When I was a kid, we always lived in what I remember my mother calling "the $25,000 house." The $25,000 house had three bedrooms and a bath and a half. Her dream was to be able to live in "the $30,000 house" that was the next level up. That house would have two full baths and a family room with sliding glass doors to a patio. The $35,000 house would maybe have a pool. That was about as far as I remember the aspirations going. It wasn't that my parents didn't work hard and didn't want more for their children. My mother worked part-time as a legal secretary at a time when it was scandalous for women to work outside the home. My father's ambition was to find the cure for cancer -- that's hardly thinking small.

While in college, I dated a guy whose father was a doctor. Their house wasn't all that much bigger than ours was. Yes, the furnishings were more expensive, and his father drove a Cadillac (which was the prestige vehicle nameplate for the nouveau-riche at that time). But they didn't live in a mansion with a bridal staircase and palladian windows and tray ceilings in the bedroom and a home theatre. The guy I was dating may have had top-of-the-line audio equipment in his room, but it was still a 10 x 10 bedroom in a suburban house. And he didn't have his own bathroom.

I don't know when this business about being rich started. Perhaps it was when cash-strapped states in the 1970's started legalizing lotteries, where all you needed was "a dollar and a dream." Or perhaps it was 1984, when a shaggy-haired guy named Steve Jobs emerged out of a middle-class neighborhood in California to unveil the Macintosh; and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous began to air, bringing "champagne wishes and caviar dreams" into living rooms of the middle class seemingly every single night. It was important that the middle class start seeing these lifestyles every night, and regarding them as something to which they should aspire, despite the fact that most of the people profiled on the show made their money in the ferociously competitive maw of the entertainment industry, where luck plays as much of a role, if not more, than talent:





What's interesting about these two clips from the show is how ordinary these "lifestyles" look today. Micky Dolenz' English mansion resembles from the front about half the McMansions built in Bergen County during the last decade. A kitchen like that shown in the 1980s as being part and parcel of the life of the toffs was regarded on real estate programs on HGTV during the last decade as mandatory in even the most modest POS cape cod if you wanted to be able to sell your house. Places like Bobbie Brown's "luxury vacation spot in Arizona" are now all-inclusive resorts like the Sandals/Beaches chain, visited by the kind of people you surely know who take their kids out of school for a family vacation at a posh resort.

It isn't that there wasn't interest in celebrities before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Photoplay and Motion Picture Story were founded in 1911, and People had been around since 1974. But the effect of Lifestyles was to start people thinking "I could live like that," especially with the kind of money Wall Streeters were making at the time.

Somewhere along the line, just living "a good life" wasn't enough anymore, and it seems to have coincided with the ramping up of income inequality right around the heyday of Lifestyles, when Ronald Reagan first cut taxes on investment income -- a practice continued with enthusiasm under Presidents George H.W. Bush and, yes, even Bill Clinton. A great deal of money was made by a few during the Reagan era, and even more made by a few during the dot-com bubble. But for average workers -- people like my parents for whom sliding doors to a patio was a big deal -- the pie was growing ever-smaller. So if the entertainment industry that had spawned Ronald Reagan could dangle enough shiny in front of ordinary Americans and get them longing for stone mansions with French country kitchens, they might not notice how the lifestyle they were actually living was in danger.

And so we came to the 1990's, when guys in blue jeans and T-shirts became multimillionaires and even those who weren't wanted to live like them. So the POS capes and ranches started coming down, and huge ersatz country houses with bridal staircases and designer French country kitchens and crown molding in every room and teensy-tiny windows on three vinyl-sided sides of the house allowed people who were not celebrities to "live the good life", even if only on a 75 x 100 lot instead of seven rolling acres in the English countryside. Car leases allowed entry-level programmers to drive BMWs. A middle-class family could go to a "posh" resort like Beaches ("Luxury included® Resorts for Everyone").

And then it all came crashing down in 2008.

It gets harder to dangle the shiny of fancy cars and luxury homes to a guy whose job ws sent overseas and now finds that his entire industry has. It's hard to sell "If You Just Work Hard Enough" to a guy who hasn't worked in two years and can't even get a job at Wendys because as a skilled machinist, or PC tech, he's "overqualified." It's hard to sell champagne wishes and caviar dreams to a couple who really did try to look at the numbers the mortgage broker was showing them to "prove" they could afford their house with the French Country kitchen and tray ceilings , but now they find the house is worth half of what they owe on it and they're both out of work and scrambling to find a rental that will take two unemployed people, their kids, and their dog.

