"If my kid grows up to be a garbageman, it will not bother me, if that's what he wants to do."
What if it means that he can't afford health insurance, save for retirement, or make a down payment on a house?
What if it means that he can't afford health insurance, save for retirement, or make a down payment on a house?
For instance, I'm not sweating trying to put aside vast quantities of money for college education. Why am I doing this horrible thing? Well, tuition has been going up by about twice the rate of inflation for a long time now (http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml ), and projecting that out, it's another 70% increase in real tuition prices over what I already consider the completely unsustainable tuition rates of today. I don't know what will happen, but today's traditional "four-year college you live at" is not going to be the only choice, or possible even the dominant choice, by then.
Similarly, health care insurance simply can not continue increasing at the rate it is currently increasing at for another 20 years. It's physically impossible. Who knows what will happen instead?
Housing prices are also very difficult to predict once it really settles in that housing is not a good investment.
It's a choice he'll make with eyes wide open if I can help it, but it's his choice, not mine, and frankly neither of us sitting here in 2010 have more than a passing clue what sort of world he'd be making that choice in. Care to bet that by 2028 the US won't have some kind of universal health care, for instance?