Aram Zucker-Scharff

College Grads Taking Low-Wage Jobs Displace Less Educated:

Dear College Grads: You’re ruining the economy. 

“The funny thing is, the majority of our servers, bartenders and people who work in the corporate office do carry either a master’s or Ph.D.” 

Haha yeah, the value of your Ph.D. is a bartender job. “Funny.” 

“As the number of college graduates outweighs the availability of education-appropriate jobs and they take whatever they can get, everyone else is pushed down the ladder, said Katie Bardaro, PayScale’s lead economist and analytics manager.

‘There’s not really a lower-level job they can move into since they were already in a low-level job,’ Bardaro said.”

That’s right college graduate, your Master’s degree has gained you vaunted entry to the bottom. Enjoy the security of having no further to drop and the guilt of being the majority reason we need to increase minimum wage. 

In which some idiot claims that Student Loans are too big to fail.:

Thanks for explaining that the student loan system is Too Big To Fail. That argument has never failed, right? Also, can’t let the *enormous* assumption here pass that bankruptcy is the only way out of loans, because no one has ever run out on a loan before.

Just because it is harder to run out on a student loan than a house loan doesn’t make it impossible. This is the same type of BS that was said about the housing market: ‘oh well, no one will run out on their housing loans because people don’t do that, it would be irresponsible.’

The College-Loan Scandal: Matt Taibbi on the Ripping Off of Young America | Politics News | Rolling Stone:

The federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education – saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy

The bi-partisan congressional solution: delay a year, after which student loans go up to 7.25 to 8.8%. 

The president’s solution: Make a press-worthy attack on banks while ignoring skyrocketing base costs.

The results: an exponentially growing economic bubble whose burst will make the real estate bubble look like a polite hiccup.

The Journalism Internship From Hell:

Editors cared about this sensational stuff because it had once sold newspapers. But now almost nothing inspired people to buy a hard copy from a newsstand when all of the same stories were available online, free, immediately. Even voyeurism couldn’t save these sinking ships, so why was I there? It was difficult to imagine Woodward and Bernstein sweating under the Miami sun, almost crying, disgusted with themselves for what they were doing. Would they call this journalism? Should I?