If you’re graduating from college this spring, you’ll be sitting around at the age of thirty-five still suffering from the fact that Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, and Kent Conrad decided to make the stimulus bill stingier in order to better bolster their credentials as preening centrists. When thinking about short-term inflation-unemployment tradeoffs, this sort of thing is crucial to keep in mind. Inflicting a high unemployment rate on the population has incredibly punitive and deleterious long-run consequences for young people.
I remember laying on the couch in my living room the morning of my fourth birthday. It had to have been a Saturday, since I was watching cartoons. My mom walked in and said something like, “It’s your birthday! You’re four now! Isn’t that exciting?!” and I started sobbing, as if the nominal difference between three years old and four years old would be accompanied by a cataclysm. I liked being three. Four was not three.
My twenty-fourth birthday is Monday. I don’t want to be 24. But I don’t like being 23, either. My birthday has become synonymous with miserably writing papers, studying for midterms, and being harassed by my friends for not having a Halloween costume yet.
It’s the fifth time it’s been like this, since I continue to allow myself to be convinced to return to school based solely on the argument that I am good at it.