Money is actually quite nice. I have enough to get by and save a little.
So money in and of itself is not the problem. How much shit costs now is the problem.
People wonder why America is in the shitter in terms of economic growth. Some blame the housing market bubble explosion of disastrous proportions. Others blame the government for bailing out private companies that it should have never touched. And yet others still blame the moochers of the welfare system.
Sure, none of those things helped. But here is the major difference between the last economic crisis we had to this one: life is more expensive and people are not making as much.
I don't necessarily say spread the wealth. If someone wants to be sickly rich, so be it. As long as they do it in a lawful manner, they can be as rich as they fucking want. I solely believe in the power of any individual to be the best individual they can be while also being a contributing member to society (which prevents assholes that want to mooch off the system from saying "Well, the best person I think I can be is to live off welfare and create as many dependencies and rack up as much debt as possible").
So no, our market has nothing to do with the fact that there are ridiculously wealthy people out there that don't want to share. They don't have to. It's their fucking money, they earned it (unless said wealth was obtained in an illegal fashion, then they should be strung up, tarred, feathered, and run out of town).
If we look at the previous period of cataclysmic recession (no, not 2009, I consider that recession and this recession the same g-damn recession) to today's recession, we're growing out of this recession at a much slower rate than in the past. This is partially due to the steeper drop in employment (and pay cuts) we've experienced this time.
Couple that with a higher cost of living than ever before in this country, and we're left with broke college graduates that can't find jobs that have a mountain of debt behind them. I don't want to use myself as an example because 1.) I found a job 4 months out of college, B.) My tuition loans are tiny compared to most and 3.) I'm keeping up with all of my bills.
However, I look at some of my friends that have astronomical amounts in student loan debt and I wonder how the hell anybody manages to ever pay an amount like that off. Evar.
The average student loan total for a single student after college is completed is said to be about $25k. I find that a little low. So lets take a better average by looking at a popular state school and see what average tuition for a bachelor's degree is there.
University of Minnesota's Average 4-year tuition costs: 52,240
Oh ... wait, that's just tuition. Let's assume you need on-campus housing for the first two years.
That's another $15,456. If you get your own place for the rest of the time, you're looking at your own food and rent/utilities. Time to get a job, sucker.
For the average student attending U of M, they're looking at $67,696 in total cost. That doesn't count ANY other needs besides food the student might require. Like clothes ...
Let's assume that like most kids going to college now, they're going in with little to no money to their name and their parents weren't able to save anything (like most families). I'll keep it simple and say that the student will end up with $60k in loans.
Jesum crow, that's a lot of fucking money. A lot of people don't even make that much in three years, let alone one.
We'll take our student example and say he/she gets lucky and finds a decent paying job within 5 months of graduating. This gives him/her time to save a bit before loans go in to repayment. Unfortunately, the student was stabbed with a 6.5% interest rate. And if any of us know about student loans, you know you're paying the interest off BEFORE the principal.
What
the
fuck?
What kind of company says, okay well over the life off the loan, we're going to charge you extra for ever having taken a loan to begin with. For every month you do not pay the loan off, we're going to charge you X amount of dollars. Then, when you pay us every month, we're going to take that amount out of your payment and say "This is what you paid on the interest" instead of saying "this is what you paid on your balance".
No wonder it takes decades to pay this shit off.
I have no idea what the cost of living is right now. But I can tell you that if you want to live in a gross 1 bedroom, 1/2 bathroom apartment, in a bad part of town, and only feed yourself the cheapest food, you can keep your monthly costs down to under $1,000. If you really want to play it cheap, skip your refrigerator like .4% of the country does right now:
"Those food chilling mother fuckers" - Jon Stewart
The reason I point this out is because the wonderful people over at Fox Nazi .... Fox News decided to point out that the "poor" people in our country aren't as poor as poor used to mean. Almost everyone in the country has a refrigerator. HOW DARE YOU HAVE A REFRIGERATOR BUT NOT PAY YOUR TAXES?!?!?
Anyway, my major point with the college graduate who managed to find a job is that he/she will be able to sustain his/her life if they watch their money and manage to save so they can actually pay off their loan within a reasonable amount of time and incur a lower interest hit. Instead of paying the loan back over thirty years and paying damn near double the amount of the loan back due to interest, this person decides to throw a couple thousand dollars at the loan every month instead and pays it off in ten years.
