You should definitely look into being a CEO, but since half of them leave their job due to being fired, it’s not always the greatest gig. Golden parachute notwithstanding.
I think my use of the CEO level might have blindsided you to the fact that I was using the top spot as a proxy. However, your past posts belie an intelligence that would otherwise not be slipped up so easily. Your use of footnotes instead of regular hyperlinks shows that you either a) are too set in your ways from grad school to change, or b) want a list of references to show your audience that you aren’t blowing smoke up their ass.
You have me beat on snark, but your empathy is also lacking. Or at least hiding behind the veil of contempt for being a part of the youngest Gen X cohort that graduated just in time for the Dot Com bust and went back to grad school just in time for the Great Recession.
The problem seems to be that, at least for your original post and this response, you are slipping too easily between the personal, emotive, am-I-joking-or-am-I-not satire (which allows you the impenetrable defense of “I was just joking!”) that you normally submit to Medium versus the open-minded, intellectually rigorous discourse that I know someone of both your life experience and formal education is capable of (and that was exhibited in the second half or your original post).
Back to the matter at hand, which is the student loan crisis we started talking about eons ago. My stance is that there is no student loan crisis. At least not one that is big enough to warrant federal action. Yet.
The student loan “crisis” isn’t a cause, it’s an effect. A symptom. A byproduct is the actual problems that you allude to in both your original post and response to my comment.
ACTUAL crises include:
- The environment is falling apart. (The Latest: EPA just repealed the Waters of the U.S. rule)
- The current form of capitalism only includes financial capital. (Not the other seven)
- Business started seeing their employees as numbers on a balance sheet instead of actual human beings, so yes, real income has flatlined or been reduced.
- Our corrupt politicians are moved around like so many chess pieces by our corrupt billionaire class.
- Healthcare is bankrupting our citizens.
- K-12 public education is a joke, mostly due to the current funding setup using property taxes you mentioned earlier.
Yes, I agree that public college should be free. The original idea behind land-grant universities was in response to the First Industrial Revolution, and a similar response will probably be needed know that we are in the midst of the Digital Revolution.
That being said, I wrote an article on why free tuition and mass student loan forgiveness isn’t going to happen. It’s a pipe dream. You mentioned that, “…there’s far too much money to be made off the desperation of others…” The same can be said of elections. I like Bernie and Elizabeth and might even vote for one of them, but their student loan plans are politically DOA.
Now that is out of the way, all we need to do is accept the situation we’re in and figure out how to get out of it. It’s not easy, and there are other things taking up my mental and financial bandwidth.
- My wife and I spend thousands of dollars for private school for our kid because the public-school system is a fucking joke where I live. We’ve looked at moving, but for right now, you know, jobs.
- Health insurance eats away at our income to the point that we can’t save anywhere near enough for retirement.
- My county is currently deciding whether to pay for 911 operators or funding for two libraries. Like that should even be a choice. Where did they fuck up so badly that we have to choose between public safety and libraries?
In all seriousness though, student loans, for all of their problems, are not our biggest worry right now. That’s not a free pass for the current loan/education system to keep its current course, but it is a suggestion that we realize that it’s a game we need to learn how to play because there are bigger fish to fry before we catch this one.
