MEGAN MCARDLE: How To Put The Brakes On Consumers’ Debt.

My basic opinion of the piece is that this is a conflict between what Walter Russell Mead calls the blue social model and the red-state world where Ramsey lives and finds most of his listeners. We can quibble about this or that — is Ramsey’s estimate of stock market returns too rosy? Should he be more open to bankruptcy? But what it boils down to is that Olen thinks that rising economic insecurity calls for a massive expansion of the blue social model, while Ramsey thinks it calls for getting more entrepreneurial and adjusting your lifestyle to meet reduced income expectations. How well you think this works is probably closely connected to where you live.

Nowhere is this clearer than on the question of education. Early on in the piece, Olen recounts an episode when a listener asks about stopping his debt-repayment plan in order to send his kid to a $42,000-a-year college. Olen seems to find this odd; after all, the cost of college has risen dramatically over the last 25 years. This is true, but I’m not sure why it’s relevant: $42,000 a year is not even the average cost of tuition, much less the minimum decent standard you can get away with. What it will not do is send you to a fancy Northeastern private college. Ramsey’s advice is absolutely correct: A middle-age couple with heavy debt need to get themselves stable, not shell out more than $150,000 in college tuition.

But for blue-state professionals, that’s something close to suggesting that they should abandon their kids in the street (or have them take out $150,000 in student loans, which is not much better). The social norm is that you send your kid to the best college he or she can get into, by any means necessary. In a red state, if your kids are planning to stay in your area, then it’s probably not that much of a sacrifice to send them to the local state school — in Biloxi, a degree from Ole Miss is probably more valuable than a degree from Harvard. But especially in the Northeast, mobility is the default assumption; you want your kids to go to the school that will give them the best array of jobs and places to live, not one that will position them to come back and take their place in your community. This may mean considerable personal sacrifice — even when I was going through Penn, 20 years’ worth of tuition inflation ago, I knew a surprising number of kids whose educations were being financed by mortgages. If you start off with this norm, then what has happened to tuition over the last 25 years is something like watching the price of a basic food budget octuple in real terms, leaving millions of families mired deeply in debt just to pay for some hamburger and rice. If that had happened to the price of food, even the staunchest Republican might be looking for some relief beyond better budgeting skills.

Educational expenses loom very large in Olen’s piece; she emphasizes it over and over, along with medical debt.* And in blue states, that is exactly how a lot of parents feel.

Read the whole thing. But blue-state parents bleeding themselves dry on educational expenses — at any level — should really pre-order my new book.