Jeff Bryant  – “Wall Street wants to own your education destiny. To the old saying about “death and taxes,” you can now add another: debt. In fact, in contemporary America, debt is likely becoming at least as all-encompassing as the other two. An increasingly powerful force behind the debt explosion is not what you might expect: not cars, not homes, not healthcare. It’s education. Since the Great Recession, federal and state authorities have been disinvesting from their obligations to educate the citizenry. So now, nearly every state spends less on higher education than it did in 2007.  And most states continue to spend less on K-12 education than they did in 2007. Federal government expenditures on education are also in decline. So the burden of financing education has increasingly fallen on local governments and individuals, who have responded by borrowing money to pay for schooling. Education debt is rapidly becoming a cradle to grave omnipresence – from parents taking out kindergarten loans, to taxpayers shouldering the ballooning costs of exotic school bonds, to senior citizens staving off bankruptcies caused by college debts.”