HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Total Student Loan Debt Has Nearly Tripled Since 2004.

Total student debt stands at $966 billion as of the fourth quarter of 2012, the N.Y. Fed said in press materials, with a 70% increase in both the number of borrowers and the average balance per person. The overall number of borrowers past due on student loan payments has grown from under 10% in 2004 to 17% in 2012.

Fewer people with student loans are buying homes, according to data in the report. Of borrowers ages 25 to 30 who are taking out new mortgages, the percentage of those with student debt has fallen by half, from nearly 9% in 2005 to just above 4% in 2012.

“The higher burden of student loans and higher delinquencies may affect borrowers’ access to other types of credit and the performance of other debt,” the fed report concluded.

Educational debt is now the largest consumer liability after mortgages.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

AT JOEL KOTKIN’S NEW GEOGRAPHY BLOG: Disney Stops Thinking About Tomorrow, guest-blogger Zohar Liebermensch writes. This explains their approach to intellectual property.

AT AMAZON, specials and markdowns in The Easter Shop.

Also, today only: Dyson DC40 Vacuum Cleaner with Accessories Bundle, $399.00 (38% off).

ON PJTV, I talk with Michelle Fields about education. But admit it, you’ll tune in to watch her, not me.

BOEHNER: We’ll consider any gun measures that pass the Senate. Some are upset about this, but I think it’s more a way of putting endangered Dems in the Senate on the spot, channeling Kurt Schlichter.

Related: Sen. Joe Manchin Really Doesn’t Want To Talk About Guns. “Editor’s note: This question and answer session was permitted under the condition that The Journal would not ask questions regarding gun control legislation or the Second Amendment, as requested by the senator’s staff.”

ECONOMIST: Italy’s recent election could doom the Euro.

HIGHER EDUCATION INSIDERS back disruptive change.

KATHLEEN PARKER: Why the ‘threat’ on Bob Woodward matters. “Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script. Yes, all administrations are sensitive to criticism, and all push back when such criticism is deemed unfair or inaccurate. But no president since Richard Nixon has demonstrated such overt contempt for the messenger.”

Some of us saw this coming. Remember the Obama Truth Squad, composed of prosecutors and law enforcement officials in Missouri intimidating Obama critics in 2008?

And note this Michael Barone piece from 2008, too.

UPDATE: More from 2008. (Bumped).

SHOULD MITT ROMNEY come to Detroit’s rescue? They’ve been voting Democratic for years, now they’re a disaster, and they need a Republican to rescue them? That’s rich, but if I were Romney I’d find something else to do. Who needs the inevitability of a bunch of corrupt machine clients calling you a racist because you dared to shut down their no-show jobs?

MICHAEL WOLFF ON EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN ON unsolved crime. Epstein’s new book is The Annals of Unsolved Crime.

JOSE GUARDIA: Don’t get too excited about those Spain coup rumors.

FREE SPEECH: Conservatives, liberals, media advocates rally behind man jailed for criticizing Indiana judge.

READER BUSINESS PLUG: Direct Textbook, where reader Morgan MacArthur writes: “We’ve been fighting high textbook costs at DirectTextbook.com (my site, a price comparison service) for eight years.”

ED DRISCOLL: ‘In Detroit, You Can’t Talk Aesthetics without Talking Ruin Porn.’ “That sense of nihilism has implications far beyond the television and movie screen. Much of today’s left have abandoned the serious study of history, and have largely turned their backs on the future as well. All that is left for them is to play in the ruins — and to create more of them.”

THE REVOLVING DOOR SPINS AGAIN: Obama to nominate Burwell for White House budget chief.

President Obama will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell on Monday to head up the White House’s budget office, a senior administration official told The Hill on Sunday.

Burwell, who has long been considered the leading choice for the director’s spot at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), runs the Wal-Mart Foundation and formerly worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and served in President Clinton’s White House as deputy director of the budget office.

The OMB job has been open since newly-appointed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, a close associate of Burwell, left to become the president’s chief of staff in January last year.

Spin, spin, spin!

ROLL CALL: Obama’s Lost Leverage.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this for the White House and a re-elected president with political capital to spend.

But President Barack Obama is in a position of supplication to Hill Republicans, talking loudly and often about the harm of automatic budget cuts but lacking the leverage to get the GOP to buckle.

Senior administration officials had for months predicted that Republicans would cave on the sequester and agree to more taxes, even after agreeing to $600 billion in tax increases in the New Year’s Eve fiscal-cliff deal.

After all, aides noted, Republicans had caved again and again: on the 2012 payroll tax cut, on tax rate increases for the wealthy and on a debt ceiling extension.

Why not one more GOP rollover? Polls seemed solidly in the president’s favor.

But so far it’s not working out as the West Wing planned.

Well, stay tuned.

BILL WILSON: How To End Overcriminalization. He doesn’t get to the tar-and-feathers point, but it’s implied. And justified.

WELL, THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: Harvard Students Financially Illiterate. “A survey of Harvard students by the Harvard University Employees Credit Union found that only 10 percent had any formal financial education.”

IT’S HAPPENING ALL OVER: Law schools see sharp decline in applications.