Welcome to front running 2020 with max kaiser and stacy are over at a bevy of special guests right here in fabulous hipster brooklyn im feeling it so stacy this episode is all about Student Deaths and the students of course are the millennium goals and generation z. They like the candidates promising to get rid of all the student debts theres 1. 00 trillion dollars in outstanding debt today in america that is up from 300 63000000000. 00 in just 2005 joining us to discuss this dr Michael Hudson professor steve kean and randy roller professor steve kean of course you talk a lot about debt and in fact increase the rate of increase of debt what do you think of that number 363000000000. 00 in outstanding Student Loans in 20051. 6 trillion today doubling every 2 years which is a huge right of growth that simply cant be sustained indefinitely and thats whether by the students themselves coming on board well by the windows its a huge increase in the private debt load on the economy and its falling on the people who earn the least money and its setting them out for being on a able to participate in the rest of the economy lifestyle which is also driven by did so i think is one form of it is going to basically 8 the student debt is going to make it impossible to keep posting Household Debt so the Financial Sector is eating itself im so old i remember the 2008 fine. Cry out and if you recall the sub prime debt bubble up and we have this global meltdown the student debt is already bigger than the subprime debt bubble. That was about an on trillion dollars when you look at it went from 6 to non trillion between about 22000. 00 and fog so were not talking the same sky living christian dead were talking they did go on turning in income and then when they graduate theyre graduating move off what about 100000. 00 u. S. Dollars was a level of debt the average is 30000. 00 and in fact its non dischargeable prior to that what happened with the subprime crisis was people could do the jungle mailbox away students can never walk away from this almost all of it is essentially owed to the government so the government owns you anyway and you cant escape it you cant just jingle mail away from the u. S. Government 30000 is the starting level and they go i could graduate. Something of that scope a year so this starting with the debt to income ratio 100 percent before they even pay the rent a little on consider paying a mortgage max and i graduated before 1900 91. 00 you all graduated around that sort of time the rate of increase since the 1980 s. A lot happened in the 1980 s. We could talk about the rate of tuition increases gone up 8 times faster than income when i went to u. C. L. A. I was able to afford the tuition and my own apartment by working part time in a stationary shop you cant do that today dr Michael Hudson what do you have to so houses just like the house is worth whatever a bank is going to lend against it in those banks lend more and more for housing the housing prices went up and education is worth whatever a bank is going to lend the against it and the government. Drop the Student Loans you pointed out an interesting thing a key point recently the subprime death was owed to banks but the student. Debt is now owed to the government so that means that the government could wipe out all the student debt and it wouldnt hurt any creditor at all it could be wiped out without any disruption of the economy and in fact unless its wiped out the economy will be distorted because as steve cain just said if you have to pay a lot of money in student debt you cant afford to get a Bank Mortgage to buy a house of your own in youre going to end up living with your parents you know awol dr michael doesnt care according to moodys erasing a student debt would be a small stimulus but would it create moral hazard moral hazard or has it that he wouldnt know what is the morrow if he had worked the moral hazard is if the rich families that can afford to send their kids to School Without an education would no longer be able to lord it over the families that are driven into poverty by student debt the moral hazard is that there wouldnt be a polarizing economy between an oligarchy at the top and a democracy at the bottom thats the moral hazard according to the l. Ike archaean according to the neo liberals printing it back to the sub prime crisis movies unless very much responsible for that now randi you of course. Have been involved with your bernie delegate back in 2016 tell us what bernie thinks of student out what his plan is and how that relates to the his hes very popular with the generation z. And the money obviously is very popular because this is one of the single biggest issues holding the generation down and his plan is simply to wipe out all the student debt and then come back later and lower the Interest Rate to below 2 percent i think 1. 8 percent right now the rates are between 4 and 7 and i dont really know i didnt have student at either c. C. I dont really know what happens when you default but i do know anecdotally that when youre paying your taxes and you think. Youre going to get your stimulus is a refund the i. R. S. Collects for your student debt. So i know that his plan and these are policy stacy when my parents met at u. C. Berkeley in 1960 it was free to go to berkeley and you paid for incidentals now its 13000 dollars if youre in state and 40000. 00 these are actual policies made by people in government that decide as roberson what whos going to what when when i was 3 universities well they would just before i started but they were trivial relative to the costs today because the bureaucracy in universities was trivial the head of to pop and my predecessor effectively would have a meeting with the vice chancellor and talk about the budget that was needed and abuse cost of a lunch and that was the end of the discussion now listen and talk bureaucracy involved in doing that so a huge part of the increase in cost of universities has not the money going to the academics or the citys facilities for students is this enormous bureaucracy which is part of this whole student it the whole overload then what is that thats neoliberalism get it instead of believing you should managers make things work better you need managers to like it it makes want to do but also these universities are acting like gatekeepers there are small number of jobs where you can make the elite type of Mega Millions and folks are willing to pay i went to n. Y. U. Back in the seventys and eightys i was shocked to find out that tuitions out over 50000. 