Why you feel poorer than ever: It ain't the price of eggs

If you’re reading this, you’re likely a lot poorer than you think. Nonprofit Quarterly writer Steve Dubb came to a straightforward conclusion when writing about how bad the student debt problem was five years ago: “It’s a simple lesson — if you subsidize demand but don’t have sufficient supply, the price goes up… US higher education spending now is highest in the world — about $30,000 a student.” In his commentary, Dubb cited one of the original architects of federal student loans, economist Alice Rivlin, and her opinion on the project she pushed so hard for in her younger days. While tuition and student borrowing increased more quickly per year than at comparable educational institutions not subject to that type of ownership, Eaton found “sharp declines” in “student graduation rates, loan repayment rates, and labor market earnings after private equity buyouts.” But even as academic budgets were generally cut across the board, increased recruiting budgets meant that there were always new students in the pipeline, and the data from these thousand schools suggest that “profits triple after a buyout.” Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Suffice it to say, the United States has conclusively proven that a Frankenstein’s monster of health “consumers” who have no idea what their “purchases” will actually cost, profit-driven private insurance companies that pay different amounts to different providers for identical care, a random mix of public and private providers who all charge different amounts to different consumers for the same care, a regulatory apparatus that has been completely captured by the pharmaceutical and medical device industries that the apparatus is supposed to be regulating, and a giant flow of government money undergirding the whole system… does not work. — can buy shares in nursing-home real estate funds, which have been nauseatingly described as “the surprise heroes of high-yield investing.” As the country has stumbled its way through decade after decade of proving just how much this assemblage of throwaway parts from a grab bag of differing health care philosophies doesn’t work, the share of the economy taken up by health care spending has grown to more than 17%, or roughly one-sixth, of our entire GDP, roughly twice the average of OECD nations overall.