In fairy tales, sometimes people are paid in fairy gold by a member of whatever name you want to give the Fair Folk.
Often because the amount offered is so high, people would barter away things they wouldn’t normally sell: Their voice, their next love, their spouse . . .
Sometimes people would sell something and only later realize that they had made a poor bargain and had unintentionally sold something else entirely that they did not want to sell.
Worse still, they would find the next day that the gold they had been given in exchange had vanished.
The lesson on the surface was often one of greed, and being lured by things that were too good to be true.
There is quite a bit of fairy gold in our economy.
Higher education is a form or fairy gold. When student loans started becoming the rage decades ago, the idea was to make higher education “accessible to everyone.’
Never mind that a person could work hard a put himself through a good state school back then, it didn’t account for individual situations and so the student loan mania was born.
What was the rest? A boom in college campuses, tuition and costs rising at around a 14% clip which was generally a good 9-10% higher than inflation, and now a person with a bachelor degree has somewhere around $50,000 in debt after four years.
If they get a graduate degree it’s somewhere around $100,000.
They get a job and pay monthly, depending if they are paying their loans off for 10 years or up to 30 years, somewhere around $700 to $1500 a month.
Now here’s where to people have made a bargain they really haven’t realized they have made.
60% of the people in college now are women. Those women are aiming for men better than themselves, so they are looking for educated men they find attractive.
If they get lucky and marry one, he almost assuredly has student loans equal to hers (unless she won the lottery and got a well-heeled man).
Both of them get jobs and discover, wow, the full salary off one individual goes to nothing but paying off student loans.
Neither can quit their jobs, they’re both in their mid twenties and they put off having kids, hell they can’t afford a house yet, but they will they think.
And the years go by and their most fertile years go by and they have trouble having kids or decide not to have them.
When they signed up for student loans, they were giving up their children. That was what they were really selling.
Another example of fairy gold is our governments deficit spending and the deficit spending of the American public, with credit cards and home loans and car loans, all making them feel wealthy on the belief that more money would always come.
All that safety net that was supposedly in place made people spend spend spend, more than they had.
It made people feel good about all the good they were doing to fight poverty, bring about equality and all that rainbow and butterflies stuff.
But now the fairy gold is fading away like the illusion it was. And it was an illusion, that supposed wealth that this nation, this world had. An illusion built on debt, debt that is now going to sap the vitality of the world.
What was sold for all that debt? America will no longer be a superpower, the standard of living for people in this country is going to drop 30-50%. Poverty, like hasn’t been seen in 80 years here is coming back with a vengeance.
Think about that for a moment, think about losing 50% of what you have right now. What’s life like?
Was it worth it? Was the party worth it, if it cost everything?
