A crisis to sink our teeth into

This is an urgent plea to all Baton Rouge parents of young children: The madness has got to stop.

I’m talking about the senseless, runaway inflation of the local Tooth Fairy market.

Baby teeth have fetched as much as $20 a pop.

It’s gone from sweet and cute to painful for grownups, and the madness has got to stop.

With gasoline’s roller coaster prices and the eye-popping cost of groceries these days, this is one segment of the economy we can—no, must—control.

But no one’s minding the store. We have no Ben Bernanke or Miles Molar calling a press conference to unveil our bicuspid bailout plan; our bleeding children are bleeding us dry.

I’m as guilty as anyone in this maxillofacial madness. Mea culpa.

But I’m offering a solution. What I propose is simple, really. As a community, let’s agree to return to the good-old days when a tooth was worth a quarter. The first tooth maybe gets 50 cents—maybe—but not a penny more.

And let’s learn from our mistakes. Any decent economic disaster begins with excess demand. In our house, it’s an excited 6-year-old who’s been fiendishly tongue-mining her canines all day and then comes running into the kitchen, blood drooling from her grinning maw. “Look! I loth anutha tooth!”

She’s gleeful in her Warren Buffet mastery of Tooth Fairy market forces, fluent in its rampant inflationary benefits that, by sunrise, will further stuff her squirrelly bank. (That’s right, her bank is shaped like a squirrel, although the cunning subterfuge—that she’s storing money rather than being piggy—has gone unheeded.)

My contribution to this toothsome crisis started in a moment of laziness. It was late, the tooth was already tucked under the pillow, and my wife’s bedtime instructions were clear. But the only bill in my deceptively fat wallet was a fiver. (In defense of my wallet, it is a mere iPod nano compared to the sausagesque, George Costanza behemoth that is Advocate columnist Danny Heitman’s, which quite possibly contains the other half of the $350 billion federal bailout).

So, when our miniature Madoff came running to the breakfast table gleefully waving a five dollar bill, my wife’s lowered chin and raised eyebrows said it all: “Are you nuts?”

I could only beg mercy. After all, once the mercantile madness begins, it’s so quick to spin out of control. There’s no quenching juvenile demand for cash: Our daughter recently excavated two front teeth within a day, proudly handing us the bloody nubs like found treasure, reducing us to clerks in some ghoulish pawn shop.

I conceived a bailout—a dental dam, as it were—for this river of blood and teeth. An unusual reward arrived after our Parker’s most recent extraction—an old silver dollar. The thinking went something like this: Divert attention away from the value of the bounty with a shinier reward.

It was as futile as last season’s LSU defense, like Simple Simon trying to outfox the Shaw Group.

“Daaaaaaaddy?” came her syrupy inquiry. “How much ith thith really worth?”

So, now we’re down to our last economic sanction: mashed potatoes and Jell-O—basically, nothing solid.