A recent report from the Education Sector, a think tank, shows that 30 percent of college students who took out loans eventually dropped out. As Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, noted, this is a problem because of the severe drop in earning potential that occurs when a student leaves school without a degree:

“In the end, it’s about money and time,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. “There’s almost a synergy between the two that will knock you out of school.”

The cost to the economy is roughly half a trillion dollars, he said. Although college dropouts make more than those with only a high school diploma, he said they earn about a million dollars less than college graduates over their careers.

Among 18 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “the United States finished last (46 percent) for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it.”

In 2010, the total cost in lost earnings and tax revenue due to college dropouts in America was $4.5 billion. In California alone, “college dropouts are losing nearly $15 billion in earnings over their work lives, costing the federal government more than $3 billion in lost income taxes.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has indicated that the GOP is ready to reenact the debt ceiling debacle the next time the nation comes close to its borrowing limit. But as economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers write, the economy was significantly setback during the last showdown, which they call “an act of economic sabotage“:

High-frequency data on consumer confidence from the research company Gallup, based on surveys of 500 Americans daily, provide a good picture of the debt-ceiling debate’s impact (see chart). Confidence began falling right around May 11, when Boehner first announced he would not support increasing the debt limit. It went into freefall as the political stalemate worsened through July. Over the entire episode, confidence declined more than it did following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008. After July 31, when the deal to break the impasse was announced, consumer confidence stabilized and began a long, slow climb that brought it back to its starting point almost a year later. [...]

Growth in nonfarm payrolls decelerated to an average 88,000 a month during the three months of the debt-ceiling impasse, compared with an average of 176,000 in the first five months of 2011 (see chart). Payroll growth subsequently recovered and has averaged 187,000 jobs a month since. Despite the rebound in job growth, employment is likely still below where it would otherwise have been.

Despite numbers like this, House Republicans evidently desire to deal the still fragile economic recover another body blow.

• Wages for manufacturing workers aren’t keeping pace with inflation. [Wall Street Journal]

• The Federal Reserve is preparing to handle the fallout from Europe’s continuing economic problems [Wall Street Journal]

• The housing market this spring is on pace to be the strongest since the housing bubble burst. [Reuters]

• Spain’s prime minister says his country will not need international help to hold its banking system together. [Financial Times]

• Terence Flynn, a Republican member of the National Labor Relations Board, resigned amidst allegations that he leaked information to a person with ties to the Romney campaign. [Politico]

• In a sign that the U.S. labor market is improving, more workers are going on vacation. [Bloomberg]

• Lobbyists are gearing up for the farm bill, which is scheduled to come to the Senate floor in June. [The Hill]

Louisiana’s legislature is now considering a similar bill to preempt local efforts at requiring paid leave for workers, as Half in Ten and the National Partnership for Women and Families noted:

S.B. 521, legislation that would take away Louisianans’ right to enact local paid sick days policies, is about to be voted on by the House — one of the last steps to enactment. Currently, more than 600,000 workers in Louisiana don’t have paid sick days, and if this bill becomes law, cities and parishes would lose the chance ever to put common-sense paid sick days standards in place…Louisiana already prohibits municipalities from setting their own minimum wage and can’t afford another anti-worker policy.

Just a few cities in the country — Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle — along with the state of Connecticut require that workers receive paid sick leave. The United States is all alone in the industrialized world in not requiring some form of paid leave as a matter of national policy. Each year, the U.S. economy loses $180 billion in productivity due to sick employees attending work and infecting other workers.

However, Rodriguez and her daughter will get to stay in their home, thanks to some help from Occupy Wall Street protestors:

Desperate, Rodriguez contacted several community groups including Occupy Fights Foreclosures — the battle to save the Rodriguez home began. Suzanne O’Keeffe, with Occupy Fights Forclosures, says the bank didn’t treat the Rodriguez family right. She charged they not only didn’t fill out the proper paperwork to foreclose, they waited too long. [...]

Now, [Rodriguez] is determined not to look back. “It’s time to look forward,” Rodriguez said. “Thank God the bank listened.”

As ThinkProgress reported back in December, Bank of America is taking the Occupy movement’s foreclosure prevention actions seriously, warning employees to be prepared should Occupy make an appearance. Occupy protesters have successfully prevented foreclosures across the country, from Rochester to Minneapolis to Los Angeles.

HALPERIN: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?

ROMNEY: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course. What you do is you make adjustments on a basis that show, in the first year, actions that over time get you to a balanced budget.

