It’s becoming more and more evident that educators should try to find some time between encouraging gender change and rewriting history to eliminate contributions of white men, to teach the young ‘uns about money.
Specifically, students should be made to understand what money is, how when one borrows money one is obligated to repay it, and to the larger point, understand the general concept of the value of money.
It would be a tall task, no doubt, considering the financial illiteracy of the population in general, which would include many parents.
Just in recent days, Clueless Joe Biden has put forth forgiving $10,000 in student loans, for starters, and more for low-income types who already had qualified for Pell Grant giveaways.
This has been met largely with cries of it’s not enough. Social media is filled with aggrieved students posting their total educational indebtedness and lamenting how $10,000 is but a drop in the bucket.
This is variation of many fellow coworkers in the past, who felt the company was obligated to pay them an amount sufficient to subsidize their standard of living, no matter how self-indulgent that was. When I pointed out to them that they could cut back on spending for things such as vacations, cars, etc., or could increase their skills, their proficiency, their workload and argue for more money, they would look at me as if I had three heads.
The equivalent of these delusional people are those who think $10,000 is nothing.
My response is I’d gladly accept $10,000 from each of you, since it’s nothing at all. How about a rebate for me and others like me, who paid off the student loans of our progeny?
The good folks at Penn’s Wharton School of Business did some calculations and found the Biden handout could balloon to costing more than $1 trillion over the next decade, if one does not go with the optimistic scenario of Biden and his handlers.
Imagine, $1 trillion is NOTHING!
This total disregard for money applies all the way down the scale. Once, when I was doing telephone support for health insurance, our supervisors would try to incentivize us by handing out small rewards, like $5 gift cards.
I was doing this job post my career in journalism, as a seasonal temporary gig, and was not relying on it to pay my bills. Many of my co-workers could not say the same, yet they turned up their noses at a $5 gift card.
I gladly accepted whenever I won one, and eagerly offered to take the burden of spending the cards off the hands of my burdened colleagues. Surprisingly, $5 was meaningful to them if they were being asked to give it away.
A former neighbor, an elderly woman, had another neighbor work for her doing housework and the like, for an insanely low hourly rate. When said worker asked for a bit more per hour, the woman was outraged.
Then the elderly woman got a slap in the face in the form of reality. The neighbor quit working for her and the old woman who needed help then resorted to employing workers from housework provider businesses, and ended up playing at minimum two times as much per hour for a lot less work.
Finally, I live in a school district that leads the county in tax millage. The mock-Latin motto on its crest should be Spendibus Plentius.
Over recent months we’ve been treated to much chest-thumping over our new $7.5 million high school football stadium.
Then, horrors, it was heard that Friday night some of the seating had collapsed during the very first game.
The same media outlets who trumpeted the opening of the stadium, haven’t gotten around to reporting on the seating problem.
But, upon driving past the stadium today, I can report that at least one row in one section, and possibly more, have seats that are bent over at an angle not matching surrounding seating.
No big deal. As our people challenged in fiscal sense would say, it only cost $7.5 million.
Sam Ross Jr's site 