Like many of you, I’ve heard several reports about Michelle Obama’s comments at the Zanesville Day Nursery. Some of the more amazing and highly reported comments included ironically, her encouragement to give up hope and not pursue a lucrative job:
"Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond."
Michelle also spoke about the difficulties of living with the consequences of her choices:
Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. "The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,"
Finally, Michelle tells us just how expensive it is to keep kids in extracurricular activities:
"I know we’re spending "” I added it up for the first time "” we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,"
Michelle Obama’s economic views are the kind that have created the subprime mess: (more…)