This, of course, is the point that progressives have been making in response to the House Republican budget, which Romney supports. According to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts in the House GOP budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — would cost the economy 4.1 million jobs over the next two years due to the $400 billion in spending cuts for which it calls. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who flagged this particular exchange in the interview, wrote, “didn’t Romney, in saying that, pretty much blow up the entire rationale for over 30 years of Republican economics right there? Cutting government spending will throw us into a recession or depression?”

Europe is already struggling under the weight of austerity, with its economy contracting at the fastest pace in three years. Romney seems to understand the effect that cutting the budget indiscriminately in the short-term will have, yet he’s backing a budget that fails to acknowledge it.

• The Eurozone economy is contracting at the fastest pace in three years. [Financial Times]

• Bank lending fell in the last quarter, after almost a year of growth, while bank profits hit a five year high. [Wall Street Journal]

• More states are moving towards establishing independent tax tribunals to handle tax disputes. [Reuters]

• What would a Greek exit from the Eurozone mean for the U.S.? [Reuters]

• A top economists is pushing Congress to pass legislation that would help homeowners refinance their mortgages. [The Hill]

• Morgan Stanley will give refunds to some investors who overpaid for Facebook stock during the company’s initial public offering. [Associated Press]

• The Securities and Exchange Commission has completed its investigation into Lehman Brothers’ actions during the financial crisis and has decided not to move forward with fraud charges. [Bloomberg]

1. Facebook may have hid information about weak revenue growth: According to one lawsuit launched since the company went public, Facebook “concealed crucial information” regarding weak revenue growth, failing to disclose a revised revenue forecast, much like Wall Street banks failed to provide key information about mortgage securities they were peddling before the financial crisis.

2. Morgan Stanley alerted “preferred” investors to Facebook’s poor growth forecasts: Facebook’s Wall Street underwriters are facing scrutiny from regulators for only alerting certain “preferred” investors about Facebook’s declining revenue stream, leaving many potential shareholders in the dark.

3. Facebook stock dropped, Wall Street got rich: Facebook stock plummeted on its second day of trading and has continued its decline since, but Morgan Stanley and the other underwriters are still turning massive profits by “shorting” its stock. “In fact,” Fortune’s Steven Gandel wrote, “Morgan Stanley and the other banks who were selling Facebook shares to the public were positioned to make more money the lower Facebook’s shares went.” As of Tuesday, the group of Wall Street banks that underwrote the IPO could have topped more than $450 million in profits — on top of more than $170 million in underwriting fees.

4. Facebook will dodge billions in taxes after its IPO: Corporate tax law allows companies that issue stock options to make huge deductions to their tax liabilities, helping Facebook avoid $16 billion in taxes. CEO Mark Zuckerberg could possibly never pay taxes again, using a series of loopholes to avoid them after the initial hit he’ll take after selling shares.

5. Facebook is spending big on politics: Just like the Wall Street banks and other big companies that spend huge amounts of cash lobbying Washington, Facebook jumped into the fray, giving $119,000 in donations to lawmakers through March 31. The money went to leaders of both parties and those lawmakers who “serve on House and Senate committees that handle Internet and online privacy issues.”

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon simply put it, “Facebook was whispering in the ears of the lead managers of its investment banks, on the understanding that the results of those whispers would remain available only to select clients until after the IPO was over. That’s not cool.” But at the moment, it’s how big businesses and Wall Street banks operate.

Of course, tuition increases and growing debt are a phenomenon several decades in the making. And Romney’s plan would make the problem decidedly worse in two important ways, giving federal money away to Wall Street banks and predatory for-profit colleges, two industries to which Romney has extensive ties.

First, as he’s promised before, Romney intends to divert money away from student aid — instead giving it away to banks — by repealing Obama’s student loan reforms:

Reverse President Obama’s nationalization of the student loan market and welcome private sector participation in providing information, financing, and the education itself.

President Obama did not nationalize the student loan market. (Plenty of banks still make private sector student loans.) Instead, Obama and the Democrats cut private banks out of the federal student loan program, ending billions in subsidies that were needlessly going to banks for acting as loan middlemen. The money saved went into the Pell Grant program. Romney’s plan would entail taking away Pell money in order to pay Wall Street to service federal loans.

Second, Romney would remove regulations meant to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges:

Ill-advised regulation imposed by the Obama administration, such as the so-called “Gainful Employment” rule, has made it even harder for some providers to operate, while distorting their incentives.

