Star investor Mark Cuban recommends a novel fix for the economy: reduce the country's huge overhang of student debt.
"There's $1.2 trillion in student debt," he told CNBC. "You figure half of that is misspent. Put another $600 billion into the economy, and you take a huge step forward."
The debt burden of young college graduates stifles their spending power, Cuban said. "That's the same money that, when you graduated [in the past], you used to move out of the house or you went out and spent money that improved the economy and helped companies grow," he said.
"It's a really simple equation."
The solution: cap the amount of loans that each student can receive at $10,000 per year, Cuban said. That would make colleges reduce both tuition charges and spending, he said.
At this point, tuition revenue is "just easy money, and easy money goes to a college administrator's head just as much as anybody else," Cuban said.
Interestingly enough, it's not just young people burdened with student debt.
More than 2 million Americans who are 60 and over still have student loans, nearly triple the number from 2005, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Their student debt totals $43 billion, exploding upward from $8 billion in 2005.
"Some may think of student loan debt as a young person’s problem, but, as it turns out, that is increasingly not the case," Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, told The New York Times.
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