Dang, Even A College Graduate Can't Afford College

For yet another year, the cost of college tuition has risen more than the cost of inflation. That means tuition cost rose faster than peoples ability to pay for college.

There is no way a bachelors degree can be worth the cost these days. If you consider that recently tuition, fees, books, and room & board are going to cost students these days about $25,000 per year. And with most colleges fixing it so students end up having to go 5 years before they get all of their credits to graduate. That’s a grand total of $125,000 for an education. That’s more than the mortgage loan I took out for my house!

Now granted, the interest rate for college loans is better than a mortgage, but not that much better. Since there is no down payment for a student loan, that means you are financing the entire cost. When you first get a job right out of college, you don’t get that great of salary because you don’t have any experience. So the most you can spare above living expenses is maybe $100 per week. At a fixed 5% rate (because the 2% that banks offer has impossible stipulations attached to it), it would take another 45 years to pay the bank back. By comparison my wife, who graduated in like 1994, only needed like $50/month for 20 years. So if I am figuring this out right, if students today graduate at say 25 years old, then they are stuck making a “second mortgage” payment each month until they’re 70 years old!

Yea, yea, I know that an education is a good thing to have, but I just don’t think it’s worth being under the thumb of the bank for 45 years and $246,000 just for a 4 year degree. If I had a bachelors degree, I could make maybe $10,000 per year more than I do now which is $7500 after taxes. So in the same 45 year span of time, I can make $337,500 more than I do with no degree. Subtracting the $246,000 that I owe the bank from this extra income, I would end up with a grand total of $91,500 more in my pocket over those 45 years. That only works out to $169 per week. I could use an extra $169/week, but not If I gotta pay $100/week to a bank to get that extra salary.

I think it’s time to stop pushing your kids to be doctors or lawyers and start pushing them to learn skilled trades like plumbers or mechanics.

If The Scribble Is A Joke, I Totally Get It

When the above political cartoon made its trip around the internet, I thought it was the most prolific and thought provoking thing I had seen in a long time. I loved the cartoon so much, and the “copycat” cartoons made by people who wanted the same attention, that I posted them on my old blog at MSN Spaces. There is no way anyone could say the original cartoons purpose was meant to piss people off, but that’s how people ended up treating the whole situation.

Recently the above “copycat” cartoon was submitted not as a political cartoon, but of all things, artistic expression. No joke! The Swedish guy that scribbled this piece of crap, Lars Vilks, actually calls it Art. If he called it a political cartoon, I might be able to stretch my mind enough to agree with any political message, but to call it art just totally ruins any credibility for the guy’s sanity. And as you can imagine, the Hajji’s are all rioting in the street and threatening to kill the guy. Apparently there is a bounty on the guy’s head of like 50 thousand bucks with an additional 25 thousand dollars if the killer slits his throat as if he is a sacrificial animal.

Did you know that this is not the first offensive scribble Lars has referred to as Art? He apparently made one some time back that depicted Jesus as a pedophile. I have looked seemingly everywhere for that scribble, but have come up completely empty. How could that Jesus cartoon seemingly fall off the face of the earth when it took me every bit of about 2 seconds to find all the Muhammad cartoons? Well let me tell you how that can be. All the Christians of the world didn’t riot in the streets and threaten to kill the guy. So the scribble just faded away into nothingness. “poof”

.

When are the Hajji’s gonna realize that it’s their dumb ass reaction to the cartoons that spawns the creation of more of them.

A Word from Old Man Andy

Are we raising a generation of Americans that are complete Wussys? I got stuck behind a junior high school bus on the way to work this morning. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that the bus almost literally stopped at the end of every single driveway. Are you telling me these wussy kids can’t even walk to the freakin’ corner to get on the bus? How lazy do kids have to be today if they can’t even walk any farther than the end of their driveway. When I was a little kid, I walked four blocks everyday to elementary school. Now granted, this isn’t exactly ten miles through the snow going up hill both ways, but to a five year old this is pretty far.

Kids today are way too tied up in video games. When I was a kid I remember my friends and I would stay out riding our bikes all day. Our parents had to make us come in from outside. Nowadays kids sit on their lazy butts all day playing video games.

It isn’t just the laziness I see in kids today either. These kids are getting no real social interaction while sitting at home playing video games or not congregating at the corner bus stop. They don't learn how to deal with problems in the real world. Kids today can’t just solve life’s problems by hitting the reset button on their game console. So when they are confronted with a real problem, like bullying, they become totally wussified. Then there seems to be this way of dealing with real life problems that is eerily similar to the virtual game play found in many first person shooter games. Yea, I know, for the ten kids that have launched these armed assaults on their schoolmates there are hundreds of millions that haven’t. But from what I gather, they at least consider it at some point.

Well, I guess that's about all I got to say about that.

Airstrike on Iraq

The military brass have finally called in an air strike. Hallelujah! Amen! It's about freakin' time! Now all they gotta do is step up the air strikes to cover the whole country. Similar to the way that Operation Desert Storm secured victory for the troops during The Gulf War.

War! Good God! What is it good for?

The Marines let my cousin Chad come home from Iraq two weeks ago to get a break from the war. I had sort of hoped that he would tell us about the good things that are being accomplished over there, like possibly things that the media ignores because it isn’t as exciting to cover as insurgent attacks and roadside bombings. But that just didn’t happen. Instead he told me things that merely supported everything I have read about the war. Apparently, The Marines can do little more than just “be” targets for insurgents due to some really retarded rules of engagement they have to follow. They spend their days building up sand bag guard posts, dodging land mines/roadside bombs, and ducking for cover from the bullets of “ghost gunmen”. Occasionally some suspicious “hajji” (his really cool term for a towel head) will make their day by putting himself in a situation where he can be caught with contraband that they can confiscate. It sounds like the entire war is nothing more than unproductive operations that accomplish little more than providing a miserable way of life for the US Soldiers involved. I just can’t see any other point to this war than the political reason of “backing out too early” that killed Bush Seniors chance for re-election back in 1992.