“Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.”
Well, maybe not.
There was a time when you could get a hotel room in Las Vegas for five bucks and even adjusted for inflation that would be about $40 dollars today.
Of course, there have always been “whale” penthouses and suites, but the lumpen gambler – if they played their cards right – could “Do Vegas” cheaper than any other tourist mecca would cost.
No kids of course, but that was kinda the point then – everything that happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas, except maybe for accidental child support and/or a bout with chlamydia.
Then larger developers had a thought – what if you actually started charging people rates for food and rooms that were closer to what they would pay in any other large city, any other destination?
So the room rates went up, then the food, then the rooms again, then the things for kids to do were added, then the fancy shops were added, then the rooms went up again and what had been a loss leader intended to get people to gamble turned into a profit center.
And the room rates kept rising and then it stopped and they came back down a skoosh.
Why?
Because the casino owners had a limit as to what they could charge rooms that would not significantly lessen the gambling. In other words, if you charge $100 for a room, people will still spend $1,000 gambling over the weekend – charge $200 and the the number of visitors and the gambling drops.
And, as Vegas became more expensive for the Average Joe, that’s what happened so the costs were dialed back.
The food and room and booze cost “Y axis” was risen only to the point that the gambling “X axis” did not decline.
Note – it should be remembered that much of this occurred after the mob “left” town – the rooms were cheap because it was difficult (taxes, forms, sales tax receipts that needed to match, etc.) to skim off them when compared to the gambling take. Legit businesses do not really have to worry about that problem so they could raise rates without irking Vinnie “The Wop” DePlante from Cleveland.
The new owners had hit and then set the “Vegas Point” for non-gambling costs.
Has the same now occurred for higher education and government?
Save for serious/problematic gamblers, most people use “extra” or vaca money to gamble – they figure it into the cost of the trip (though, after losing $1,400 in 12 minutes at the craps table, even regular tourists can look longingly at the limitless ATM and think their son really is sorta dumb and really doesn’t need ALL that money in the college fund, now does he…?)
And universities are hitting that same recoil point.
Fewer and fewer people now see the point of paying for a sociology masters, for a philosophy of science degree due to the cost involved and the scattered return on investment. True, this ignores the concept of getting a pure education, which is meant to teachsome specific things but more importantly to a create a baseline knowledge of the world and, even more, a “bullshit detector” - those are priceless and incereasingly in short supply.
It is very true that paying for school – even if you really don’t learn anything which seems to be one of the major issues for kids today – can get you one thing: the ticket into the “credentialed” club and that is extremely valuable.
But the value of that membership seems to be declining as the “socialist statist socialite globalist consultant assistant deputy secretary of historical propriety” club itself has come under fiercer and fierce attack of late.
And with the past decade of diversity rather than raw talent-based admissions and other academic absurdities, the value of the membership itself is declining.
Academia has become the weird old country club that was terribly important and wonderful and powerful decades ago but decided to continue to keep out the whippersnappers and the artists and the Black and the Jews (in many colleges, that is literally and not just figuratively true) and saw itself decline into ratty pointlessness.
Education costs have skyrocketed, leaving inflation ashamed.
UCLA – Tuition alone was $6,000 a year in 1980 in today’s dollars – now it’s actually $15,000.
Harvard - $40,000 (including room and board) in 1980 in today’s dollars – now it’s actually $82,000.
Government spending has seen the same increase, inkarge pat to suck up all of the soft majors ccreated by the universities; adjusted for inflatiom and population thr per-person spending has tripled.
And the list of agencies and institutions goes on (fun tip – check out the cost of where you went to school and compare it – your eyes will water.)
And this is part of the reason why school will not go up anymore beyond inflation; in fact, they are actually coming down already – for example, Harvard just announced it won’t charge an tuition (room and board, well that’s your problem) if your family makes less than $200,000 a year.
The rise was in large part due to the massive expansion in administrative staff and due to the government backing tuition loans – getting 18-year-olds to sign loan papers is easy (trust me.)
In other words, schools have pushed to and even beyond their “Vegas Point,” especially when one considers the return on investment it’s declining significantly – a problem Vegas didn’t have; no matter the cost it was still the same place.
The same “Vegas Point” issue is now facing government agencies.
The “extra” money people spent gambling – the equivalent of creating programs that are outside the core duties of government - is now all gone, hoovered up by cryptofascist bureaucracies.
Take California and its homeless issue.
Literally billions have been spent and the problem has only increased. People voted for bond and taxes out of the goodness of their hearts and have seen the problem get worse while now finding out that much of the money has disappeared into the ether of various “non-profit social service agency”
An ether that consists mostly of friends and family members of the people handing out the money.
The feds have the same issue and why the general public overwhelmingly supports the efforts of President Trump’s DOGE efforts.
People will willingly (if not happily) pay taxes for roads and schools and cops and firefighters and an army and a basic safety net and such.
Once that’s done, the idea of “extra” money – the money you gamble would in Vegas – enters the picture. Sure, I plan to lose this for fun, sure I agree the government can spend it in something extra that might do some good…but there is a limit.
That is the Vegas Point and hopefully it has now turned into what is called a political tipping point for the public.
Has the public realized that the Weebles of academia and the bureaucracy “wobble but don’t fall down” and they need something stronger…like a blowtorch?
The Vegas Point, the Tipping Point, the blowtorch may be needed indeed.
I think that’s called DOGE.
Full disclosure – I’ve spent exactly one night in Vegas and have changed plane there three times – I’m up $48 dollars.
Follow note – a vid of the Weebles’ commercial from the 1970s: