Robert Shireman, a senior adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, says he expects the default rate, which reflects the early part of the recession, to continue to rise. “When people are facing a job loss, figuring out how to pay their student loan is not No. 1 on their list,” he said.

That’s right. For better or for worse, the last thing on many people’s minds at this time is their student loans. Like Mr. Shireman reports, if you’re losing your job and you’re at risk of going into default on your mortgage, then the last thing that you care about is paying back a student loan that is ten, fifteen, or twenty years old!

But you’ve got to make those payments, folks. Student loans are among the few pieces of debt that cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy filing. Further, the government can (and will) garnish your wages if you default on your student loans.

All of this gets back to a point that I’ve made a few times in the last few weeks on this blog – that one of the best ways to stimulate the economy would be to cancel some, if not all, student loan debt for existing borrowers. And this point is related to something else that I think many of us stunted by student loan debt understand that the rest of the people out there don’t get yet – namely that even with all of the stimulus plans and other money being pumped into the economy, those who have a great deal of student loan debt are not going to be able to contribute to the economic recovery.

Now, if there were only a few of us, then the effect wouldn’t be so bad. But the number of people with out of control student loans is growing and that is not a good thing for the economic recovery…

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

The total amount given to nearly 600 executives would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines.

Seriously, is anyone surprised by this information? A few months ago I suggested that the bailout would be doomed. Anyone could have seen this coming. Who in their right mind would trust the government with such a gigantic dollar amount? It’s insane. Did everyone forget that this is the government?!

The better way to have used that bailout money would have been to give each American a stipend a la the Bush stimulus check from last spring. Why would this have been a better use of the money? Because regular citizens know where they need financial assistance and how best to spend their tax dollars. When you leave the doling out of $350 billion (only half of the $700 billion bailout has been deployed) to the government, you’re essentially asking for the whole thing to go to shit.

And it has. Great!

So far, 1.8 million rebate checks have been intercepted by Treasury Department computers showing that individuals owe money to federal or state governments.

The biggest beneficiaries: parents who are owed child support.

I think this is great news. A population which can certainly use some extra help during these economic times is getting it from their own rebate checks plus they’re getting some money that they should have already received in the first place! Of course there is the larger population of deadbeats who not only are not receiving their checks, but haven’t made their various payments to the government. This is another population that could use some help. But that’s for another rebate program at another time.