Pay day

T.I.S. has run out of books. So has the IU bookstore, for that matter. And Amazon.com.

You thought this would be your best semester yet. You’re still so motivated right now. Come on, 4.0!

But now you can’t buy your books. They’re nowhere to be found. The entire college textbook industry has crashed.

Professors are having aneurysms left and right.

But all the book suppliers are out of money. They lost it all on some complicated digital music and online book bundle. There was a bubble for a bit – they were doing great, charging obscene prices for textbooks all the while and making massive profits – but then everyone realized they could download all that stuff for free. And now, college bookstores across the country are in trouble.

So IU gives them a loan. A huge one. Straight outta your tuition money.

Things you love about IU begin to disappear thanks to “tough economic times.”

The Beatles class that highlights every music lover’s curriculum: gone. The free New York Times you pick up every day: gone. Free IUWare? Forget it. Scholarships dry up. Bus routes are cut. And there’s just no way we can afford Coach Crean’s salary. Sorry, IU basketball.

And still, halfway through the semester, you don’t have your damn books. As midterms approach, panic begins to set in.

Finally, bookstores are able to turn their loans around, turn a profit, and, for the most part, repay IU. But books are still difficult to come by. And the economic hardship undergone by IU has forever reshaped our Hoosier community.

An entire semester of classes that had to make do without textbooks, bygone beloved courses, students who would have come here if they only had landed that scholarship, a basketball program thrown to the wayside ... these effects persist, even though the loans have been repaid.

So maybe the bookstore analogy isn’t the best way to point out the lasting effects the collapse of the financial industry is having – and will continue to have – on the U.S. economy, even though it’s quite possible that students hate bookstores as much as Main Street hates Wall Street.

But the idea remains the same: as average Americans continue to grapple with unemployment, emptied retirement accounts, and cut programming (IU is, in reality, still searching for ways to cut $58.9 million from its base budget after already slashing $29.3 million) as well as trying to deal with the long-term effects of economic “scarring,” or lost productivity in the wake of the Great Recession, banks are crying injustice about Obama’s proposed banking fee because they’re paying their loans back. Edward L. Yingling, president and chief executive of the American Bankers Association, whined to the New York Times, proclaiming, “It is perplexing to us.”

That’s ridiculous. The cost borne by American society far exceeded the government loans contained in the bailout. And while other factors contributed to our economic downfall, it’s clear that banks, their lust for the huge profits that result only from high-risk endeavors, and their flat-out carelessness played a central role.

Now that they’re turning out record profits (not to mention the eye-popping bonuses to match), they should be expected to pay up.