Rancher Gary Wollert feeds hay to his cattle near Eads, Colo., Aug. 23, 2012. Like many ranchers who's grasslands have dried up due to the drought, Wollert has to supplement his cattle's diet with hay, now at record prices, to keep them alive.

John Moore / Getty Images — The nation's severe drought has been especially hard on cattlemen, made worse when Congress recessed for five weeks without passing disaster relief legislation. Most of the high plains areas of eastern Colorado and virtually all of Nebraska and Kansas are still in extreme or exceptional drought, despite recent lower temperatures, according to the University of Nebraska's Drought Monitor. The record-breaking drought, which has affected more than half of the continental U.S., is expected to drive up food prices by 2013 due to lower crop harvests and the adverse effect on the nation's cattle industry.

Rancher Gary Wollert inspects a dead cow on dry grasslands near Eads, Colo., Aug. 22. Many cattle in the area have contracted respiratory infections due to the wide temperature swings in this summer's heat wave and drought. While most cases have been cured, some have been fatal.

Cattle buyers wait to bid during a livestock auction at the Burlington Livestock Exchange in Burlington, Colo., Aug. 23.

A message is written on a restaurant sign in Burlington, Colo., Aug. 23. The ongoing drought has devastated the area's agricultural economy, but also affected a broad spectrum of businesses across the plains.

Slideshow: America's farmland baking in drought

Drought conditions plague much of the United States after a summer of scorching temperatures and a lack of rain. The dryness is affecting America's farmland, threatening crops like soybean and corn.

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U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan joined us for a live web chat on Friday, Aug. 24, to discuss education-related topics, such as student loans and the cost of college.

Here’s one of the Secretary’s answers to questions from the live chat. (See below for the full Q&A.)

Phil asked:

"Would you recommend students submit their FAFSAs to multiple schools to comparison shop among aid packages offered?"

Secretary Duncan replied:

"Yes, students absolutely should submit their FAFSA applications to multiple schools. We know that 75% send their FAFSA to only one school."

"Students should look at multiple schools when choosing college and choose one based on what's best for them, considering price, the quality of education, and graduation rates."

Secretary Duncan is the ninth U.S. secretary of education.

He has served in this post since his confirmation by the U.S. Senate on Jan. 20, 2009, following his nomination by President Barack Obama.

Here’s the full chat archive:

Federal forecasters are predicting record prices for corn and soybeans, raising fears of a new world food crisis as the worst U.S. drought in half a century continues to punish key farm states.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday said production of U.S. corn and soybeans is expected to be down 17 percent from its forecast last month of nearly 13 billion bushels, and 13 percent lower than last year. It was the second month in a row when the USDA has cut its production estimate.

Corn prices briefly surged to a record on the USDA’s forecast, but then retreated because the government said demand for the grain would fall due to its soaring cost.

The USDA’s first official assessment of the impact of the drought that has ravaged the nation’s Corn Belt is based on samples from parched, scorched fields, which are now expected to produce corn yields 25 percent below normal.

Inventories of soybeans, a key component of livestock feed from India to Indiana, are expected to be the smallest in nine years, the government report said.

The grim report is an abrupt reversal from just two months ago when farmers, making the largest corn plantings in 75 years, expected a record haul. Consumers worldwide were also hopeful that a robust harvest from the biggest agricultural exporter would help end a period of depleted global stockpiles.

Now, however, many fear record-high prices and meager stockpiles will rule commodity markets for at least a year more -- and it may worsen if growing signs of shortages prompt some countries to impose export bans or make panic purchases, as they did during the last dramatic price spike in 2008.

“Several urgent actions must be taken to address the current situation to prevent a potential global food price crisis,” said Shenggen Fan, head of an agricultural think tank funded by the World Bank. In addition to avoiding trade restraints, he said countries should throttle back on using grain to make biofuels.

The report could sharpen the emerging debate around the U.S. policy that requires use of 13.2 billion gallons (50 billion liters) of biofuels -- mostly corn ethanol -- this year, equal to 9 percent of fuel for cars and light trucks. While dozens of politicians and livestock lobby groups have called for relief, the policy has staunch Farm Belt support that is unlikely to waver in an election year.

The USDA had somewhat foreshadowed the newly lowered expectations, noting earlier this week that exactly half of the nation's corn crop was rated poor to very poor, up 2 percentage points from the previous week and creeping closer to the peak of 53 percent of 24 years ago. Some 39 percent of soybeans now fall under those two categories, rising 2 percentage points for the second straight week and eclipsing the 1988 benchmark of 37 percent.

