A friend of mine operates on a system that I once thought was charmingly peculiar to her and definitely inadvisable for everyone else.
We call it Susie-nomics. It’s a system in which money is largely theoretical and concepts of relative value are as gauzily insubstantial as the wings of cherubim.
Like most of us, Susie no longer uses much printed or minted money. She puts gas and groceries on her credit cards. When she parks in D.C. and Bethesda, she usually pays by cell phone. Her incomings and outgoings are represented by symbols registered in a bank account that she views online. So far, so normal.
Where Susie floats off into the ether is the point at which she allocates spending. If she buys two Banana Republic dresses for 33 percent off, whatever that costs her, she doesn’t think she’s found a good bargain, as you or I might. Instead, she’s instantly 66 percent closer to a “free” pair of shoes. If she runs into a buy-one-get-one offer at Giant, ipso facto she’s entitled to a frivolous purchase at CVS with the funds “saved” from buying double when she’d only planned to buy singly.
Her budgeting, in short, takes place in the realm of magical thinking. Arbitrary amounts of money are pouring back and forth in the corridors of her mind all the time as she goes about her business. To Susie’s credit — ha, there’s a word! — she’s probably no deeper in debt than the rest of us.
Unfortunately, the rest of us are horribly in debt, not least because of the trillions the federal government, in Susie-nomical fashion, is spending and printing and minting. If the feds expect to spend 8 percent next year over this, and Congress approves only a 5 percent increase, it’s regarded as a 3 percent cut. So be thrifty in your own life by all means, but you’re still on the hook to the People’s Republic of China with the rest of us.
Worse, it seems that children too are increasingly to operating according to the principles of Susie-nomics. I’ve seen it in my own house. It used to be that we, and many other parents I know, handed out allowances to children in bills and coins.
Since the money arrived in physical form, it was finite by nature. If a kid spent the $1.25 in his pocket on bubble gum, the money was gone. He could either wait until his next allowance or do extra chores to earn more.
Now, in the era of credit cards, gift cards and online banking, that quaint old practice seems largely to have disappeared, to be replaced by a kind of cosmic vagueness.
“If I mow the lawn, will you pay me $10?” has become, “How about I use your credit card number so I can get some song on iTunes and you take it out of my bank account?”
From the polished halls of Congress to the scuffed linoleum of home …
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
