Already Drowning

Profanity-laden rant by Adam Weinstein in response to that hideous huffpo stick figure nonsense that I hate with every fiber of my being and will not link to.

http://adamweinsteinwriter.com/post/61495975666/to-all-of-you-people-who-keep-sharing-that-huff-po

And let me just add here – the “you took out the debt for college,  you knew what you were getting into” argument appears in the comments, inevitably, and though it wearies me I am mad enough to try to address it here.  Let’s look at it this way – today, filling my grocery cart for a family of 4.5 for the week costs between $100-200.  We almost never eat out, so this feeds us all every meal of the week.  Let’s pretend that next week, it goes up to $1000.  Will I suddenly NOT NEED TO EAT?  Will I magically be able to grow all of my food instead of buying it?  Or maybe, I will go – hmmm.  I must have food to eat.  Food costs $1000.  I will somehow find a way to pay that $1000 so that I can continue to eat.  Perhaps I will shop around and cut coupons more and eat less (with all of my AMPLE FREE TIME), so food now costs $879 per week.  Nevertheless, food is still ridiculously more than it was last week.  I will do my best to make adjustments in other (NONEXISTENT) areas of my budget, to pay my $879 a week, but the fact is my choice now becomes pay $879 a week to eat, or go grow my own food, and to do all this making the same dollars I was before.

If  college is $2000 a year tuition, you pay it.  If college is $20,000 a year tuition, you pay it.  If college is, as it is now at my undergraduate institution, $44,000 a year tuition, you examine whether you’d rather work at a menial job your whole life, or . . . you pay it.  You can’t “grow your own food” in this situation.  You can get scholarships, shop around institutions, do half your time at 2 year community college, do work study, but you can either pay what they charge or not go, no matter how high it balloons.  Let’s ditto this with health care – if health care costs $50 a month in premiums, you pay them.  If it costs $700 a month in premiums, you pay them.  If it costs $2000 a month in premiums, you decide whether to pay them or take the risk of having no health care.  Yes, I made choices – but under these conditions, so don’t talk to me like I had some kind of OCEAN OF CHOICES here.  No education or oodles of debt.  No healthcare or oodles of debt.  How are these CHOICES exactly?

I chose to get a bachelors – let’s note that I got it from the cheapest institution I applied for (no public school in state tuition for this girl), and further that I worked 10-20 hours per week during the semester and typically two jobs during Christmas and summer holidays (usually retail by day, waitress by night/weekend), and still was paid in total only about a fourth of my tuition, let alone room and board.  Let’s talk about how back in my parents’ day, this would almost certainly have met my tuition and life expenses, at least for the kind of thrifty life I led.  Let’s note that since procuring said degree I have paid on my undergraduate (and other) student loans every single month since I incurred them, and yet because my initial college-degree requiring jobs paid so poorly I could not cover even the full interest payments, but rather was put on the “poor person/sucker payment plan,” and they bloomed and grew in the early years, so that at this point twelve years out of college I have only JUST NOW gotten those undergraduate loans back down to the point where they are the same amount that I initially borrowed.  Twelve years of regular, faithful payments, upwards of $500 a month, and every penny of it to interest.  I have paid the principal value and then some already, and yet through the wonder of compound interest I still owe every bit of the principal yet.

I chose to get a masters, arguably something of little value in my ultimate career and earning potential.  Let’s also note that I worked 40 hours a week in a temp insurance job and two 4 hour shifts on the weekend as bar waitress during the duration of my masters degree, so as to sustain myself and pay tuition.  Yup, 48 hours a week on top of a full time, intense 10 month masters program.  Let’s note that I made so little in these jobs that I could just afford my rent (shared a house with three others) and food (ate at the bar for free as much as possible) and a few drops of my tuition, and that just a few decades ago these earnings would have been enough to pay for it all, or at least most of it.

