Seriously Delinquent Student Loan Debt

U.S. government-sponsored student loan debt has become an escalating problem for the finances of many American households. The latest household debt report from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve indicates that Americans collectively owed $1.46 trillion in student loans at the end of 2018, more than any other category of non-housing related debt.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Non-Housing Debt Balance of American Households, 2004:Q1 through 2018:Q4

Worse, the percentage of student loan debt that is in “serious delinquency”, where no debt payments have been made for at least 90 days or longer, has remained stuck within a range between 10.7% and 11.8% of the total borrowed since 2012, the highest of all forms of household debt.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Percent of Debt Balance 90+ Days Delinquent

Bloomberg Quint‘s Alexandre Tansi crunched the numbers and found the amount of delinquent student loan debt has reached a new high.

Student-loan delinquencies surged last year, hitting consecutive records of $166.3 billion in the third quarter and $166.4 billion in the fourth.

Bloomberg calculated the dollar amounts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s quarterly household-debt report, which includes only the total owed and the percentage delinquent at least 90 days or in default.

That percentage has remained around 11 percent since mid-2012, but the total increased to a record $1.46 trillion by December 2018, and unpaid student debt also rose to the highest ever.

Since most of that money was borrowed from the U.S. government, the inability of American households to repay student loans represents a drain on the U.S. government’s finances, where seriously delinquent student loans drive up the nation’s budget deficits.

At the same time, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has stated that the burden of student loan debt hurts American households and will hurt the nation’s economy:

“You do stand to see longer-term negative effects on people who can’t pay off their student loans,” he said. “It hurts their credit rating, it impacts the entire half of their economic life.”...

While Powell said he couldn’t quantify what the longer-run economic effects would be, he said there is danger down the road.

“It will over time,” he said when asked whether student debt could undermine broader economic growth. “It’s not something you can pick up in the data right now. As this goes on and as student loans continue to grow and become larger and larger, then it absolutely could hold back growth.”

For example, growing student loan debt can crowd out home purchases by claiming a portion of a household’s income that might otherwise go to build its wealth. Because of this effect, student loans contribute to putting home ownership out of reach for many American households.

Powell has also suggested that student loan debt should once again be allowed to be discharged in personal bankruptcy proceedings. This solution would go a long way to providing tangible relief from the negative burden that student loan debt is having on American households, without increasing the problem of moral hazard that would explode if it were simply forgiven by government fiat.

Unfortunately, doing so would increase both the U.S. government’s deficits and the national debt unless other serious reforms are adopted.

First and foremost, the U.S. government needs to get out of the business of making student loans altogether, which has been a costly money loser for the federal government ever since it took over the industry in 2010. Returning the business to the private sector will directly protect U.S. taxpayers from the growing costs of student loan delinquencies.

Second, public policy needs to recognize that the main reason these serious delinquencies exist is because student loan borrowers did not get their money’s worth for the education they received at the academic institutions where they spent the proceeds from their student loans, where their post-education incomes are proving to be insufficient to pay back the money they borrowed.

Under current law, academic institutions will only bear a portion of that cost by having funds they receive from the federal government cut if as many as 30% of its student loan borrowers default on their student loans. That extreme exemption should be reformed so that any federal funds an academic institution might receive, either directly or through tax credits, will be reduced one-for-one for every dollar their former students are seriously delinquent on any student loans issued or guaranteed by the U.S. government.

Academic institutions threatened by the loss of federal funds or tax credits could then avoid that outcome by providing timely rebates to their financially struggling former students, and could even help bring their student loans payments down to more affordable levels by paying down the principal owed. Many institutions could even fund such a debt reduction program by reversing the administrative bloat that most have experienced during the last decade.

Shrinking that bloat would even make the cost of college more affordable in the first place. If we’re serious about reforming student loans, why shouldn’t all Americans exploited by the current system benefit?

Tags: education reform, Federal Direct Student Loan Program, student debt, student loans

SOURCE 






California Parents Object to New Sex Ed Program in Public Schools

Fed-up California parents participated in a “Sexxx Ed Sit Out” Tuesday morning to protest the state’s sex education curriculum, calling it “pornographic,” “age-inappropriate,” “highly biased and medically inaccurate instruction.”

In an open letter to principals, lawmakers, and state Department of Education officials, the grassroots effort organized by Informed Parents of California rebuked what’s being taught under the 2016 California Healthy Youth Act and the proposed California Health Education Framework.

“Children are taught negotiation skills for consent to sex,” the letter says, adding: 

They are instructed in their rights to confidential reproductive health services and directed to local Planned Parenthood clinics for abortion, birth control and STI [sexualy transmitted infections] testing without parental notice. Some children have even been prescribed puberty blockers for gender transition, and sadly, parents have been so bullied by social workers they are afraid to speak publicly about it.

Under the California Healthy Youth Act, sex education would be expanded to include topics such as gender and sexual orientation, bullying and abuse, and birth control, including emergency contraception.

“The reason parents and teachers and school board members are protesting is the way this law is being implemented,” former California teacher Rebecca Friedrichs said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Children are being instructed at school against the parents’ will and behind their back to do things that are ethically risky and life-altering.”

Friedrichs, author of the book  “Standing Up to Goliath,” has been featured by The Daily Signal in reports such as this and this for her Supreme Court battle against teachers unions.

Friedrichs said the new curriculum educates students in junior high and high school on how to use insertive condoms and dental dams for anal and oral sex. Friedrichs warns that schools may introduce the curriculum at any grade.

In coordinating the protest, Informed Parents of California instructed parents to take their kids out of school and gather in front of their local school district offices as a show of solidarity against the state-mandated curriculum. Parents were to submit a letter to the principal to explain their child’s absence.