Mitt Romney is out there talking about his father's humble beginnings, moving ever-closer to declaring himself as having been born a poor black child. When confronted about his net worth, he tosses off comments that he wants EVERONE to be rich. This is red meat to guys like Gene Marks, who thinks every small business owner wakes up every day dreaming of the day he too can be like Mitt Romney. I used to work for one of those small business owners. He's about as Republican as they come. His wife and co-owner had an autographed photo of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on the wall in her office the way tween girls have Justin Bieber posters. He's an unrepentant supply-sider. But I know that most days, he's not dreaming of being able to expand a fancy house in La Jolla. He'd be just as happy to be able to keep his business going. I think he works pretty hard, trying to drum up business, but he's not Mitt Romney. And I have to wonder just how hard Romney had to work. I mean, how difficult is it, really, to buy up companies and wreck them?

The bottom line is that not everyone is going to be rich. If a company employs 100,000 people, only one is going to be be the CEO. Most people are going to make less, and that's OK, as long as they can actually find work and earn a living. I think people are starting to realize that not everyone needs a 6000 square foot house with a French country kitchen, tray ceilings, and a bridal staircase. They're scaling back their aspiration, not because they want to be lazy (though I do think people are getting sick of working 80-hour weeks and foregoing vacations to "prove their dedication to the company", then finding themselves shitcanned anyway in favor of someone overseas who'll work for a dollar a day), but because the cost of pretending to be one of the toffs is just too high.

For Mitt Romney to get up there and say that further tax cuts for the already rich are a step towards everyone being rich is ridiculous on its face. Not everyone is going to be rich, and I think most people know this. All most people want is just a fighting chance.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, rant, social Darwinism, supply-side economics

About that business about tax increases killing jobs....

Steve Benen:

Soon after the awful new job numbers were released, Dave Weigel had a good line, at least in a sardonic sort of way:

“Me? I’m just glad we kept the Bush tax rates so the economy could start surging.”

I had the same thought. Indeed, when thinking about who has credibility on economic projections and governmental policy, the right’s uninterrupted track record of failure remains fascinating. In 1982, conservative Republicans said Reagan’s tax increases would cause a disaster (they didn’t). In 1993, conservative Republicans said Clinton’s tax increases would invariably fail (they didn’t). In 2009, conservative Republicans said Obama’s stimulus would make the economy worse (it didn’t).

And in 2001, conservative Republicans said Bush’s tax cuts would cause a remarkable economic boom (they didn’t). In 2003, these same conservative Republicans said more Bush tax cuts would do the trick (they didn’t). In 2010, these same conservative Republicans said if we could just keep those Bush tax cuts around a little more, we’d be amazed at the economic turnaround in 2011.

Here we are. I don’t think anyone’s amazed.

And yet here we are, and not only Republicans, but Democrats, are buying into the same argument.

Lucy, Charlie Brown, football, etc.

Labels: Doing The Same Thing Over And Over Again And Expecting A Different Result, supply-side economics

When a Democrat runs for office, everything he did in his entire life is up for minute scrutiny at the hands of a voracious media and equally voracious Republicans. But when a Republican runs for office, we're supposed to forget his entire record, his entire life, and just trust him.

Last week we had the appalling spectacle of Newt Gingrich, a convert to Catholicism who seems to have forgotten the repentance part of the confession/repentance/forgiveness model, embody the worst aspects of "Clean Slate Christianity" when he was confronted by a student about his marital history. For the uninitiated, Gingrich's history consists of fucking his second wife while married to his first, presenting said first wife with divorce papers while she was recoverning from cancer surgery, then fucking his third wife while married to his second -- and working very, very hard to impeach Bill Clinton for an extramarital affair while doing so.

Gingrich's response:

"I've had a life which, on occasion, has had problems," Gingrich said. "I believe in a forgiving God, and the American people will have to decide whether that their primary concern. If the primary concern of the American people is my past, my candidacy would be irrelevant. If the primary concern of the American people is the future... that's a debate I'll be happy to have with your candidate or any other candidate if I decide to run."