Let’s note that I have yet one more degree in my pocket – but my law degree was on full scholarship.  We borrowed living expenses and some cash to pay the (exorbitant) fees, but that’s it.  Let’s note that I wanted to work during my law degree as well, so as to defray the opportunity cost of three (it should be only TWO) years of lost earnings.  Let’s note that in fact I had to work between 1000 and 2000 hours during those three years, but that in order to have  hope for a post-graduation job those hours had to be voluntary, in unpaid internships, for programs that could have afforded to pay me at least a few pennies but instead liked to capitalize on free student labor.  Let’s note that we did not get full time childcare during those years because we did not want to borrow that amount, and how much harder that was – and yet I still graduated in the top ten percent.  Let’s note that despite graduating in the top ten percent, I got only a couple of job interviews, because interviews were few and far between and they all went to people with connections – an uncle who’s a judge, a parent who’s a partner at a law firm, a daddy who’s a major client.

I chose to have children, because as poor as I have always been I think they are a blessing not to be missed and I do have a biological clock that would not wait for me to pay off my debt before it started ticking.  Let’s note that now my childcare costs as much per month as my mortgage.  Let’s talk about how my choice here was either – have children and don’t work and not be able to pay your debts, have children and work a ridiculously hard job so you can afford to pay a quarter of your income to day care, or have no children.  I made my choice, but none of them were awesome.  Let’s talk about how my student loan payments cost considerably more than my mortgate, and that my health plan costs a tad less than my mortgage in premiums but that I am exposed to a $5000 deductible that re-sets to zero every year.  Let’s talk about how I slipped down some stairs in the rain and broke my back on slippery steps with no railing, and though none of that was my fault it cost us an unfathomable proportion of our yearly pay in those days even though we had private health care, and how when this baby is born in January it will cost me $5000 even though I probably (if it goes like the others did) could have him in my house without any help at all for free.  Let’s talk about how much it SUCKS that I even think about that, about how maybe I could just “forget” to go to the hospital when I go into labor, so that we aren’t hit with a $5000 bill right when we add a kid.  (I will go to the hospital, I promise, don’t worry.)  (But I genuinely thought about it, because for real a 24 hour stay in the hospital for a vaginal birth with no interventions of any kind is still projected to cost around $15,000, which is sort of ridiculous when all I will likely get is a laundry service to clean up the muck and some peace of mind for “just in case something happens”, no?)

Let’s talk about how we have to do all this while maintaining two households and the gas to drive weekly between them, because during this lovely Great Recession we couldn’t find jobs in the same city.

Let’s talk about why me thinking that this is a raw deal isn’t the same as me feeling “special” or “entitled.”  I have to buy the healthcare.  I have to pay for the childcare, or we lose a salary and stop paying our debts and they begin to balloon once more.  I have to buy the groceries, but they used to be $200 and now they’re $2000 even though the wages that I have available to me to pay this bill is the same, and stop telling me I’m entitled or special because I think that TOTALLY BLOWS.  I pay this stuff, and I’m lucky I can, but it is within my rights to attempt to educate people about, and thus try to change, the crappy system that put me here, that got started on this economic track back when I was a doe-eyed, skinny, clueless unibrow in high school.

And let’s not even talk about what happens when our generation, the GYPSYS (and frankly I’m not even sure I’m a millenial since I’m a late 70s baby, but this stupid article lumps me in with them so ok), anyway let’s not even talk about what happens when we all start to retire, and none of us have savings because our wages stayed stagnant while our costs ballooned, absolutely ZERO of us have pensions because those mystical creatures no longer exist, none of us had 401k match even because PUH-LEEZE, and somehow though our costs are ten times what they were back in the day, some dumbass on huffpo will crow that our inability to retire is all our fault for being the grasshopper who sang all summer, because we couldn’t somehow squeeze even more blood out of this stone to try to save for the future, while drowning in the debts of the past and the costs of the present.

Entitled and special my right arm.  Whoever wrote that is basically sitting on the deck of the cruise liner, where maybe he worked his way up from third class to first but heck he started on the damn boat, and he is watching the sunset and enjoying a cocktail, and watching me drown, and instead of at least shouting encouragement or, I don’t know, throwing me a damn life preserver, he’s pouring the dregs of his drink on my head and telling me to stop feeling so entitled to my being alive and not dead in the water, at least I’m still breathing, he made his way up, why can’t I, without ever acknowledging that he started out dry on the actual boat and that maybe it sucks that I have to start my journey up from the position of already-drowning.