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Aug 24 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Since today’s #CancelStudentDebt announcement tease, I’ve been obsessed with the inflation calculator and how boomers’ sense of money/value is so off. My mom made $13K/year as a public school art teacher in 1972. Paltry right? You may be shocked to see that in today’s US dollars.
I also looked up the 2022 value of $125,000 in the years my husband and I were born.
No one is arguing $125,000 isn’t a lot relative to so many who are not afforded a living wage (another catastrophic policy fail!). The point is our parents had so much more opportunity than we have, things cost less, they made more, and I fear what it’ll look like for our kids.
e.g.
Also part of me was like, maybe this inflation calculator is broken SO I WENT TO THE BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS and it is not.

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More from @meredithshiner

Meredith Shiner Profile picture
Aug 23
My parents went to the Univ. of Illinois in the 1970s. My dad paid for it on Social Security following his dad's death. My mom paid for it in dimes saved in a booze bottle. Tuition then was $352, $530, $530, $730 all in (for mom). So ~$2,575-$4300 today. Here's what it costs now!
(her recollection fits within the tuitions listed for members of Congress who went to U of I Urbana-Champaign before and after her, btw. This is a fun document!!! demos.org/sites/default/… )
people are like "go to state school!" as if our governments haven't divested from state schools as a public good while raising prices for actual students way out of whack with inflation.
Read 5 tweets
Meredith Shiner Profile picture
Aug 23
These people love means testing as a compromise and I get that “$125,000” sounds like a lot but this is absolutely insane to do. The numbers do not add up.

A THREAD: let’s say you took out $100K to go to college and you’re currently an adult with a mortgage and one child.
You live in an American city. Your average monthly student loan repayment is $1600/month. Your daycare bill is $2500/month. Your mortgage+property taxes is $3000/month.

Your average monthly payments for these three things=$7100.

Your annual bill? $85,200/year.
With a salary of $125,000/year, your take home pay after taxes (let’s say here in Illinois), is $88,500. So on your $125,000/year salary, after taxes, loan repayment, housing and childcare, what you have left over is $3300. FOR THE YEAR.
Read 10 tweets
Meredith Shiner Profile picture
Aug 22
I might have mentioned this but when we started watching older seasons and I realized Murray the muppet disappeared I fell down a wormhole of the Sesame drama around the transition to HBO and it's because the old lead writer voiced Murray and he quit. archive.thinkprogress.org/street-fight-w…
Murray is a symbol of the Sesame #resistance. His voice, Joey Mazzarino resigned in protest of the planned changes to Sesame, writing: “After almost a year of battling for what I believe is the heart and soul of the show, I lost the war.” archive.thinkprogress.org/street-fight-w…
Mazzarino also was the creator of Sesame's love letter to Black hair in the form of song, which got a lot of coverage at the time and also is beautiful. npr.org/templates/stor…
Read 4 tweets
Meredith Shiner Profile picture
Nov 9, 2021
I had a .5% chance of losing our first baby and that happened six months before the pandemic began, so, you know, when you experience improbable loss like that, it makes the risk of going to say, a bar, feel less worthwhile for the baby you're grateful to have alive, for example.
I respect that everyone has different risk tolerances, and at this point in the pandemic, I spend a lot of time weighing my mental health against risk of the behavior I think would contribute positively to my mental health.
Must be nice to hypothesize that you would have felt totally cool with having an unvaccinated kid out in the world, though. I wish I could live in that brain.
Read 4 tweets
Meredith Shiner Profile picture
Oct 25, 2021
honestly it's extra rage-inducing that this "debate" between a few old men about whether parental leave should be guaranteed and paid in this country is happening simultaneously with Roe no longer being law of the land.
The government is reaffirming its position that women should have babies no matter what but that also the act of having a baby or parenting is so devoid of value that you should not be entitled to guaranteed paid leave for three months or even one (!).
FMLA, as it stands, doesn't even protect all workers from just not being fired for having a baby, but sure, man, let's just telegraph to the world how much we don't value women.
Read 4 tweets
Meredith Shiner Profile picture
Oct 15, 2021
A few thoughts on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day—one, is I am adamant on using "pregnancy loss" as opposed to "miscarriage." "Miscarriage" imbues blame, like the birthing parent did something wrong. But maybe more subtlety, "loss" makes grief more inclusive.
People who do not get recognized nearly enough, imho, in pregnancy and infant loss are non-birthing partners. I've heard from a lot of them over the past two years. Their bodies don't do the thing, so they feel less connected to and entitled to grief, which is simply not true.
The culture of shame and silence around pregnancy and infant loss—created and perpetuated by people who have politicized pregnancy itself—makes this particular grief challenging for everyone, but non-birthing partners especially who can feel helpless through the process.
Read 4 tweets

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