There are a lot of ways to pay for college. Scholarships, financial aid, savings, working through it. Another option is student loans. Now, those have to be repaid, and a new report says today’s college seniors are graduating with more student loan debt, more money that has to be repaid than ever before. This reports says that two third of the class of 2011 has student loan debt, and the average borrower owed nearly $27,000. Part of this depends on what school you go to. At the colleges this study looked at, the low into the average debt per graduate was 3,000, the high end, more than 55,000. A couple of explanations were offered for the debt increase from previous years. One is rising tuition prices, the other is the tough job market for college graduates looking for work. 

 

What’s the word? The amount by which spending exceed income. Deficit. That’s the word. 

 

Right now, the U.S. government is running a deficit, it has been for years, it’s the topic that comes up a lot in politics, and as you might expect, it’s come up a lot in this year’s presidential campaign. In fact, during this week’s debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the word deficit came up nearly 20 times. Both candidates have plans for how to deal with it, Tom Foreman compares their ideas. 

 

Both candidates have made it a cornerstone of this election to talk about the deficit, the difference between how much money our government is spending and how much it is taking in in taxes. This is the deficit right now, $1,090 billion. If we all wanted to pay it off, every man, woman and child in the country would have to kick in(捐款、交付) about $3,500. That’s a lot, and yet each candidate says confidently, I can reduce the deficit. How would they do that? Well, first, let’s talk about what they agree on. They all say that we’re going to have to contain the spending of the government and control it, but we’re also going to have to rewrite the tax code, and we have to get the economy moving again, because that’s what going to produce money and revenue, and really solve the problem, but beyond that, they don’t agree on much.

 

Let’s look at the Romney plan first. If these were to present everything he wants to spend money on, and he needs this much to cover it, he knows he’s not going to get it, because he has a deficit. So, how is he going to deal with that deficit? He says he’s going to do it with tax cuts. Now, tax cuts initially are going to make the deficit worse, so he needs to offset them. He says he’s going to do that by looking deductions and loopholes(漏洞), things that people use to avoid paying taxes. Says, he won’t go after things like the mortgage deduction, or the health care deduction, things that many middle class people rely on, at least he suggests he won’t go after those, but that’s the problem. Economists say if you grab up all the other deductions that you might put on wealthier people and you’ll put them all back in this pile, it’s not going to be enough, you are going to end up eventually having to tax the middle class or watching the deficit just get bigger, at least based on the plan as I know it right now. 

 

Barack Obama, he has different version of the same song. He’s got all the things he wants to pay for, he also will not have all the money he needs for it. He is going to have a deficit too, and he says you can deal with it by taxing the wealthy. This is a popular plan with many voters, but it also has a fundamental flaw. There are just not that many wealthy people in the country. If you define wealthy as being people who individually make more than $200,000 a year, as he often does, for every one there is like that in the country, this is how many there are who don’t make that much money. You would have to tax these person at a much higher rate than the White House is talking about to solve this problem, and even then you probably wouldn’t get enough money to really make up the deficit. The simple truth is, both of these plans are woefully short on important details to tell us if they would really reduce the deficit.