This rule simply states that colleges leaving too many students crippled with debt and without good jobs lose their access to federal dollars. Many for-profit schools make nearly all of their revenue from the federal government — in the form of the various streams of aid used by their students — yet have much high rates of student loan default than public schools. Only 11 percent of higher education students in the country attend for-profit schools, but they account for 26 percent of federal student loans and 44 percent of student loan defaults.

Romney is already intimately tied to the for-profit college industry. Inside Higher Ed noted that two of his advisers “have lobbied on behalf of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix.” On the campaign trail, Romney has effusively praised Full Sail University, a for-profit institution. And it seems that his policy platform would be a boon to this industry which is, in many instances, extremely predatory.

(HT: Huffington Post)

• Senate Democrats are planning a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which is aimed at helping to close the gender pay gap. [Politico]

• European leaders have delayed any decision on bolstering the region’s banks. [Financial Times]

• Freddie Mac is forcing Bank of America to buy back $330 million in mortgage securities. [Wall Street Journal]

• Regulators and lawmakers are investigating whether Facebook’s bankers gave valuable information about the company’s public offering to select investors. [New York Times]

• More than 30 percent of borrowers are underwater on their mortgages, according to the latest data. [CNN Money]

• Due to Congress’ failure to pass a transportation funding bill, more states are looking to tolls to pay for infrastructure. [Associated Press]

• Economists believe China will launch “aggressive” stimulus measures to combat deteriorating growth. [CNBC]

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking to craft regulations governing prepaid debit cards. [Huffington Post]

However, it seems that Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) and the Republican legislature feel that the state has money to burn on tax cuts for the financial industry:

An Ohio Legislative Service Commission analysis said the bill “may decrease GRF (general revenue fund) revenue by an uncertain amount, though the revenue loss may be up to $30 million per year, when compared to the introduced version of the bill.”

The potential of a $23 million to $30 million tax cut for financial institutions drew fire from Democrats at a time when schools and local governments are suffering from significant budget cuts.

Kasich’s original plan was meant to be revenue neutral, but the legislature cut it up until it turned into a gift to the banks worth millions of dollars. As Policy Matters Ohio noted, the justification for cutting banks’ taxes — that they will use the money to increase lending — is fundamentally flawed:

The idea that cutting bank tax rates will fuel more lending and a stronger economy is misplaced. Since many Ohio banks already are “flush with cash,” as a representative of the industry puts it, cutting their taxes is unlikely to lead to new lending. Ohio banks are doing well, as a Feb. 28 press release from the Ohio Bankers League entitled “Bumper Quarter for Ohio Banks” attests, and are in no need of a tax cut.

“We’re basically giving the banks … a $25 million gift every year,” said state Rep. Mike Foley (D). “But we’re also doing that in the context of an economy and state budget in Ohio that has been wracked and harmed and hurt and mangled by the financial industry that we’re giving benefits to today.”

Cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program) would throw 13 million low-income people off the benefit rolls, cut benefits deeply — by over $1,800 a year for a family of four — or some combination of the two. These cuts would primarily affect poor families with children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

These deep cuts would be necessary because of the huge tax cuts Romney has proposed, alongside a promise to balance the budget. This estimate assumes that Romney would offset at least some of those tax cuts, even though he has yet to lay out a plan to do so. Thus, it’s entirely possible that even more would have to be cut if Romney were to keep his promise to balance the budget without offsetting his tax cuts.

As CBPP put it, “by 2022, if the budget had to be balanced while taxes were cut, the proposals would require cutting entitlement and discretionary programs other than Social Security and core defense by more than half. And if policymakers offset none (rather than half) of Romney’s tax cuts by reducing tax preferences, they would have to cut these programs by more than 70 percent.” Food stamps kept more than five million people out of poverty in 2010 and last year reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty by half.

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is warning of a “severe recession” in the Eurozone, predicting its economy could contract by 2 percent this year. [Washington Post]

• The International Monetary Fund is calling on the UK to do more to boost its economy. [Associated Press]

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is suing some of the nation’s biggest banks for misrepresenting mortgage securities that they sold. [Wall Street Journal]

• In several states, scholarship funds meant for low-income students are instead going to benefit private schools. [New York Times]

• The Obama administration is proposing to divide $400 million between school districts that design new education delivery methods. [Reuters]

• Senate Democrats are urging Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to schedule a vote on legislation that would penalize Americans who renounce citizenship for tax purposes, after Boehner expressed some support for the idea. [The Hill]

• Walmart shareholders are being urged not to re-eclect CEO Mike Duke,due to his failure to prevent a widespread bribery scandal. [Associated Press]