What's More American Than Pie In The Sky Economics?
Or headlights that leave you functionally blind...
Two days after my 17th birthday, I took my road test and passed. I still remember that patchwork quilt of disparate feelings: relief, excitement, pride, surprise and accomplishment.
However, minutes after processing all of those emotions, I realized what sort of scam the “junior license” was. All of those freedoms that I dreamed about for years (the kind that would motivate a boy to schedule a road test minutes after their 17th birthday) were off limits. No driving to friends' houses. No giving girls a ride home from the beach. No beach—that is, unless I found a way to get a job there.
Ah, but there was a work around. Successful completion of an extensive summer semester driver’s education class would qualify me for an early senior license. So, I coughed up $75–which, in those days, was equivalent to $67,000 in today’s money. (I’m exaggerating. A little) and joined all the ne’er-do-wells at summer school.
One day, a Suffolk County policeman came to our class to give us a brief look at what dangers young drivers face, scare us about drunk driving and give us insights on his pet peeves—you know, the kind of things he would give tickets for no matter the excuse.
“If I’m driving down a two lane road and you don’t dim your high beams, you’re getting a ticket. I don’t care if your father is Ronald Reagan.”
These days things are a bit different. We have nearly half of all cars on the road with low beams that are actually ten times more obnoxious and annoying than the brights on a ‘73 Skylark.
As far as I’m concerned, driving around with those is a lot like walking into a 4 star Michelin restaurant and farting. It isn’t illegal. No one can arrest you or give you a citation, but that does not mean that it’s even slightly ok.
I’m not sure how we, as a society, have come to accept temporary blindness at the hands of a fellow driver as permissible, but here we are.
American society is famous for employing questionable practices that haven’t exactly been legislated against but are, nonetheless, reprehensible. The student loan issue is a perfect example. The way we, as a society, have normalized lumbering teenagers with tens of thousands of dollars in debt is ludicrous.
I have a vivid memory of being at the dinner table with the whole family, stressing about how I’d pay for college. My dad, in one of his most Ralph Kramden moments, made this big public announcement:
“You take care of the grades and I’ll (and here, he pointed at his chest with his thumb) take care of everything else.”
And by “take care” he meant acquiring $50,000 in loans under my name that I’d inevitably be responsible for paying off. This was more than a decade before the internet was around, so as a whole, I think kids were a lot less informed. The overarching attitude that was drummed in our collective heads was “a college education will set you up to make double what you would be earning otherwise, so you’ll have that paid off before you’re thirty.”
And, of course, “the installments will be so minuscule you won’t notice the difference when it comes out of your checking account.” I call this “pie in the sky” economics and there is really nothing more American than that.
And it didn’t just stop there. The student union building used to hold these events where credit card companies were allowed to give away free gifts to cash poor students in exchange for filling out their applications for credit. “Don’t worry,” they all said, “You’ll be able to pay all of this back when you get out of here and start making the big bucks.”
Sound familiar? The schools in conjunction with the feds have outlawed these practices and you won’t find representatives from Discover in the student union buildings these days. The government really doesn’t want the competition or the loss of market share.
My last year of college was 1993 and today, July 22, 2022, I owe Navient $58,000. Beginning in September, my payment is going up to $420 per month. Somehow those kind folks at Navient decided that was 10% of my discretionary income.
I can’t help feeling like they missed the fact that it costs $20 a day in gas to drive, a bag of groceries is about $75, and wages haven’t increased since Jeff Bezos had a barber.
And I know much of this is my own fault. From 1993-2011, my motto was “Student loans? What student loans?” I truly believed that if I plugged away and kept trying my hardest, I’d become a financially successful songwriter and I’d pay everything off with my residuals. I mean, why waste “pie in the sky” economics on something as colorless as a white collar job, when it could be employed in so many other ways?
Take out a $10,000 loan and publish that book you always wanted to write. You can pay it back when it starts flying off the shelves. Cash in that 401(k) and build that race car. Those purses are usually pretty hefty. Your only limit is your imagination. Well that and your relationship with reality.
I remember seeing this meme that this dufus once posted that said, “I don’t want to hear about your student loans! You went to college, you’re smart, figure it out yourself.” Taking into account this person’s upbringing and history made it ten times worse. It was only through sheer circumstance and caprice that this guy was born into a family where he was shepherded down a different path, but he seemed to be having a wonderful time giving everyone the impression that he, at sixteen years old, had the foresight to see what the rest of us could not. Because of his sheer precocious wisdom, he is living in the black while everyone else is in the red.
It’s a shit stance to take. It’d be like me gloating about how wonderful I am for renting an apartment when the next housing bubble blows into confetti. It’s one thing to be a stinkpot that lacks empathy for anyone else and quite another to gloat in the shade of their collective misery.
All of that aside, I’m still left with this new $420 bill every month. It’s a lot of money, but I’m sure I’ll prevail. You know what I’m going to do? I’ll keep writing the best articles I can write until I accrue 84 more people paying me $5 a month for a subscription.
There. Pie in the sky economics. It’s bound to start working at some point.
"Since Jeff Bezos had a barber" that was a much needed belly laugh :) kudos and you are right, keep writing and the universe will be by your side