Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree-holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," said Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
GERMANY is proposing to levy extra taxes on the young to pay for the costs of the country's growing numbers of old people, under government plans for a ''demographic reserve'' levy.
Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats have drafted proposals that, if law, would require all those over 25 to pay a proportion of their income to cushion Germany against a looming population crisis.
The German Chancellor's ruling party is seeking extra sources of revenue to pay for soaring pensions and bills for social care costs as Germany's ''baby boomer'' generation ages amid a decline in the birth rate.
College students in nearly all states will be hit with a triple whammy. First of all, tuitions are increasing at public universities and colleges in large part because ObamaCare restricts governors from making changes to Medicaid eligibility that would reduce their state's health-care costs. Consequently, higher education is one of the first places they can cut.
College students are being hit again because the federal government took over the student-loan business in 2010, eliminating the competition. This allows the Education Department to borrow money from Treasury at an interest rate of 2.8% and lend it to college students at a rate of 6.8%. A portion of the profits from overcharging students will be used to help pay for ObamaCare.
And the third blow comes as college students graduate and enter a depressed job market where employers are creating fewer jobs as a result of the high costs associated with ObamaCare. Analysts at UBS have suggested as much when they stated in a September 2011 report that the health-care law is "arguably the biggest impediment to hiring, particularly hiring of less skilled workers."
JUSTICE ALITO: But isn't that a very small part of what the mandate is doing? You can correct me if these figures are wrong, but it appears to me that the CBO has estimated that the average premium for a single insurance policy in the non-group market would be roughly $5,800 in — in 2016.
Respondents — the economists have supported — the Respondents estimate that a young, healthy individual targeted by the mandate on average consumes about $854 in health services each year. So the mandate is forcing these people to provide a huge subsidy to the insurance companies for other purposes that the act wishes to serve, but isn't — if those figures are right, isn't it the case that what this mandate is really doing is not requiring the people who are subject to it to pay for the services that they are going to consume? It is requiring them to subsidize services that will be received by somebody else.
GENERAL VERRILLI: No, I think that — I do think that's what the Respondents argue. It's just not right. I think it — it really gets to a fundamental problem with their argument.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: If you're going to have insurance, that's how insurance works.
GENERAL VERRILLI: A, it is how insurance works, but, B, the problem that they — that they are identifying is not that problem. The — the guaranteed issue and community rating reforms do not have the effect of forcing insurance companies to take on lots of additional people who they then can't afford to cover because they're — they tend to be the sick, and that is — in fact, the exact opposite is what happens here.
About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes to protest a host of issues at the all-boys school. The concerns included a lack of consistent teachers and the removal of the principal. The boys, dressed in school blazers, neckties and hoodies, chanted, "We want education!" as they marched outside the school. Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school's future. As recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym, library or cafeteria due to a lack of teachers, parents saidIf the failings of the education bureaucracy had even 1% of the attention of that of the single Trayvon Martin case, there may be some hope for these young people.
