No Runny Eggs

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:

1. lamenting over, rather than taking responsibility for, prior poor choices.   This allows you to feel as if you don’t really owe money you agreed to pay back because of course, someone must have fraudulently enduced you to do it.  In the case of the Obama’s school loans they were likely “frauded” multiple times.  
2. Choose jobs that “feel good” without regard for the financial realities of that choice.  The corollary here is to make future financial commitments that require significant increases in your income even though there is no real reason to believe that your future income will come anywhere near the ability to support those commitments.   I must have missed that option with my utility companies where I get a discount based on the “helping” value of my occupation.
3. Maintain a misplaced prioritization of what desires versus needs are.   $10K a year on dance lessons and summer camps?   What kind of tin ear does it take to say this kind of stuff when the median income in the area she was addressing was about $37K?   Can you imagine how that sounded to the folks at the day care who probably weren’t making much more than that in a year?

I keep reading how Michelle Obama is supposed to be very smart, very articulate, maybe she is.   However, if the above is indicative of the kind of advice she provides Barack I wish she would keep it to herself.   Barack’s got enough bad ideas and advice without any help from her!