Another Student Loan Nightmare

Today I read in another newspaper regarding how the Students loans are crushing the dreams of students who took them out. But it also how the parents in order for the offspring’s to get into an excellent school follow blindly into a debt trap in the hopes that if their offspring get that particular college degree, will open doors to them. But if it is true, even then it takes a lot of salary, which is rare in this economy to pay for all the debt.

Remember also those students loans are hard to extinguish even if you declare bankruptcy. And then there is the choice of the majors, if somebody is majoring in liberal arts or some other less popular or marketable major, even your Ivy League degree would not help you far enough. But you can’t say that it is entirely the fault of the students or the loan administrators, since the parents swayed with all the marketing of these prestigious schools and how much salaries their alumni commands, fall into that trap without realizing that it is just the average or the starting salaries, which can vary across majors and industries.

It is true that an Ivy League degree can open lots of doors not open to other less prestigious schools but it is ultimately your own hard work that counts in the end. An Ivy League degree can open up doors but once you are in, you have to prove your work and mantle if you want to move ahead.

The runaway spending

The Federal Government is on a roll. Spending money like there is no tomorrow starting with the Stimulus Package (which is debatable if it was that necessary ) to the continuous stream of stimuli coming out of Washington, the latest being the business and job bill that will add almost 100 billion dollars to the Federal Debt. I don’t really understand how the hell we are going to pay for all of this when the economy is not growing that fast. We have not raised any taxes and spending has not been cut, so where is the money coming from. The answer the institutional and overseas investors (namely China and Japan) in the form of buying our Treasury securities. There is going to a time not in the distant future that our interests alone our debt will easily exceed 1 trillion dollars.

I just thought that maybe we will have a sensible government in Washington which will try to reduce the debt and the deficit but I don’t see anything of that sort yet. I am hoping against hope that somebody responsible will be able to start addressing our huge debt, unless we want to look like Greece, because even with our huge exports and resources, we would not be able to grow and continue funding our programs if we can’t find funds to pay for it from our own resources.

Death of a Metal Legend- Ronnie James Dio

A great Heavy Metal legend recently died. I was introduced to the Heavy metal genre when it was in its peak in the eighties by one of my friends and from then on I became a fan of it. Although I do listen to diverse genre buy I love the heavy metal genre the best. It is really sad that it went away long time ago. But as I was saying Ronnie James Dio of the band Dio had great albums like “Holy Diver” and “Last in Line” plus great songs like “Rainbow in the Dark” and ‘We rock”. He will be greatly missed.

Shape of Opinions

The people who are in different countries are influenced by their own media and their own environment. That is my conclusion after talking to one of the persons and reading the newspapers of different countries. It is hard to have your own opinion when the people around you keeps on churning out stories and conspiracy theories about what is going on in their country. Even if you try to form your own opinion and then air them, you are either accused of being naïve or just a puppet of foreign powers. You are shunned by your friends and other acquaintances and are in rare circumstances a target of threats.

Even so called educated people are swept away in these lies or half truths and then are ultimately convinced to join these people’s crazy theories. It is just reflection of diverting the problems of their own lives and blaming everything on other people and this obscures the real debate and no real solution is found for the problems.
It is thus this mentality of blaming every problem on others that lead to nowhere and absolves people of their actions and behaviors.