Partiers in Mississippi want to institutionalize the nullification process, with a proposal to create a permanent committee devoted to nullifying all kinds of federal laws. The Dispatch reports:

The committee, composed of 14 state elected officials, would determine what is and isn’t within the federal government’s power when dealing with the state’s constitutional rights. … The bill, which is listed with the state as an “active bill” and will be taken up by the Constitution Committee, provides measures to “prohibit the infringement of the Constitutionally protected rights of the State of Mississippi, or its people, by means of federal statute, mandate, executive order, judicial decision or other action deemed by the State to be unconstitutional.”

“This was a bill that was requested for me to bring up,” Chism said. “It’s to solidify the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.”

Chism said the bill was drafted in response to 23 executive orders issued by President Barack Obama on gun control and weeks before the state is scheduled to begin implementing a national health system commonly known as “Obamacare.”

Having failed in their court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, state lawmakers started introducing nullification bills to purportedly eliminate that law.

The problem with the practice of nullification, once used to defend Jim Crow segregation, is that it rejects both the constitutional tenets that validly enacted federal laws are supreme over state laws, and that it is judges, and not state legislators, who determine whether those laws are valid or not in our system of checks and balances. Right-wing lawmakers revived the discredited tactic as a last-ditch means of fighting federal legislation they could not defeat in court. But a law that authorizes state legislators to review all federal legislation as a matter of course would open the door to a much broader swath of radical and defiant action, which is why James Madison warned that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” because it would allow the states to simply ignore any law they want.

Fortunately, the Mississippi bill was immediately greeted with hostility, and even Chism himself admitted the bill likely would not make it out of committee.  But bills pending in several other states by “tenthers” go so far as to propose that enforcing federal gun law would be penalized as a felony.

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Justice Scalia: The Constitution Is ‘Dead, Dead, Dead’

Justice Antonin Scalia

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is well known for ardently opposing the view that the Constitution is a “living document,” meaning its text should be interpreted in light of modern societal conditions. Reinforcing the extremity of his own view, Scalia accurately identified just what the opposite of a living document is during remarks at Southern Methodist University, disparaging children who come to the court and refer to the Constitution as “living”:

It’s not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead.

Scalia has made similar comments before. In 2006, he said “you would have to be an idiot” to believe the Constitution is alive, and in 2008, he told NPR, “Let’s cut it out. Let’s go back to the good old dead Constitution.” In fact, given reports of similar comments just this past December at Princeton, his “the Constitution is dead” refrain seems to now be a standard part of his book tour. While there are reasonable interpretations of the Constitution that are defined as something other than “living,” Scalia’s extreme suggestion that the Constitution is “dead” reflects how ill-equipped his own brand of originalism is to address problems that are quite alive and well. But on this occasion, Scalia seemed to have realized the absurdity of his own claim, backtracking later in the event to say that “dead” was not a good description after all. “It’s an enduring document, not a dead one,” he said.

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Three Charts Reminding The GOP That Domestic Spending Is Already Headed Toward Historic Lows

Republicans like to portray President Obama as a big government spender, despite the fact that government spending under Obama has grown at its slowest pace since the Eisenhower administration. The GOP is also trying to pretend the spending cuts that Obama has signed into law over the last two years simply didn’t happen.

In fact, under its current trajectory, non-defense discretionary spending — everything from education to food safety to transportation to housing to veterans’ benefits — will hit historic lows in the next decade, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden showed in these charts:

If the so-called “sequester” comes into force in March, which House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) says it will, domestic spending will fall even more. “Instead of totaling 3.2 percent of GDP in 2017, nondefense discretionary spending would total less than 3 percent of GDP and would be on its way down to 2.6 percent by 2022. This is less than two-thirds of what was previously its lowest level,” Linden wrote.

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Inside Ex-Gay Therapy: Homosexual Behavior Is A Fantasy Addiction To A Wounded Gender Identity

The late psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall believed homosexuality was a perversion.

Joseph Nicolosi, founder of ex-gay group NARTH and trainer of many other ex-gay therapists, is back with another brief article attempting to explain his perspective on the nature of homosexuality. Earlier this month, he explained that his patients can get over their supposed “addiction” to gay porn by simply making friends with more men. This week, he offers a convoluted description of homosexual behavior as an addiction to acting out a fantasy that compensates for a wounded gender identity:

Joyce McDougall has investigated the central role of “theatre and role-playing” in non-typical forms of sexual activity, including homosexuality. She is among the few contemporary psychoanalysts willing to study such forms of sexuality. McDougall understands “sexual theatre” as an acting-out of intrapsychic sexual forces in a symbolic attempt to resolve an identity conflict. In this regard she confirms the classic psychoanalytic understanding of “perverse” (as the term was used in previous years) sexual activity as being rooted in identity confusion. Noting the repetitive-compulsive nature of these role enactments, McDougall found that while her patients complain about the constrained structure of these “erotic theatre pieces,” they could not abstain from their enactments: “…and have to do it again and again and again” (McDougall, 2000, p.182).

What Nicolosi is trying to suggest is that gay people (and “the extreme case of transsexuals”) were somehow sent the wrong messages by their parents about how they are supposed to understand their own gender. This leads to a sense of inner conflict that they then address through compulsively trying to fulfill that “false” identity. Essentially, he thinks that gay people are just actors cast in the wrong role who don’t know how escape the performance because they believe they are trying to fix some kind of “past trauma” by acting it out.

Stepping back from that gobbledygook, it’s actually easy to make sense of how these perpetrators of fraud arrive at such nonsense. The obvious explanation for why there are gay people who don’t want to be gay is because they exist in a society that condemns homosexuality; they are taught from a young age that being gay is wrong and something to be ashamed of. Mainstream social science recognizes this reality, which is why the recommended professional practice is to affirm same-sex orientations to help resolve the inner conflict.

Ex-gay therapists take the opposite approach. They assume same-sex attractions are a defect by default. Thus, they need to invent other explanations for why people feel conflicted about having them. And like most aspects of ex-gay therapy, the easy solution is to blame the patient. Nicolosi’s gibberish is a means of doing just that. It’s a gay person’s fault he’s gay, it’s a gay person’s fault he feels bad about being gay, and only by accepting that shame and blame can that gay person attempt to find recovery. That’s the insidious message behind ex-gay therapy.

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