If you want to know why I talk about the Christofascist Zombie Brigade, and while I knock Christianity in a way I don't knock others, it's because of people like Newt Gingrich -- arrogant, self-important assholes who think THEY know the mind of God.

Now we have another Republican asshole, who may lack the religious hubris of Newt Gingrich, but who is blatantly playing a similar game of "Don't look over there, look over HERE, where I tell you to look. It's Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who has realized that he's going to have a tough time running as a fiscally responsible conservative after having been George W. Bush's first budget director:

Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-Ind.) is known as a strong fiscal conservative, a top selling point for a potential presidential run. But before he was governor, Daniels was the first budget director for President Bush during a time when the country went from a budget surplus to a budget deficit, and it's likely that he'll have to explain how that fits with the philosophy he touts should he decide to jump into the Republican field in 2012.

On "Fox News Sunday," host Chris Wallace pressed Daniels on this point. "When you came in, this country had an annual surplus for the first time in 30 years of $236 billion. When you left, two and a half years later, the deficit was $400 billion. You were also there when President Bush launched his Medicaid drug benefit plan that now cost $60 billion a year. I know there was a recession, but do you think it was wise -- at a time when we were fighting two wars -- to have two tax cuts and launch a huge new entitlement?"

Daniels said deficits during that time were inevitable. "It was a recession, two wars and a terrorist attack that led to a whole new category called homeland security," he said. "So nobody was less happy than I to see the surplus go away, but it was going away."

Click over to get to the link to the full article at the $40 Million Woman's site, including the order for diverted attention from Mr. Daniels.

Labels: 2012 election, assholes, hypocrisy, It's OK if You're a Republican, supply-side economics

So can we stop with this horsepuckey that if you just shovel enough cash into the pockets of the wealthy they'll "create jobs"? This one ran last Friday. I'll post tonight's update when it's available.

UPDATE: Here you go:

Labels: Republican lies, supply-side economics, taxes

This one comes to us via the inimitable Driftglass, and as you watch these bozos giggling at Peter Schiff like Maureen Dowd making fun of Barack Obama, you understand why the word "douchenozzle" was coined:

Labels: conservatives, idiocy, supply-side economics

Aren't you glad that we gave AIG a $143 bailout for luxury junkets for the company's salespeople and fat bonuses for its executives -- and the company is probably going to go belly-up anyway?

A number of financial experts now fear that the federal government's $143 billion attempt to rescue troubled insurance giant American International Group may not work, and some argue that company shareholders and taxpayers would have been better served by a bankruptcy filing.

The Treasury Department leapt to keep AIG from going bankrupt on Sept. 16, and in the past seven weeks, AIG has drawn down $90 billion in federal bailout loans. But some key AIG players argue that bankruptcy would have offered more structure and greater protections during a time of intense market volatility.

AIG declined to comment on the matter.

Echoing some other experts, Ann Rutledge, a credit derivatives expert and founding principal of R&R Consulting, said she is not sure how badly the financial system would have been rocked if the government had let AIG file for bankruptcy protection. But she fears that the government is papering over the problem with a quick fix that was not well planned.

"What we see now are a lot of games by the government to keep these institutions going with a lot of cash," she said. "This is to fill holes in companies' balance sheets, and they're trying to hold at bay the charges that our financial system is insolvent."

The deal that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York pressed upon AIG was intended to stop any domino effect of financial institutions falling because of their business ties to AIG. The rescue allowed AIG to provide cash to huge banks and other players who had invested in rapidly souring mortgages insured by the company.

Early this year, investors had begun privately demanding that AIG pay off its billion-dollar guarantees. But in mid-September, when the demands for cash reached a public crescendo, AIG had to admit that it didn't have enough cash on hand to meet the obligations.

In the first weeks of its federal rescue, AIG has used the loan money to post collateral demanded by these firms, sources close to those deals say.

"No one else benefits," former AIG chief executive and major shareholder Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg wrote to AIG's current chief executive on Thursday. "Unless there is immediate change to the structure of the Federal loan, the American taxpayer will likely suffer a significant financial loss."