00 a year so you really cant afford that much and even youve got celebrities in hollywood folks adding another to 300000. 00 in bribes to get into a university is going to cost 2. 00 or 300000. 00 to begin with because they want to get the job at the top of the Banking System that the bank of the ponzi scheme the financialization straight its enormous bodies game if you want access to be at the top of the pond youve got to go through the ivy league youve gotta go deep into debt youve gotta pay another huge bribe and that just disenfranchises so many millions of people that wont have any access at all so the whole point. University is not education anymore they are acting as gatekeepers to the oligarch attentional ism i mean i had students tell me that only university to get a job originally my father was a universe to get an education and if you make it all about credentialism you end up devaluing the quality of the education itself so in that with a list a genuinely educated workforce and the caliber of the teaching that joining this whole period of increasing costs the student to stop ratio has been forming theres less stuff teaching theres more mocking a load everything is being will make an honest personal contact is declined so rather than this increase in cost reflecting increase in important quality its actually a degradation of that and just a huge bureaucratic wire at the top well the result of what he was talking about is theres been a whole trains in the shape of the how much education adds to your earning power it used to be the more education you got the ph d. The more you would earn but no thats been reversed certainly in my field economics once you have a ph d. In economics youre so brainwashed with the vision that the only thing you can do is teach but the universities in order to pay all this money to the administration overhead that steve pointed to they want to hire part timers to teach you can only get an edge on professorship for maybe 3000. 00 a court so the higher your education the less qualified you are to actually work in the real world especially in economics one of the nicola point is i have some Close Friends that were really happy that their daughter got into a very Prestigious School in boston and i asked how theyre going to pay for it was 70000. 00 and they had saved and they had money and she was going to get loans and i asked them point blank based on what she wanted to study i said why dont you just buy her a house in las vegas where you live for 280000. 00 and give her the house and centers of Community College shell have an asset with no debt she live there and get a skill. Its a good question moment when youre spending 70. Year and she would emerge she may not have debt but others could come out of there with 1250000. 00 or 5 guys burger chain started the dad said i can send you to college so i can start some business together they started 5 guys burgers now theyre all going to florida by University Getting back to what max was saying about the gatekeepers the problem doesnt just begin with tell it it begins in kindergarten here in new york city it costs more to go to kindergarten and grants go. To college and in fact you remember in the stock market crisis when the citibank was having a fraudulent stock broker the deal with the stock broker is we will get your daughter into kindergarten if you give a good stock Market Report here and so the weeding out process begins oh already in grade school to go to a school it can get you in to the prestige coed so it really is a right of terri aristocracy thats emerging were talking about i knew you were going to say this because thats why i or my kindergarten now felt. This was going to come up in fact weve had this scandal as well not only do we have the celebrities and the powerful people apparently paying bribes to get their children into these schools which shows you that even though they have this huge wealth that the importance of getting that degree from a particular university regardless of what you actually learn at university is so important now in our economy and we have the hereditary issue is Something Like 40 percent like a huge percentage especially white americans at harvard or you know certain select universities are actually children of families that are powerful or when theyre this is the definition of like an aristocracy or all the dark e. That is being and entrenched in this economy right didnt universities and libraries are built by the rich to give back now the pendulum has swung the other way theyre using them. To ossify and calcify their place as the elites by saying these job rate is that once you get over the bridge they pull it up and everyone else is left adrift right so if there are no Public Institutions then there is no Public Domain and there is no common good and we have not escaped the monarchies of europe and we brought back a central bank whats the difference now between you know where we were 200 years ago before we even bother with a declaration a minute ellen association i mean thats thats the the point is should we actually be charging for education because this is we charge for things its because its been a benefit to the person whos buying it and thats the audiology took over education about 30 or 40 years ago but the perspective of education was originally that education is a benefit for society in general i wouldnt want to live in a Society Without doctors or engineers all saw