The United States has a problem: rapidly rising student debt. It also has a solution: online education. The primary reason for spiraling student debt is the soaring costs of a college education at a physical college. Online education strips away all of those expenses except for the cost of the professor’s time and experience. It sounds perfect, an alignment of technology, social need and limited resources. So why do so many people believe that it is a deeply flawed solution?

Because it means massive swaths of higher education is about to change. Technology has disrupted many industries; now it’s about to do the same to higher ed.

But it is the students who need aid, and not the financial kind. They have too much of that as it is. The amount of student debt is large and getting larger. It will top $1.1 trillion this year; two-thirds of college students will graduate with debt. The average debt burden is $27,000, though that is skewed higher by a small percentage who owe a lot more. Forty percent of students owe less than $10,000 . The amount of student debt has doubled since 2007, tripled since 2004, and many economists believe that the effect on the overall economy is negative.

While college graduates undoubtedly land in higher-paid jobs (earning almost twice those with only high school degrees), that may be offset by the burden of interest payments on student loans. Says Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial : “Student debt has a dramatic impact on the ability to buy a house, and to buy the dishwashers and the lawnmowers and all the other purchases that stem from that … It has a ripple effect throughout the economy.”

As for the students, the price of the debt is often not worth the benefits. According to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York , 17 percent of students are in default, compared with 10 percent in 2004. And a large portion of those defaulting are over 30 years old, which means that the problems with student debt don’t disappear with age.

On Monday, by a comfortable 69-27 majority, the U.S. Senate passed a controversial bill that will require online retailers with annual sales of more than $1 million to collect state sales taxes. Said Republican Mike Enzi of Wyoming : “This bill is about fairness. It’s about leveling the playing field between the brick-and-mortar and online companies, and it’s about collecting a tax that’s already due. It’s not about raising taxes.”

Wait, isn’t it? Leaving aside the anomaly in today’s world of a Republican sponsoring a bill that raises revenue, the proposed law is entirely about raising taxes. The question, then, is whether these are taxes that ought to be raised, and if this is the way to raise them.

The short answers: yes to the first, no to the second. This bill is precisely the wrong way to raise revenue from a growing stream of business. It applies a tax designed for physical entities to new commerce and does so in ways that will do little to help states or to reinvigorate small businesses that are hurting.

Over the past month, America’s largest companies reported their earnings for the first quarter of the year. These quarterly reports provide as much insight into our economy as any of our leading indicators. And these results, if read correctly, highlight once again the bifurcated world we live in. Our gross domestic product is growing about 2.5 percent a year for now , but that masks a vast divergence, not between the 1 percent and the 99 but between what works and what does not. What this earnings season demonstrates is that capital and companies are thriving, along with tens of millions of people connected to those worlds, while labor and wages are not. But that is not how it is being interpreted.

The consensus among investors and the financial media is that the quarter was something of a bust, as company after company reported only modest ? and in many cases, non-existent ? revenue growth. “Revenue still missing as companies beat earnings,” blared a USA Today headline , and that encapsulates what most have said.

The uber-bearish economist Gary Schilling, cited by the widely-read uber-gloomy blog Zero Hedge, put it bluntly: “Pricing power has been non-existent [and] sales volume increases have been very limited so the only route to profit has been cutting costs. That has pushed profit margins to all-time highs.” Enjoy it now, says Schilling , because profit without revenue growth is “unsustainable.” The only reason markets are doing well and corporations aren’t panicking, the thinking goes, is because central banks are flooding the world with money.

Events unfolded rapidly in Boston this week, from the bombing on Monday to release of photos of the suspects on Thursday to the citywide manhunt for one brother and the killing of the other. While we now know that the two young men are ethnic Chechens who spent time in Kyrgyzstan , we know nothing as yet about why they did what they did.

But perhaps less important than whatever their rationale turns out to have been is how the United States is reacting to the events of this week. On that score, the initial reactions here suggest that we may have turned a post-9/11 corner, still shocked, still pained, but no longer so fearful, so ready to blame religious zealots, and so willing to discard the freedoms that give us such strengths and yet can, at times, leave us so vulnerable.

There will always be people who find some reason to wreak havoc and inflict pain. Yes, such attacks can kill and maim, and thankfully, the Boston Marathon bombing, horrible though it was, did only limited physical harm considering the number of runners and the size of the crowds. It’s what comes after that shapes our lives even more. It’s how society reacts that affects not the hundreds directly harmed and the three killed, not the thousands of friends and loved ones, but the millions and hundreds of millions who were touched only through their sympathy.

In a world increasingly framed by economic debates, the phrase “the laws of economics” has become ever more prevalent. As the U.S. Senate prepares to unveil a new immigration bill, much of the discussion centers on the economics of illegal immigration and the incentives for employers to hire undocumented workers. Said a recent Barron’s article : “Immigration policy is a game governed by classic economic rules, especially by Say’s Law, which says supply creates its own demand … Whether the new applicants are seeking stoop-labor jobs in California’s Central Valley or high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, the laws of economics dictate the outcome: more immigration.”

How about the war on drugs? Said one recent analysis : “We’re losing the war on drugs because it’s a war that defies the laws of economics. We might as well be fighting a war on gravity.”

And how about what history can tell us about our current policies? Said one recent review of Amity Shlaes’ biography of Calvin Coolidge, which makes the case for Coolidge as an exemplar of responsible economic policy: ?“Our current political leadership ? and we who elect them ? are spending the country into ruin. The laws of man can be bent and broken; the laws of economics can not.”

We think of spring as a time of cherry blossoms and renewed hope, as we slough off the depths of winter and ease into the warmer months. These bright days seem a strange time to encounter the by-now widely circulated warnings of impending doom by Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and current gadfly, David Stockman.