Another concern is that in this depressed market, AIG, and the taxpayers that now own 80 percent of the company, will lose coming and going.

Anyone who believed that this bailout was anything other than a way of getting entrenched incumbents in Washington -- yes, Democrats as well as Republicans -- through the election, was an idiot. With absolutely no guarantees that the bailout of the company would do anything to keep it from collapsing, and no accountability whatsoever as to what the company would actually do with the money, this money -- our money -- was shoring up an expensive beach house with toothpicks in advance of a Category 5 hurricane.

Barack Obama's talk about tax cuts is at this point disingenuous. He is not going to be able to cut taxes. I understand why he has to do it; he remembers the ghost of Walter Mondale saying at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, "President Reagan will raise your taxes and so will I. He won't tell you; I just did." And we all know what happened to him.

Neither is John McCain if elected -- if he were being responsible -- except that John McCain will do it anyway because the giant, insatiable maw of the preposterously wealthy cannot be satisfied with anything less than continued feeding with the lifeblood of this country's future:


McCain won't tell you this is why he's cutting taxes for himself and his friends. He'll tell you it's to "grow America." He'll come out with the old canard that "rich people create jobs." And there are plenty of Americans who'll believe it, because we've been trained to salivate at the word "jobs." But it's not about you, or me, or jobs. It's about greed. It's about the black hole at the center of every so-called "free marketeer" who thinks that if you just shovel enough cash into that hole, they'll be happy and throw a few pennies your way.

But this is where we are today, thanks to the Bush family and their cronies, who ALWAYS believed that the world was a private fiefdom for the benefit of their family members and friends, to John McCain, who supported policies that fed this notion and became one of those friends so he could benefit, and to spineless Democrats who have been too lazy or too frightened to articulate the reality that Ronald Reagan was wrong -- you can't have everything you want and it's all free if you just give the already wealthy even more.

Meanwhile, Circuit City, that wonderful company that fired all its store employees who actually knew something and replaced them with low-wage people unable to answer technical questions, is finding that their strategy backfired on them. The company is expected to announce over 150 store closings today -- and it may not even wait around till Black Friday to see how sales go that day. I don't fault the people working their now for taking jobs that were available, and I'm sorry that they're going to lose them. But this is yet another case of colossal mismanagement at the top -- and you may rest assured that those who made these decisions will suffer not one whit, and will be well taken care of out of the inevitable liquidation of the company.

Even the most well-run companies are struggling in this economic environment, and I'm not saying that poor performance is always a function of bad management. But like households that have some money socked away for lean times, well-managed companies are in a position to weather the vagaries of the business cycle. But AIG played with fire and got burned, and Circuit City made a bonehead, supply-side, penny-wise and pound foolish decision, and both companies deserve what they're going to get -- except that those who brought them to this state aren't the ones who are going to find themselves unable to afford so much as an oven-stuffer roasting chicken for Christmas this year.

Labels: corporatism, f***ed companies, so-called free market, supply-side economics

Any questions?

(h/t: Ken)

Labels: supply-side economics

Of course the fact that John McCain has now decided to be a George W. Bush clone on economic policy as well as on Iraq policy won't make one bit of difference to Chris Matthews, who will continue to refer to McCain as a maverick. After all, true love of the kind Tweety has for John McCain is always delusional.

But if you had any doubts that McCain's campaign slogan should be "If you enjoyed the Bush years, you'll LOVE a McCain administration", his economic policy speech yesterday erased them:

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, spoke at length about those economic hardships and suggested he might well break with the economic policies of President Bush and former President Ronald Reagan. “It will not be enough to simply dust off the economic policies of four, eight or 28 years ago,” he said in the speech, at Carnegie Mellon University. “We have our own work to do.”

But a major component of his economic plan — like those of Presidents Bush and Reagan — centered on tax cuts. Besides making the Bush income tax cuts permanent and reducing corporate taxes to 25 percent from 35 percent, Mr. McCain called for eliminating the alternative minimum tax and doubling the value of exemptions for dependents to $7,000 from $3,500, among other recommendations. He also proposed giving taxpayers the option of filing a simpler, shorter tax form each year than is available now.

