John Kasich was asked what he’d do about rising student loan debt, and so was Jeb Bush. The levels of education debt are indeed exploding: The median amount for 18- to 33-year olds was more than $15,000 in 2013, up from about $6,000 in 1990.
This debate got better when I started playing “Beez in the Trap” in the background, just fyi.
Carly Fiorina is right that more companies are shutting down. And it’s also true that new business formations are falling, as Marco Rubio mentioned earlier. But it’s hard to blame those trends on “Obamacare” — the decline in entrepreneurship is a decades-old problem that long predates Obama or the Affordable Care Act.
No one is sure why the startup rate is falling, but the decline has mirrored similar trends in labor participation, job turnover and geographic mobility (how often people move between cities). Economists worry that suggests the U.S. economy is losing the flexibility that helped fuel its past growth.
There’s probably no single policy that would help reverse those trends. Still, I’m glad to see the problem finally entering into mainstream political discourse.