That seems logical. But when you think about it that means that money is NOT going in to our economy. At all. And that's all this person can really afford to do at this point in his/her life. They cannot afford their own house, they cannot afford luxuries like cable or a LED T.V. or a PS3 or a computer. Hell they probably can't even afford a fucking gym membership.
(Case in point, on my own, I'd be living in a shitty apartment with little to my name besides my car. Living with another person makes finances a little easier to manage).
Here's the deal: it costs WAY more to become a successful, comfortable adult now than it ever did in the past. Because of that, people between the ages of 20 and 40 (this is a rough guesstimate but I think it's accurate enough) are not spending nearly as much as they used to. They're trying to save. Problem is, the regular things we need cost more than they used to and people aren't exactly making that much more than they used to. The cost of living has gone up and the amount people get paid has not.
Education costs contribute to this and is probably the main factor. It takes longer to become what people like to call financially stable. You could be financially stable at 25 years old back in the late 80's. It was doable. Even if I had finished school when I was 21 and had been working for 4 years -- as opposed to graduating a year and a half ago and only working in my career for the last year -- I'd still not be where I would want to be financially because college is so g-damn expensive.
How do we fix it? Well ... I'm not sure. Here's the other issue with this country:
Nobody wants to work the minimum wage jobs anymore. And why should they? Shouldn't they aspire to being something more than $6.15 an hour (MN minimum wage)? But ... there are jobs that need to be filled that just don't pay well because the work entailed doesn't merit high pay.
So what, as a society, do we do? I have no fucking clue. Nobody wants to work for peanuts, but they can't find work elsewhere because the market is saturated with college graduates. This really only applies to people with a college education, a.k.a. student loan debt.
The grad that can't find a job right now is fucked. Their loans are having to be deferred and right there is MORE money that's not going in to the economy. This person moves back in with their parents. AGAIN, there's more money not going in to the economy.
Where does it end? Let's say this person does take a low paying job, then his loans will eventually go in to repayment and EVERYTHING he makes will go to the loan otherwise his credit will suffer. And the last thing you want on your credit record is a delinquency on student loan debt.
I have no solution. I guess I just wanted to bitch. Mainly because I have friends that are so far in debt due to student loans that I hear about how they can barely afford the basic necessities, i.e. roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their backs.
I wish I had an idea to adjust the cost of education. But I don't know how to do that without making it unattainable for a lot of people. I suppose you could say it's not unattainable no matter the coast, just take out loans and get a job and pay them back.
But it doesn't always work out that well. People go to school, take out tons of loans, and don't find a job after that; sometimes they have to take a low paying job that doesn't cover all of their bills. How is the hell is that "fair"?
I don't like social programs like Social Security and Welfare. I hate them both in their current forms. Now, if they were correct to prevent moochers (and ensure that I'd get my share during retirement that I'm putting in now) I'd be okay with it. But it needs fixing first.
I'd rather do away with SS and just give everyone back all the money they've ever paid in to it, and then get rid of income tax and do a flat consumer tax. Everything you buy will be taxed, some things at a lower rate than others (i.e. food). Or fuck it, that would cause too much trouble with different things having different rates. 10% consumer tax. Shit might cost a little more right out the gate, but people would see more in their pay checks and be like, oh well this isn't so bad ...
Fuck health care, I don't know how to fix it. Get rid of government regulations on it, let people buy what they want, and if someone opts out and gets sick and is hospitalized, fuck 'em. That's their dumbass fault for not wanting health insurance. I refuse to pay for his shit.
I don't like the idea of every man for himself, but there are certain areas where I do definitely think that you should take care of yourself without the assistance of others. No I don't think everything should be handed to us on a silver platter; I understand some people are dealt shitty cards when they're brought in to this world and it's not their fault.
But there has to be a better way to help less fortunate people so that it doesn't cause such huge problems. I'm just not sure how.
Someone told me today that the reason college tuition has skyrocketed is because the federal government stepped in to give people money in an effort to assist them in to going to college. Because of that, colleges raised their tuition prices knowing they would get that money out of the students because they were going to get it from the Fed anyway. I have trouble believing that, and until I see financial figures proving that shortly after Federal Student Aid was started, colleges started jacking tuition, I won't.
/rantoff
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