Mr. McCain even called for cutting one tax before the Republican National Convention, let alone the election: he urged Congress to suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax from this Memorial Day until Labor Day. He said doing so would provide “an immediate economic stimulus,” but such plans have gained little traction recently in Congress, and some environmentalists fear such a cut would encourage more people to use their cars at a time when Mr. McCain has made combating global warming a central theme of his campaign.

The McCain campaign put the cost of his tax cuts at roughly $200 billion a year, but its estimate did not include the cost of making the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would more than double that figure.

The campaign said it would offset the lost $200 billion by eliminating from the federal budget earmarked pork-barrel projects; putting a one-year freeze on discretionary spending in most federal agencies, later eliminating wasteful programs; broadening the tax base by eliminating loopholes; and spurring economic growth. But its estimate of how much could be saved with such measures was far higher than those of some other independent budget analysts.

Does this sound familiar? It should, because it's the cornerstone of the very Bush policies that have driven us into debt so huge that it's just about beyond our ability to ever pay it back and has driven us into recession. And this is also the president who has promised us that "there will be more wars" and an indefinite stay in Iraq until some undefined notion of "victory" is reached.

So....where you gonna get the money, John? Or are you just going to write more hot checks until your one or two terms are done, at which point your time here in this level of reality will be just about done and it'll be someone else's problem?

Today Maureen Dowd insists on flogging the "Barack Obama is an elitist" meme even though most actual voters don't seem to care (perhaps because they know they've been shafted by politicians and Washington pundits like Dowd). Would that she and the other multimillionaires of the Washington Press corps would stop fanning themselves long enough to point out that whatever George W. Bush hasn't done to wreck everything, the guy who has gained the label of "maverick" because at one time he worked with Russ Feingold to enact the very campaign finance legislation he now feels doesn't apply to him, cements his status as selfish, "I got mine and fuck you" empire-building neocon.

And when the whole house of cards comes down on his watch, not even Tweety's love for John McCain will save us.

Labels: John McCain, supply-side economics, utter horseshit

With the cable news channels wrapped up with either ignoring the McCain thinking with his dick (ewwww....) story or trying to spin it so that anything he did was actually VIRTUOUS, they've taken a break from hammering the "McCain is a moderate! He's a maverick! He'll save the Republican party from the right wing crazies!" theme.

But voters should not be fooled. McCain hasn't been anything resembling a maverick since he sold his soul to the narcissist sociopath from Texas, and now it seems he has Phil Gramm as part of his campaign. And Gramm has a plan for health care reform that's so radical, so daring, so fabulously wonderful, that it's going to "revolutionize America's health care system."

Want to know what it is?

Can you guess?

Wait for it.....


TAX REBATES!!!

Yes, folks, this revolutionary health care plan would eliminate the tax exclusion for health benefits paid by employers, and instead give tax rebates of $2500 to $5000 per family.

Today, McCain is advocating a plan that's radically different from those of Clinton and Barack Obama, and - if he goes all the way by following Gramm - could revolutionize America's healthcare system. For McCain and Gramm, the problem with our healthcare system - and the reason why over 47 million Americans are uninsured - is that it's excessively, scandalously expensive. The solution, they say, is to let Americans shop for healthcare with their own money. McCain advocates giving tax rebates of $2500 per individual or $5000 per family. With that money, families could purchase policies on their own. What's truly radical about the plan is that it eliminates the tax exclusion for healthcare benefits offered by companies to their employees, and replaces it with the $2500 to $5000 rebates.

Consumers could then use that cash to buy their own insurance in what Gramm foresees as a vibrant, consumer-driven marketplace for healthcare packages.

So let's see....no changes to the current environment in which insurance companies can deny coverage for pre-exsiting conditions, deny coverage for procedures they've already approved, ask doctors to rat out their patients who may have conditions they can refuse to cover, pay bonuses to employees who stonewall patients, need I go on? And nothing to bring down the cost of health insurance, because the magic of the "free market" will take care of it. Ah, supply-side economics is alive and well and still living in Texas.



Does anyone know of a health care plan that provides comprehensive care for a family for $5000?

I guess they're figuring that the supply-side, nonregulatory environment that produces tainted food and drugs will kill off enough people quickly that health care won't even be necessary.

Labels: health care, supply-side economics