Correlation is not causation
When I was teaching High school in Brooklyn the halls were filled with posters telling kids how much more people with a college education made. The assumption being that if you go to college and get a degree you will make more money. But, correlation is not causation.
Compare someone who went to college with someone who didn't in 1960. There were a lot of good reasons not to go to college, maybe you got a good factory job and for the first 20 years you were doing very well compared to the college degree kid, but then your factory was shut down. The US government has intentionally sent our manufacturing overseas so that jobs that don't require a college degree are low wage jobs.
Now if everyone goes from high school to college today, does that mean we don't need cashiers, or salesmen at shoe stores, or people to stock shelves, or custodians, or all the other jobs that do not need a college degree? No. So who does them? People with a useless college degree who never should have gone in the first place.
You might think that kids are encouraged to go to trade school and learn how to paint cars, or fix motors, or install electrical equipment, or be a plumber. But you would be wrong. When I suggested that this should be included it came very close to costing me my job. The schools are rated on the percent of kids that graduate and go to four year schools. A trade school doesn't count. Now if you go to a two year trade school you could easily come away with skills that will get you a 100k a year job, whereas if you get some useless degree you will have 100k in debt and wind up being a cashier living in your parents basement.
Sending everyone to college does not mean we are a better educated society, it means that college diploma has become far less prestigious. Because everyone is going the cost has skyrocketed, and yet the value of the diploma has fallen.
Now the same principle applies to US monetary policy. It used to be that there was a correlation between debt and growth. Companies would borrow money in order to finance growth, so this made sense. Debt did not cause growth, instead growth required debt initially. You would expand your business, and to do that you would borrow money. But then "modern monetary policy" made it seem like all the government had to do was print money and "poof" you had growth.
No, if you have foolish debt then "poof" you have bankruptcies, and inflation. The worst debt is when they are spending $5 trillion, no one is paying careful attention over every penny. So we have inflation, bankruptcies, layoffs, and then depression.
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