The nation's rangeland and pastures are faring even worse, with roughly three-fifths rated to be in poor to very poor shape - the largest area thus affected in 18 years.

Friday's USDA report amplified the troubling picture already painted a day earlier, when the latest weekly U.S. Drought Monitor map showed that the drought conditions in Plains states where production of corn and soybeans is key continue to worsen. That update showed that the expanse still gripped by extreme or exceptional drought - the two worst classifications - rose to 24.14 percent, up nearly 2 percentage points from the previous week.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Erik S. Lesser / EPA

Letter carrier Letonya Lawson makes her deliveries in Avondale Estates, Ga., this week. Despite a default, no interruption in postal service is expected.

Neither rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night -- nor, apparently, a $5.5 billion default -- will keep the U.S. Postal Service from moving the mail.

The agency confirmed Wednesday that it has defaulted on a payment, mandated by Congress, to a health benefit trust fund managed by the Treasury. The agency said it will miss a similar payment due Sept. 30.

The default will have “no material effect” on its operations, according to a Postal Service spokesman.

“We will continue to deliver the mail, pay our employees and suppliers and meet our other financial obligations,” the spokesman said.

The default is a milestone in the long-running political dance between Congress and Postal Service managers over how to finance the delivery of mail to 151 million addresses, nearly 40 percent of the world's "snail mail" volume. Though its Capitol Hill critics complain that Postal Service should be made to operate “more like a business,” Congress has created a set of rules that all but guarantee billion-dollar losses.

Those losses are almost entirely the result of the now-defaulted “pre-funding” requirement for retiree health insurance and other accounting charges, according to Ron Bloom, an investment adviser at Lazard who has advised the Postal Service on restructuring.

“No other company in America, public or private, has that obligation,” he said. “The Postal Service is losing about $75 million a month from delivering the mail. That's a problem, but a different problem than the billions we hear about. If we raise the price of a stamp by half a penny, they would be breaking even.”

The Postal Service faces other constraints. It is banned from setting up retail outlets, for example, that could generate profits to help subsidize delivery costs.  Worse, it is barred by Congress from charging the full cost of providing the service it is required to deliver.

“On the one side, (Congress) says, ‘We want to you deliver a letter from the corner of Alaska to the far corner of Hawaii and we want to you do it for 45 cents,' which has nothing to do with the price of what it takes to get there,” said Bloom. “On the other hand, (Congress) says, ‘We want to you break even.’”

Beyond the crushing burden of prefunding benefits, the Postal Service is grappling with a long-term decline in the volume of first-class mail -- 4 to 5 percent year -- as more communication shifts to the Internet.  It’s not unlike a transition in the 1970s, when the decline of railroads forced the Postal Service to develop a new infrastructure of sorting facilities, part of the reason Congress chose to establish the service as an independently funded agency, according to Robert John, a Columbia Journalism School professor who has written about the history of the service.

“They built these large sorting centers that made it possible to distribute first-class mail in a day or two,” he said. “That’s one of the ways they could save money. They could no longer use all the facilities that they built out.  Do we, as a matter of policy, need to get catalogs, advertising -- so-called junk mail -- in one day? Could we get it in three days? But then what about Social Security checks?”

As revenues from first-class letters have declined, the volume of package deliveries has grown. Though it competes with private delivery services like UPS and FedEx, those carriers don't deliver to remote areas that are less profitable. So they contract with the Postal Service to get the job done.

That means looming Postal Service cutbacks could create economic hardships for those carriers -- and the thousands of small  businesses that depend on them.  

“If I were at Fed Ex, I would be extremely worried about the situation,” said John. “It’s bad news for small business and it's bad news to the American economy."

More recently, Congress has sidelined the Postal Service's efforts to cut costs. The agency this year unveiled a five-year plan to reach profitability that, in addition to closing low-volume facilities, would cut Saturday delivery and eliminate the requirement to prefund employee benefits.

In April, the Senate approved an $11 billion cash infusion to avert a default, but delayed many of the proposed cuts for at least a year. The House is deadlocked on a bill calling for deeper cuts, in part due to opposition from lawmakers from rural districts where the cuts would hit hardest.

Congress has come to the financial rescue repeatedly in the past, said John, and he thinks it's likely that lawmakers will do so again. The political fallout from inconveniencing millions of voters in sparsely populated areas will likely override philosophical opposition to what the agency's critics see as a "bailout."   

"I would think that congressmen, who for principled reasons are opposed to government intervention and who happen to represent rural districts, are going to be like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis when it comes to privatizing the post office."

