The biggest problem the economy has is the enormous student debt new college grads and those leaving college find themselves with. In the past leaving college meant getting a job and getting a used car and/or an apartment with some friends. Yes there was student debt, but it wasn’t any where near your car payment. You could still afford the car and the apartment. Now its the exact opposite. Today, the minute you graduate college you face the challenge of debt against a college education whose value is immediately “underwater”

As a result spending habits have changed dramatically. Now when you leave school you move back home. You take public transportation or borrow your parents car. The only thing new you buy is the cheap work outfit you need. Savings ? Forgettaboutit. It’s not happening. Your entire focus is on hitting your monthly nut for school debt , credit card and maybe a car or apartment. The crush of college debt has taken an entire generation of graduates, current and future out of the economy. Which is exactly why the economy hasn’t grown and won’t grow beyond microscopic growth rates we have seen so far.

So until we get the meltdown in college education, don’t expect much improvement in the economy. Who gets elected won’t make a dang bit of difference.

Obama isn’t straddling a line between hawk and dove. He is a hawk.

It’s terrifying that isn’t clear to everyone, because it suggests the neoconservative desire for even more foreign wars is skewing the way that Americans conceive of hawkishness and dovishness. It suggests we’re defining “warmonger” down.

Here are the facts:
- Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars.
- He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security.
- He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan.
- He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.
- He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad.
- He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist.
- He expanded drone attacks into Somalia.
- He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia.
- He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America.
- He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism.
- He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.

In summary, President Obama escalated a major war and sent tens of thousands more troops to fight it, even as he joined in regime change in a different country, ordered drone strikes in at least three others, and sent commandos into Pakistan, a list of aggressive actions that isn’t even exhaustive.

A former governor of New Mexico, he was re-elected by that state’s voters, left office popular after two terms, and therefore has the most executive experience of any Libertarian Party presidential nominee. He can also cite the state he ran as evidence that nothing radical happens when he’s put in charge. An economic conservative and social liberal, he represents a new direction for a party that has long wrestled with its paleo-libertarian wing. And yet he too is certain to lose on Election Day, as third-party candidates in American presidential elections do. The question is whether he can match his party’s 1980 high-water mark and win 1 percent or more of the vote, and whether he might win even more in the key swing state of New Mexico, where voters already know and have cast ballots for him.