Imagine you’re five years old and you’ve just lost your first tooth. You carefully place that tooth under your pillow, knowing that during the night the Tooth Fairy is going to drop by and replace that useless tooth with cold hard cash. How much money would you expect to find under your pillow when you wake up? Fifty cents? A dollar? Nine dollars’ worth of coins?
If you’re Treasurer Josh Frydenburg’s son, you would have found a crisp $20 bill. On Friday, Frydenburg revealed that inflation has been hitting all sectors of the economy as even Tooth Fairy money has skyrocketed over the years.
“I told [my son] that when the Tooth Fairy visited me… I only got 50 cents!” The Treasurer said at a Q&A where he was debating his rival for the seat of Kooyong, independent candidate Monique Ryan. During the debate, Ryan grilled Frydenburg about allocating millions of dollars of Jobkeeper money to businesses that did not need it. Ryan was trying to imply that Frydenburg gave exurbanite amounts of money in handouts to people who he viewed favourably. Imagine that. Anyway, he gave twenty dollars to his own son for a tooth.
The going rate for a tooth these days is somewhere between a gold coin and a five-dollar note. Although, when Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers was asked how much his own child had received from the Tooth Fairy, he also said it was twenty dollars. Which really suggests that politicians might be earning too much money. That’s a burrito with extra guac level of cash.
If Tooth Fairy’s pay-outs had stayed level with the inflation rate it should only have increased from 50 cents to just under $3. The Treasurer is throwing too much cash at this problem if he’s forking over a solid twenty for just one tooth. After twenty teeth fall out he’s going to be down $200. And we thought $5.5 billion on French submarines that we’ll never see was a waste of money.