Even if Congress acts this year, which isn’t expected, the projected annual savings of $2.1 billion wouldn't kick in until late 2014. The Postal Service has projected a record $14.1 billion loss for this year. 

While some cuts seem inevitable, Bloom cautions that they could end up doing more harm than good.

"Clearly, you've got to right-size the network because first-class is in long-term decline," he said. "But the problem with all network companies is if you cut the network too fast, you accelerate the very problem you're trying to fix."

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Democrats pressed their attack Sunday on Mitt Romney’s record as head of the investment firm Bain Capital in the 1990’s.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate majority whip, asked on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Why is Mitt Romney running away from his company, Bain Capital, like a scalded cat? Because there’s abundant evidence that under Bain Capital they were exporting American jobs to low-wage countries and he doesn’t want to be associated with it.”

Defending Romney’s record at Bain Capital, Romney campaign advisor Ed Gillespie told NBC’s David Gregory that outsourcing – U.S. companies setting up foreign operations to replace operations in the United States – was due partly to President Barack Obama’s policies of imposing “excessive regulations” and maintaining a high corporate tax rate.

Gillespie charged that Obama’s policies are “forcing jobs overseas.”

Gillespie contended that some of the money in the $830 billion stimulus program which Obama signed into law in 2009 was channeled into companies and jobs in China, Finland, Mexico, and Denmark, instead of in the United States.

At the same time, Gillespie did not condemn outsourcing in every instance. He said that Romney believes that “American companies should be free – we have a free economy -- to make decisions that are in the interests of their shareholders, and what we need to do is make those decisions more attractive to invest here in the United States, rather than making it more attractive to go overseas, which is what the Obama policies do.”  

The Obama campaign has spent the past few days accusing Romney of lying after the Boston Globe reported that he’d retained the title of chief executive and chairman of Bain Capital until 2002, three years beyond the date he said he ceded control.

With the Bain issue, the Obama campaign is repeating charges first made against Romney when he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002. His Democratic opponent, Shannon O’Brien, accused him of being culpable in layoffs at a Kansas City steel mill that went bankrupt in 2001 after Bain Capital had profited from an investment in the company.

Fortune Magazine reported Thursday that “offering documents” that Bain Capital sent to potential investors in 2000 and 2001 provide contemporaneous evidence that Romney had no active role in managing the firm after 1999 when he left to run the Winter Olympics in Utah.

Romney “took a leave of absence from Bain to go and run the Olympics in Salt Lake City…..The International Olympic Committee was going to pull the Olympics from the United States which would have been a huge embarrassment for our country,” Gillespie said. Romney “left a life that he loved to help a country that he loved even more.”

Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, told reporters Thursday that either Romney had misrepresented his position at Bain in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission “which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments…”

Durbin sidestepped the question of whether Cutter’s use of the term “felony” was improper; instead the Illinois Democrat said the disclosure documents which Romney and Bain Capital filed with the SEC from 2000 to 2002 were “completely confusing” because they said he was the chief executive of the firm, and yet he has said he was no longer at the firm.

On the question of whether Romney ought to release his tax returns for years before 2010, Gillespie said that two years of returns were sufficient.

He contended that the Obama campaign was using the tax return issue to try to distract voters’ attention from the “dismal” state of the American economy. The real issue, he said, “is what are we going to do to make it where more Americans are filing their incomes taxes because they have a job?” He cited Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have left the work force.  

 Updated at 5:55 p.m. ET: Unions representing civil servants in Scranton, Pa., filed suit Tuesday after the mayor cut pay for police, firefighters, garbage collectors and other public workers to minimum wage, saying that was all the city could afford.

Unions representing police, fire and public workers in the city of 76,000 filed three lawsuits after the city defied a judge's order and issued paychecks Friday that paid 398 city employees at the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, according to the Scranton Times-Tribune.

The lawsuits against Mayor Chris Doherty include one filed in federal court under the Fair Labor Standards Act accusing the city of failing to pay wages on time and failing to pay overtime. Another lawsuit seeks to hold the mayor in contempt for violating a judges order. Yet another alleges that benefits for disabled police and firefighters were cut without a hearing.

The Times-Tribune, quoting City Business Manager Ryan McGowan, reported that as of Monday the city had $133,000 in cash, but owed $3.4 million in vendor bills. One of those bills was health insurance, McGowan said.

Related: Are you making $30,000 a year or less? We want to hear from you.

Scranton is among a number of cities struggling to pay their bills amid rising labor costs. Earlier this month, Stockton, Calif., became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy protection from creditors.

