Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives creates a good selection of economic charts every week. Here’s one of his latest under the title Brace Yourself: Our Latest Look at Student Debt:
College Tuition and Fees constitute one of the biggest threats to our economic outlook. Here is a chart of data from the relevant Consumer Price Index sub-component reaching back to 1978, the earliest year Uncle Sam provides a breakout for College Tuition and Fees. As an interesting sidebar, we've thrown in the increase in the cost of purchasing a new car as well as the more substantial increase for the broader category of medical care, both of which pale in comparison.
During the decade of the 1990s, when real out-of-pocket funding declined 25%, tuition and fees rose 92%, which sounds substantial ... until you compare it to the 1272% across the complete data series. For early boomers (a decade before the timeframe in the chart above) paying for college was sort of like buying a car. But in recent decades, it has become more like buying house, for which the strategy of a minimum down payment is commonplace for first-time buyers.
HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—From the Pit of Hell:
If you want to dispose of hazardous waste in the US, despite an EPA gutted by the Bush administration, you'll have to follow extensive regulations. Paperwork must be completed and approved, the waste will be poured down a deep injection well, or buried under tons of earth in abandoned mines. It will have to be managed and monitored by highly trained, expensive specialists and inspected by third party officials, making it a time consuming, costly project. But if you're a contractor in Iraq or Afghanistan, you can bypass all those silly safety procedures and make a bundle doing it:
They're called "burn pits" and they're used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan to burn and dispose of all kinds of waste, some of it hazardous. And they may be responsible for contributing to the sickness and even death of military personnel. Which is why Democratic Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire and others filed legislation requiring a full investigation into the effects of burn pits and to prohibit their continued use.
The same private contractors and military brass that brought our soldiers death by electric shower and contaminated water are able to use poorly paid enlisted men and women, wearing little or no protection, to do their highly profitable dirty work. These pits are vast. A single burn site might contain hundreds of tons of machinery, plastics, dioxin, benzene, paint and solvents, heavy metals, and medical waste—including amputated limbs.
On today's “encore presentation” Kagro in the Morning show: ➡ & ! are in. Crazy and/or stupid people & who they shot. Greg Dworkin Storifies Phil Mattingly Tweetsplaining TAA/TPA/TPP. Parsing the procedure story that even explainers don't explain. New contributor WillaGorilla brings the Bernie game.
On iTunes | On Stitcher | Support the show: Patreon; PayPal; PayPal Subscription