It's powerfully important that our kids get an education in personal finance.

I don't want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes.

Adjusted for inflation, somebody going to college today to a state university, is paying about 300 percent of what her mom or dad did just 30 years ago.

It is not the job of the Department of Education to maximize profits for the government at the cost of squeezing students who are struggling to get an education.

Personal responsibility matters. There are no excuses for those who spend money on things they cannot afford. But it's a whole lot harder to act responsibly when consumer credit contracts are designed to be incomprehensible, when prices are obscure and risks are hidden.

There's a lot of research on the shift in who deals with money when families get in trouble. In good times, husbands handle the family's finances about 80 percent of the time. But when times turn sour and families start dealing with creditors and managing unpayable bills, women take more active roles.

What do the Republicans say? Donald Trump? They say they're just going to roll back the Dodd-Frank regulations. They want to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.