Scranton's mayor and the city council have been locked in a dispute over how to raise money in a city that has steadily lost population over the past 50 years and has been hit hard by the real estate slump and the Great Recession that followed. Doherty has argued that the city needs to increase taxes, but council members want to find other ways to raise money. Doherty is a Democrat. The city council  is comprised of Democrats.

The Scranton newspaper said the city has been designated as financially distressed for 20 years.

Related: US towns face perfect storm as budgets are squeezed

Just 4 percent of people who grew up in the bottom fifth of the household income ladder made it to the top fifth as adults, according to a new long-term study showing the limits of American mobility.

“The rags-to-riches story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality,” said Erin Currier, project manager with the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project, which prepared the report.

The analysis of household income across two generations, released Monday, found that very few people born to poor parents ended up rich, and only 8 percent of people whose parents were in the top fifth of households dropped to the bottom fifth as adults.

The study found that the vast majority of American families are bringing in more money than their parents did, adjusted fror inflation, than when they were the same age. But especially among the most poor, bigger paychecks aren't often enough to push families  up the income ladder.

Related: Do you make $30,000 a year or less?

Most people raised in very rich and very poor households didn’t see their own circumstances change much when they grew up. The report found that 70 percent of Americans whose parents were in the bottom fifth of the income ladder stayed below the middle as adults. And 63 percent of those born in the top fifth of the income ladder stayed above the middle when they became adults.

Those born in the middle three-fifths of the income spectrum did have a higher likelihood of moving either up or down the ladder as adults.

In all, 35 percent of American households could be classified as upwardly mobile, meaning they had a higher household income than their parents at the same age and were at a higher point in the income distribution ladder than their parents had been.

People can make more money than their parents and still not rise up the income ladder because median income has increased at all levels.

Currier said that means many people may feel more successful than their parents – maybe because they own a slightly bigger house or have a flat-screen TV – but aren’t much better off relative to other households today.

"The general public thinks there’s much more mobility than there actually is," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, who was not involved in the research.

Mishel also noted that many households have more income than their parents did at the same age because more women are working than in the previous generation.

That's a contributing factor that the Pew report also acknowledged. Looking more narrowly just at men, they found that 59 percent of sons are earning more than their dads did at the same age.

The Pew analysis was based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, an in-depth look at family finances, using data from 1968 through 2009. The long-running study allowed the researchers to compare how adults are doing in comparison to how their parents were doing at the same point in their lives. The figures were adjusted for inflation, family size and age.

A separate look at total wealth found that half of Americans are wealthier than their parents were at the same age.

The fact that most households are bringing in more income than their parents but only half are wealthier is a little troubling, Currier said.

“Clearly families do have more money in terms of what’s coming in every month, but they don’t have greater savings, they don't have greater assets - for the most part - than their parents did,” she said.

One of the biggest ways individuals can improve their circumstances relative to their parents is to get a college degree.

The researchers found that a four-year degree triples a person’s chances of making it from the bottom to the top of the income ladder. College graduates also were more likely to be doing better than their parents were at the same age, in terms of both income and wealth.

The researchers also found that African-Americans were less likely than whites to outearn their parents. The data was too limited to do a similar analysis of other racial and ethnic minorities.

Related:

To get your kids ahead in life, get a college degree

We are the median: Living on $50,000 a year

Updated 2:12 p.m. - Congress ended months of partisan bickering on Friday by passing and sending to President Barack Obama a comprehensive extension of highway and infrastructure projects, along with a one-year extension of low student loan rates that were set to double.

The House voted 373 to 52 to approve a $120 billion, 27-month bill to fund highway projects. Attached to that bill was the student loan extension, which prevented rates from doubling from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1.

The Senate approved the package shortly thereafter in a 74-19 vote. The legislation now heads to the White House for the president's signature.

The package lumps together some of the biggest stumbling blocks to beguile lawmakers in the past few months. Squabbling over how to finance each priority had divided the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-run Senate.

Republicans had also insisted on including a measure to move the Keystone XL oil pipeline forward. President Obama and Democrats opposed it, though, and it was ultimately omitted from today’s bill.

Instead, Republicans were able to use funds set aside for "beautification, bike paths, and sidewalk lighting" for higher priority infrastructure projects such as the national highway system instead.  They were also able to keep funding at current levels.

The package also cuts the average review and permitting process for new infrastructure projects in half, done mostly by streamlining environmental reviews so they can run concurrently, something for which Republicans had also fought.