what to do for the young, debt-ridden and jobless

Some people have read my piece on Occupy Wall Street as being more critical or unfeeling towards recent college graduates than I intended. I don't take back anything that I said in that post, but I want to point out that the point wasn't and isn't that these people don't have legitimate grievances, or that we shouldn't take their problems seriously. Some constructive ideas:

1. First, I have argued that college costs need to be reined in, perhaps dramatically, since before the financial crisis and the attendant hit in employment rates for college grads. I wrote a piece here on that issue. The takeaway, for me, is threefold: first, stop the rampant expansion in administrative costs at universities, which are the primary driver of tuition increases, in large part by second reducing the vast array of services that colleges are offering that, whatever their merits, are tangential to the educational mission, which is itself a part of the third element, stopping the manic physical expansion and focus on facilities, beautification, and high-cost/high-maintenance construction.
2. You can certainly find far, far more educated and nuanced discussion of Keynesian economics elsewhere, but I do believe in the general Keynesian countercyclical economic model as endorsed by Paul Krugman et al, and I think properly executed fiscal and monetary stimulus could do a world of good for our job market. (Unlike Krugman et al, I don't think the failure by policy elites to enact that kind of stimulus is a product of short-term political forces but rather is due to an endemic capture of the policy apparatus by our financial and banking system.)
3. Personally, broad student loan forgiveness strikes me as a sound policy both ethically and from a stimulus standpoint. You wouldn't have to make it complete, but could agree to waive some percentage or some fixed value off of anyone's load debt. I understand the sense in which this seems to punish those who paid off their loans, and I also know that the deficit hawks would howl. But this is indeed a great burden on our young adults, and I don't see a moral hazard problem per se when it comes to student loans.

Update: A commenter sends along this link to an argument against student load forgiveness from Justin Wolfers. My theory is that Wolfers has a lot of student loan debt himself, or his children do, so while his economic mind opposes the idea, it would be personally better for him if student loan forgiveness passed. That's the only explanation I can offer for why he would express seemingly sound ideas in such an irritating tone. I don't know, seems like loan forgiveness would be a bad idea, but golly. Scraping together a little sympathy for these people wouldn't make your arguments less valid, and would do your tone a world of good.

Incidentally, Wolfers's piece utilizes my least favorite bit of political illogic, the part where he say

Do this once, and what will happen in the next recession? More lobbying for free money, rather than doing something socially constructive.  Moreover, if these guys succeed, others will try, too. And we’ll just get more spending in the least socially productive part of our economy—the lobbying industry.

Except, well, no. This kind of argument gets bandied about all the time, and it happens because when the future actually arrives, nobody remembers this hogwash and bothers to refute it. Look at it this way. We were in recession. Obama got a stimulus passed. We may have slid back into recession already or may be about to. Does that mean we're going to get more stimulus? Anybody who is politically engaged would say no. That's because things change. The political situation changes, conditions on the ground change. "If we do this now we are required to do it again," or "we did it then so we must do it again now" are arguments nobody makes, thanks to their complete emptiness, so using the prediction of those arguments to preempt potential policy is equally empty.

Finally, Wolfers is disingenuous when he says

Notice the political rhetoric?  Give free money to us, rather than “corporations, millionaires and billionaires.”  Opportunity cost is one of the key principles of economics. And that principle says to compare your choice with the next best alternative.  Instead, they’re comparing it with the worst alternative.  So my question for the proponents: Why give money to college grads rather than the 15% of the population in poverty?

 This would be more convincing, and much closer to that cutting tone Wolfers is so transparently trying (and failing) to achieve, were the "worst possible alternative" not, in fact, the status quo. Wolfers is speaking here as if government supporting the richest and corporations over more progressive alternatives is some lame straw man. It is in fact standard operating procedure, as he is well aware.