Reporting live from the wavering edge of the Student Loan Bubble: congratulations, collectively impoverished college students and recent graduates losing hope week by week! You've managed to achieve what many pointy-headed "Economics" professors might have called "inadvisable" or even "insane:" the highest student loan debt levels ever recorded. Huzzah!
There's no easy way to break this to you so we're just going to rip off the ol' band-aid: we have another entire decade to go before American "income"—stuff they pay if you ever get a job—claws its way back to where it was ten years ago. That's a twenty year income pit. Years to dig ourselves into the hole, years wallowing at the bottom, and more painful years to get out. But! Let's look at the bright side.
America's finest colleges and America's finest corporations aren't all that different: they're both sitting on huge piles of cash, complaining about the economy, and soaking you, the consumer, for all you're worth. Simultaneously!
In an abandoned Army base on the edge of the California desert, hundreds of recession-weary Americans camp out and wait for the hard times to blow over. Life in "Slab City," with no plumbing or electricity, is deemed preferable to life amongst the driftless unemployed masses in the wider world. Where is your Slab City?
Bad news for those of you planning to ride out this recession on a diet of peanut butter and jelly, spread atop tiny Saltine cracker "sandwiches," consumed by candlelight in the single dry corner of your leaky urban squat, as the howls of alley cats and junkies serenade you with the symphony of the night: peanut butter is now out of your price range.
Today, global stocks sit at their lowest point in 15 months. In Europe, the markets are "in meltdown," as traders flee in fear of a Greek default that would devastate the continent's financial stability. The world's economy is stuck in a race car with a brick on the accelerator chugging full speed towards a ramp overhanging the tempting lip of the double dip recession. I think we can make it! Faster, faster, whee!
I have an idea: I ask you to loan me some money. Then when it's time for me to pay you back, I'll charge you a fee, for holding that money, and another fee, for giving the money back to you. Welcome to the modern American consumer banking system.
Seton Hall in New Jersey is a pretty okay school, if you judge schools based on the historical performance of their basketball teams (as I do). And now, Seton Hall has a special bonus deal: smart person discount!
You like your precious "free checking?" I bet you do. More like freeloader checking. Sadly, your "free checking" is hurting the needy banking industry, which is why it is going to disappear.
Help us out here, economists. Make yourselves useful. Is this what the second dip of a Double Dip Recession feels like? I mean, we do have that nauseating sinking feeling. But we've had that for a few years now.
The weirdest thing in the whole entire USA Today "economic reporting as well as stories about angels" newspaper today was this alleged propaganda piece about how Americans just keep getting more and more pessimistic about the economy. What's the major malfunction, Americans? Unhappy about the virtually assured prospect of several more relentlessly awful years of your home not gaining value as you foolishly expected, extending the fearsome "lost decade" unto, it seems, infinity? Well I guess that makes sense.
In the "olden days" of this great nation—when we still had that pioneering spirit—young Americans, upon turning 14 or whatever, would immediately get married, have a bunch of kids, and settle into a life of poverty, scratching a living from the harsh and pitiless soil. Things change! Now we're all too fat to scratch anything from the soil. We scratch our poverty-level subsistence from Wal-Mart. And we're free to marry people of different races! But we're all still poor.
Liberals can finally stop occupying Wall Street and screeching pointlessly on their insular blog sites: President Barack Obama is going to tax the rich! He's finally standing up to Wall Street and throwing all his weight behind this symbolic gesture which will do little to fill the yawing gap of empire-induced debt! He just announced his firm intentions today. Already, the economy is crumbling.
"Retirement." Historians tell us that the word refers to an obsolete ancient practice of living out your elderly years engaged in leisure activities, rather than in scavenging soda cans from neighborhood recycling bins to supplement your meager Wal-Mart greeter's paycheck.
Kids these days should be thankful to even get accepted into a community college, what with the parents of kids these days having so little money to donate to the endowments of Ivy League universities. Unfortunately for kids these days, community colleges these days are way more crappy than expensive colleges these days. Sucks to be poor these days!
