Several months ago Erin (I think) wrote an article called why I don’t care about the national debt. Maybe someone else stole the by line but I remember the conversation that spurned the entry. About a week and a half ago the President reminded us how in a generation we had plummetted from 1 to 12 in terms of countries with the highest percentage of citizens with a college degree. And of course this is Debtors’ Prison so you know how we get down. Let’s explore how the three are interconnected.

Student Debt and National Debt. It’s really hard to care about the latter when entrenched in the former, particularly when the latter is used as an excuse for why the govt can’t help you but they need another fleet of 100 million aircraft to hunt the 50 Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. But let’s look deeper. We as students behaved alot like our country, borrowing a ton for a questionable large investment and assuming everything would just work out because hey, it’s us.

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Ugh. The office chatter has already started. It’s the same every year. Right after college hoops ends. If baseball was even remotely exciting that would become the talk of the water cooler but instead it’s taxes.

 First young associates complain about their tax burden, then older associates and young partners concur, comforting them with the knowledge that deductions for houses, spouses and kids are in their future. Conservatives complain about taxes generally while liberals complain about funding wars and bailing out banks. Old geezers whine about having to pay six months wages in taxes for the year.

Please allow me to retort

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Hi Kids. People have been commenting that there has been less useful information and more paranoia, idiocy and douche-baggery in recent posts SO yours truly has decided to start at the beginning with this simple principle: You are taxed on what you make, and you pay interest on what you borrow. If this simple truth does not inform your big picture than you are hopelessly at risk of over borrowing.

Now I know what you’re thinking, if you got into a school good enough to merit borrowing to attend, then you should be able to add and subtract right? I am sure each of us has made decisions that are different from what we would have chosen as our answer if our situation had been presented to us as a word problem on the SAT.

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