it as what happened without economists. Saying it of being a profit benefit ignoring the public means that ignoring that the skill by says we need for a Sophisticated Society and putting the burden of that school vices on the individuals and what we turned it into is just now the churn Institution PublicHigher Education become a form a version of a real estate scam that is not the basis for a functional saudi arabia were going to be back after the break so you can go to school on us right after this way. You know we talk a lot on the show many years about economy and currencies and what makes a currency really what makes a currency is scarcity for example gold is a currency its money because its scarce thats the primary reason people use it as money keynesian economics or a socialism is usually unworkable because. The people who are organizing it think that well you can just print all the money you need you need a program print more money theres socialism for banks on wall street as was pointed out recently one of the big president ial debates you know bank gets in trouble just print more money well whats the ultimate scarce commodity what is the ultimate scarce commodity think about it what is the ultimate scarce commodity. Welcome back to front running 2020 with max kaiser and stacy arbor before the break we were talking about 1. 00 trillion dollars in student debt and we left off on this idea of competitiveness stacey yes germany has Free Education america has expensive education and yet it seems that germany is out competing us steve basically risen because youre not relying upon the students so they get into university but to get a good mark youve got to be an intelligent person to get and not a lot of will she want to want somebody whos borrowed money consequently you can afford as an academic to file the students if they dont do addition job whereas if you try to file students with a pilot i think they have boarded and they deserve to get what they paid for which is a degree and that is that subverts the whole purpose of education ive experienced this over a 30 year 40 year period in academia and ive seen the quality of the capacity to file bad students simply collapse so what is happening universe is graduating people with credentials but not in education but the fact is we do have a problem with household formation it is at a record low and a lot of this many economists say is because of the student debt so when people argue against forgiving this debt and remember Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders definitely want to forgive this debt but the argument against it is like it dont create the moral hazard and all these other people paid and they worked hard to pay and why should we forgive these debts which is better for the economy however that those debts get made whole and that they pay theyre paid off or household formation how important is household formation to an economy you have to put it in the context of how competitive the economy is in terms of how many jobs it has in the 1st place no take the case of germany where steve mentioned if you dont. Can go to school and dont have to pay tuition that means that you can afford if youre a doctor to provide medical services or an engineer to provide Engineering Services or you can afford to work for a income that does not require you to add on a payment of student debt in america if you graduate with a for a deficit of 300000. 00 of student debt from n. Y. U. Is a dental school youre not going to be able to afford to take most jobs that dont pay enough to pay the student debt so youre going to default now so the real question about moral hazard is it worth polarizing the economy and impoverishing the whole class just for the principle that all debts can be repaid when a steve and i say we know the debts cant be paid me and then the way to follow this false dream that somehow the economy can afford to pay its debts and somehow the rich people deserve to impoverish the 99 percent of the economy this further and further and that the real moral issue is should the 99 percent be indebted for student debt mortgage stepped. All the other forms of debt to the one percent thats thats the moral issue and should america give up its hope for competitive economy just to make students pay for a loan so that you can afford to have the rich families monopolize education and lock out families that cannot afford the 40000. 00 that it takes to get into kindergarten and america. But you also have as weve mentioned earlier that tuitions have gone up there is that the tuition prices for their private University Public universe a Public University is a pyre and these are wages wages of state but the wages if you do the wages of professors theyve gone down and down and down because they can only get part time jobs as professors so the professors jobs are going down whole the university because theyre. Time is one of the universe the costs are going up because their office a big bureaucracy is what i think of as the neo liberalism and neo liberalism seems to have really come in after we went off the Gold Standard you can create all sorts of money you could create also today in credit and the boomers were 1st then were not saying theyre horrible people they were lucky they got to be the 1st one on this near mint scheme and now there is a battle there is a reconciliation to be made that the millennial are stuck with these huge debts and how is this going to resolve itself its going to resolve itself through revolution as bernie says our revolution or its going to resolve itself at the ballot box and i think that as more people get fed up and they get interested in casting their ballot on these issues that are basic issues and im indebted to the one percent and im basically working a dead end job ive done radio shows where people call in and said i did the bear can dream i got 2 degrees you know i went to school and im up to my eyeballs in debt and i get paid less than 40000. 00 dollars d a year