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All Posts, Finances & Retirement

American Debt: The Right Perspective, Giddyap

Did anyone catch this article buried in the WSJ a while back? Damn funny and damn true! I’ll copy in the first half, but click on the link at the end for the full article.

Joe Queenan for the Wall Street Journal

Hey Kids, It’s Till Debt Do Us Part

Every time a politician opens his mouth these days, it’s to say that we as a people cannot leave our children saddled with a mountain of debt. Sometimes they throw in our grandchildren for good measure. It’s even more poignant when they say “our unborn grandchildren,” because unborn grandchildren are always pink and cute and cuddly and helpless, whereas our real grandchildren are often nasty little suckers with horrible names like Skyler.

The basic argument is that by leaving our children and/or our grandchildren with enormous bills to pay, we are ripping an otherwise gleaming future right out of their pudgy little hands. This is unconscionable, we are told. This is immoral. This is not the American way.

Who are they kidding? I’m sure that I speak for many when I say that I do not mind leaving my children saddled with debt. After all, they didn’t mind saddling me with it.

It cost me over a quarter-million dollars to send my two kids to fancy universities that I never dreamed of attending myself, and that’s without mentioning all the money that I spent on piano lessons and basketball camp and, oh yeah, that jaunt to Hawaii for a soccer tournament in which my son’s team finished dead last. A tournament that I couldn’t attend because I was back home working my fingers to the bone to ensure that my kids didn’t get buried beneath a mountain of debt.

Toss in the tens of thousands of dollars that I shelled out for trips to the Great Barrier Reef, Paris, London, the Ring of Kerry, San Francisco, Ocho Rios, Disney World and Loch Ness and I’m easily down a half-million bucks on the parenting deal. Notice that I didn’t mention anything about charging the kids for trips to Atlantic City or Canada. I’m not an ogre.

When politicians run their mouths about mortgaging our children’s future, they act like the rest of us haven’t mortgaged our present to guarantee our kids’ future. But we have. We’ve been doing this since the country was born.

Want to live in a country that your parents liberated from British rule, kids? Pay for it. Want to live in a society where you can expect to live past age 30 with most of your appendages intact? Pay for it. Want to live in a society free from Nazis and communists and dictators with preposterous mustaches? Pay for it. Want to live in a society where your parents took on enormous debt to ensure that you weren’t born in the middle of another Great Depression? Pay for it.

Click here to read the rest.

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07.12.11

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Welcome to my site, derived from an advice column I wrote while getting my MBA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I give helpful, opinionated advice based on my own experience and from the expertise of my extensive network. For more, click here.

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