America Figueroa, a mother of five who serves as the Hispanic spokeswoman for Informed Parents of California, said about 100 families from the three Desert Ridge Academy school districts in Indio, California, signed up to participate in the protest.

The proposed Health Education Framework, set to be adopted in May by the State Board of Education, says high school students “will explore and discover their identities, gender expression, and sexuality throughout their education and into and beyond their high school years.”

According to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, parents may opt out only from topics such as “human development, pregnancy, family planning, and sexually transmitted diseases and not topics like sexual orientation and gender identity lessons.”

The public comment period for the Health Education Framework closed in January.

Although parents have written letters to lawmakers and attended school boards meetings, “parents are feeling completely ignored,” Friedrichs said.

She said some parents “are being harassed and bullied” by sex ed proponents at school board meetings.

SOURCE 






Australia: Schools face being shut down for a YEAR to weed out Muslim extremist teachers

Schools face being shut down for up to a year in a bid to tackle Muslim extremism in the classroom if a leading election candidate gets his way.

Teachers and students would also face disciplinary action for failing to shake hands with the opposite sex.

One Nation's New South Wales leader Mark Latham, who previously led the Labor Party, has revealed to Daily Mail Australia his five-point plan to eradicate Islamic radicalisation and Sharia law preaching at school.

He is campaigning for government schools to be shut down for six to 12 months, with new principals and teachers hired, if there was evidence of radical Islam being preached to impressionable students without any attempt to stop it.

'Any radicalised student runs the potential of acts of public violence,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Young people are being radicalised and the consequences in terms of acts of terrorism are horrendous.

'We're allowing a problem to fester because of political correctness. 'You're talking about something that's a supreme, public danger.'

It comes two years after Muslim students at Punchbowl Boys High School in Sydney's south-west allegedly threatened to behead non-Muslim staff and declared themselves ISIS sympathisers.

The former principal Chris Griffiths and his deputy Joumana Dennaoiu were stood down after they failed to co-operate with departmental deradicalisation programs.

One Nation's plan to tackle Islamic extremism in schools:

1. Zero tolerance: closing radicalised schools and placing radicalised students in youth detention

2.  A regular, transparent system of public reporting on incidents involving radicalised Islamic behaviour, and the action taken by schools in response. These reports should be tabled in NSW Parliament

3.  A strict Code of Conduct for the way in which teachers explain to students acts of radical Islamic terrorism. The emphasis must be on evidence and reality rather than Leftist apologies and rationalising away violence of this kind

4.  Insisting on Western standards of respect and courtesy at all school events, overriding Islamic practice

5. Ensuring outside organisations with a history of radicalised views (campaigning against our culture and our civilisation) are not given access to NSW schools. The Bankstown Poetry Slam should be banned immediately

'The school had become an Islamic school and the leadership was believing in Sharia law,' Mr Latham said. 'That's a radical move in itself that we can't tolerate in government schooling.

'If there's a school that's being transformed from an open government school into an Islamic institution, which seems to have happened at Punchbowl Boys High, then the public deserves an open account how it happened, what the school leadership was doing about it, how the education department responded.'

A former teacher at nearby Punchbowl Public School also claimed radicalised students as young as 10 had menacingly recited the Koran in Arabic at her and on one occasion even made throat-slitting gestures.

Mr Latham is demanding that radicalised students be placed in youth detention.

The former federal Labor leader stands a strong chance of being elected to the NSW upper house at the March state elections, and could share the balance of power with Fred Nile's Christian Democrats and the Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party.

He also wants teachers and students to face disciplinary action for failing to shake hands with the opposite sex, which fundamentalist Muslims regard as sinful. 'They must. It's a courtesy of our culture that must be practised in our schools,' he said. 'It would be a disciplinary matter that should be taken seriously.'

In 2017, Muslim students at the Hurstville Boys Campus of Georges River College, in Sydney's south, were given permission in 2017 to put hands of their hearts as an alternative to shaking hands with female teachers.

Mr Latham accused the major political parties and the education bureaucracy of failing to properly tackle Muslim extremism in the classroom.

'If there wasn't a religious dimension to this, if there wasn't a minority dimension to this, the education system one assumes would come down on the students like a tonne of bricks,' he said.

'The prevailing attitude would be "we can't pick on minorities", "we can't tell the full truth of what's happened here". 'The main problem is it's swept under the carpet.'

One Nation wants the Department of Education to compile a report twice a year outlining radicalised behaviour and the school's response to it, which would have to be tabled in Parliament.

'The real problem is we haven't got transparency,' Mr Latham said.

'My feeling is these problems are common enough in the education system to be very worried about.'

Under Mr Latham, events like the Bankstown Poetry Slam in south-west Sydney would also be banned, where arts workshops and school visits are held.

The event, funded by the federal government and Canterbury-Bankstown council, featured a poem called 'F*** Pauline Hanson'. 

The anger wasn't just directed at One Nation's federal leader, with videos denouncing the police and mocking the laying of wreaths on Anzac Day.

'It had nothing to do with poetry, it's just ranting against Western civilisation and against our society,' Mr Latham said. 'I was horrified to find out they were allowed to go into eight western Sydney schools as mentors.

'I find that a very, very disturbing trend. The people who are clearly anti-Western political agitators with a radical message.

'They shouldn't get any government funding and they shouldn't be allowed within coee of any school.'

Despite his misgivings about radicalised Muslim teachers at public schools, Mr Latham acknowledged Islamic schools often produced good academic results and made a contribution to Australian society. 'If they're peaceful and constructive and they fit in with Australian values, they get good education outcomes, of course we've got to support them,' he said. 'Some Islamic colleges have been a wonderful success.'

SOURCE