HUG Your Student Debt, Inc.^™

As lawmakers stare down the barrel of a potential trillion-dollar deficit, they’ve already started looking for ways to stanch the bleeding. The F-35 program, a trillion-dollar boondoggle of a weapons platform that only occasionally works, isn’t really on the table. Nor are the massive tax cuts that forged the present budget shortfall. No, where legislators intend to recoup some scratch is in capping access to federal student loans for graduate students.

Late last year, congressional Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, which delivered the lion’s share of its benefits to the wealthy and corporations. The GOP did not justify this policy on the grounds that all corporate shareholders and trust-fund hipsters deserved to have their wealth increased. Rather, the party argued that, however one felt about making the rich richer, the tax cuts would ultimately benefit all Americans by increasing economic growth and lowering unemployment.

Eighty-three percent of people ages 22 to 35 with student debt who haven't bought a house yet blame their educational loans.

Owning a home, the most common way Americans build wealth, can become a distant dream for many crushed by student debt.

In the late 1990s, Ed McKinley fell in love with a $65,000 house by a lake in New Hampshire.

The owners let him move in early and pay rent until the buying process was completed.

Inside his new home, McKinley installed a modern stove, painted the walls and began to redo the floors.