In a long essay in the New York Times drawn from his lengthy and just-published book The Great Deformation , Stockman this week made an impassioned plea for Americans to wake up to the looming crisis just ahead. This crisis, he predicts, will be triggered by a stock market collapse that will remove any lingering illusion that we are OK: “When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.”

Stockman has many proposed solutions ? abolish Medicare, means-test Social Security ? but little hope of any change. The system is broken, the die is cast, sell, sell, sell, sit with cash in your mattress and hope we can make it through the reckoning.

While tiny Cyprus teeters on the brink, dominating much of the news, and elusive peace in the Middle East remains in the headlines, there is another battle going on — the latest in a long war that is shaping our planet far more than the events in Nicosia or the West Bank. Food and water are essential to human existence, yet in the last few decades the ability to increase food supply by technological means has stirred fear and passion. Cyprus’ woes may come and go; the food wars are going nowhere.

Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s just announced they would not sell a soon-to-be-approved genetically modified salmon called AquAdvantage. That follows Whole Foods’ recent announcement that it would require all items sold in its stores to include information on “genetically modified organisms” by 2018. Popularly known as GMOs, these are foods whose genetic code has been scientifically altered. The recent steps are just the latest salvo, and follow a failed ballot initiative in California last fall that would have mandated all GMO foods to be clearly labeled.

These measures were presented as part of ongoing efforts to allow consumers to make more informed choices about their foods, but they also take a clear moral stance against GMOs. In announcing the salmon ban, a Whole Foods spokesperson stated : “We believe all farmed animals — whether raised on land or in water, should be from breeding programs designed to promote their welfare rather than developed solely on production or economic?outcomes.” A number of Whole Foods shoppers were already outraged that the chain has been selling products containing GMOs, particularly corn produced from Monsanto’s Roundup Ready genetically modified seeds. One advocate labeled Whole Foods “Wholesanto,” claiming that it only agreed to labeling after too many customers threatened to boycott the store. There was also reference to the policies in the United Kingdom and much of the European Union, where public attitudes towards GMOs are overwhelmingly negative.

Paul Ryan unveiled the House Republican budget this week with an ominous yet familiar warning: “America’s national debt is over $16 trillion.” Having stated the problem, he then offered a solution, one which differed only marginally from what he’s offered the past two years. Namely: restrain government healthcare spending on Medicare and Medicaid, reform the individual tax code, close loopholes, lower corporate taxes, and promote natural gas and energy independence. The goal? A balanced budget by 2023 that will ensure “the well-being of all Americans…and reignite the American dream.”

The strongest part of Ryan’s unveiling is not the specifics, which may not be very strong at all, but the unimpeachable critique of the White House and congressional Democrats for not offering their own blueprint and budget for the future. Some of that is semantics; both the president and congressional Democrats have offered various rough outlines of their long-term budget, and now Senate Democrats offered their counterproposal . But until late they had operated?more in the rough-and-tumble of dysfunctional Washington negotiations rather than with explicit, official and formal (and long) outlines of exactly what will be spent and how. Yes, each year the White House, through the Office of Management and Budget, does assess and express views about present spending. That is not the same as an explicit pathway for the future, which Ryan has indeed offered.

Such offerings are vital. You may, as I do, disagree with key elements of what Ryan and the Republicans are proposing. You may, as I do, object to the fixation on the size of the current debt without any consideration of why that debt was incurred and how much it currently costs to service it, given historically low interest rates. But Republicans are offering a set of answers, and Ryan for one is asking for those to be addressed so the process of debating and, yes, compromising can begin. No, the president is not required to offer a detailed budget; the power of the purse lies with Congress, not the White House. But a detailed vision, especially one that contrasts with the Republican one, would be welcome and productive.

Is China about to collapse? That question has been front and center in the past weeks as the country completes its leadership transition and after the exposure of its various real estate bubbles during a widely watched 60 Minutes expose this past weekend .

Concerns about soaring property prices throughout China are hardly new, but they have been given added weight by the government itself. Recognizing that a rapid implosion of the property market would disrupt economic growth, the central government recently announced far-reaching measures designed to dent the rampant speculation. Higher down payments, limiting the purchases of investment properties, and a capital gains tax on real estate transactions designed to make flipping properties less lucrative were included.

These measures, in conjunction with the new government’s announcing more modest growth targets of 7.5 percent a year, sent Chinese equities plunging and led to a slew of commentary in the United States saying China would be the next shoe to drop in the global system.

Everyday, we are treated to a new peril: Today we have sequestration, a word not much in anyone’s lexicon until recently. The mandated cuts to the federal budget, $85 billion by last count, will further stunt anemic economic growth, or so? economists and the Congressional Budget Office guesstimate . The prognostications surrounding the sequester have been grim, with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough warning of a “devastating list of horribles,” ranging from severe travel snafus to the end of vital education programs.

In the political media, in Washington, and in the defense industry (which will see especially draconian cuts), all of this is Big News. But after months of buildup, the end-of-days drama is ending with a resounding thud. The? meh? reaction of financial markets of late is particularly telling ( the Dow flirted with its all-time high this week ). Markets are mood rings, and the mood now is one of boredom and fatigue. Even the? New York Times ?led page 1 not with the sequester but with a studied picture of a nun saying goodbye to the retiring pope.

This is a good thing. Since the housing market imploded six years ago, we’ve been suffering from black swan fever. When Nicholas Taleb penned his passionate polemic about the inability of financial markets to allow for unanticipated and rare events (“black swans”), he did us all a great service in highlighting the narrow-mindedness that can have dire consequences.