The Dentist Of The Year gets a little plaque

Lord help me, I know times have changed, and I'm not about to talk like someone from the Depression era about how when we had no food we ate old overcoats and we were GLAD to have them...but the quarter I used to get from the Tooth Fairy seems somewhat paltry now, when I look at what the kids are getting for a used bicuspid now. $7 dollars! What a nice bag of candy THAT would buy!

And, as they say, follow the money. Since 1998, Delta Dental has been running the Original Tooth Fairy Poll® as a way to see how much change the fairy has been doling out. And it turns out, if you follow the ebb and flow of parental generosity as regards lost choppers, you are also tracking the US economy, because for 17 of the past 21 years, the movement of the tooth money has followed the trend of the S&P 500.

(The 500 are the stock prices of 500 large firms that serve as a barometer of the US economy. S&P means Standard and Poor. I am certainly not Standard but I am certainly Poor.)

They make no claim that the tooth money and the stock prices are in any way connected, but it's interesting to see them track as they do:

  

One question the poll result does not answer is, why would anyone tell some stranger how much they shell out every time their kid sheds a Chiclet? Unless the kid in question had buck teeth, in which case it would be obvious: one dollar each!