The congratulatory greeting cards are nice, but let’s face it: When new grads rip one open, they really hope there’s cash or a check inside…
— from an article by Michelle Singletary in the Washington Post, May 31
The students are graduating, right about now, and they’re hearing speeches about the wonderful future they’re moving into. And getting greeting cards, some of which might contain money.
At a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, billionaire Warren Buffett was asked by a 14-year-old for his top financial advice for young people today.
“If I had one piece of advice to give to young people, you know, across the board, it would be just to don’t get in debt,” Buffett said.
Ha!
Where was Warren Buffet when I was taking out my student loans? My college finance office made it as easy as pie to rack up $28,000 in debt.
For a degree in journalism. Journalism, folks.
What were they thinking?
That I was going to be able to pay off $28,000 in student debt with a journalism degree? Ha!
But I can’t blame the finance office. They all graduated from college with degrees in business administration, without learning a single thing about debt.
Without learning the most important thing we needed to learn.
I hope you don’t mind if I quote American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
He wrote that in 1844. Unfortunately, I didn’t come across it until a couple of days ago. It wasn’t required reading in my classes.
Of course, what he forgot to mention is, that along with that bag of wind comes student debt. Lots of it.
But the truly funny part of this whole situation is that money is entirely an imaginary concept. A fiction. Just like the education I received. A bag of wind for which I racked up $28,000 in student loans that I will likely never pay off.
Just for the fun of it, let’s consider what would happen if I defaulted on my loans.
Does anyone actually need that money? That fictional money?
I spent it to get a journalism degree, which turned out to be worthless, so by any coherent system of correlation, the money I borrowed from a bank and paid to the college was also worthless.
I know the bank will be pissed of I default, and will try to make me feel guilty. But in reality, the bank has more money than they will ever be able to spend, and my measly $28,000 is less than a drop in the bucket. It’s, like, one molecule of H2O.
In reality.
But why are we even talking about “in reality”? What’s reality? I’d like Warren Buffett to express an opinion on that question.
An author much more intelligent than myself once wrote:
“Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.”
And what funds that budget? Money. The ultimate fiction.
Following the ‘debt ceiling’ negotiations in May, 2023, my U.S. Senator, Michael Bennet, voted to raise the debt ceiling. He explained that the bill “was far from perfect” but it avoided a catastrophe.
Then he said:
“We cannot continue to allow politicians to weaponize the debt ceiling and hold the American economy hostage year after year. It’s time for Congress to pass my bill to eliminate the debt ceiling and permanently lift the threat of default from our economy.”
Sounds like Senator Bennet wants to keep putting us deeper and deeper into debt with each passing year.
I bet he went to college, to learn that.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.