We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
It's usually pretty good, satisfying, and adequately-compensated, but right now it's a bit of a bummer. The biz is slow and quite stressful, and it (corporate communications, PR, investor relations, marketing, etc.) is a good measure of the condition of the US economy.
Perhaps this is my winter depression, DSM 4 "Life sucks." I have not been skiing often enough. My bonus this year is half of last year's. I need a new hot girlfriend who can appreciate my annoying quirks and bad habits. Why can't the government give me some money and some cute sweet girls just be be my wonderful self, so I can go protest something, or go back up to Sugarloaf for a few days? I blame Obama. Everybody always told me that I was very special, wonderful and talented, but maybe they lied.
If my next big deal goes through this week, we can delete this post. Plenty of difficult work is all I want. If I am not working 7 days/week at my age, I feel like I am wasting my time. Thankfully, I am no Euro-weenie, and don't have a union job like my Dad did where they prevented you from working too hard or too long.
At Watts: Green Movement Dead In The Water. It's been said many times before, but it certainly seems moribund. Problem is that too many people, and governments, make big bucks from the scam.
I remain in favor of more warmening for the benefit of the human species, but am preparing for the coming Ice Age apocalypse by buying a 1-BR condo in West Palm. (Just kidding. Florida is not my kind of place.)
This is the sort of thing I might expect from a lesser, more insecure institution but it is, after all, where Larry Summers got whacked for daring to opine that women might be slightly different from men.
It's creepy as hell, stupid on so many levels, and a good example of pantywaist Dhimmitude too. In fact, you could characterize the Harvard faculty's response as hate speech against the truly peaceful Hindus. Robespierre was like this. Eventually, they decided to remove his head from the rest of his body, too. There's the rub.
It's getting so there are so many things you aren't supposed to say these days...can't even say to a chick in the office that "Hey, you look great today." So no "hate speech" - and no "love speech" either. Or is "love speech" covert "hate speech" because it is demeaning? It's difficult to know, anymore, because it seems OK for them to say to me "You look hot today." I don't really mind being "objectified" as a sex object by women, however. I deserve it, and I enjoy it because I must be an evil part of the partriarchy (or a skirt-chaser, which I am, along with every other red-blooded single guy), or whatever.
Over the years, I think I have posted many things here that would get me fired from Harvard. Things about appreciating pretty girls, things about gals being different from guys, things about Jihadists being a danger to civil civilization, things about Lefties being closet fascists, silly mockery of radical Feminists and of the "Transgender Community" - they have a community? - and plenty of other no doubt dangerous, verboten topics. Somebody should just wire my jaw and cut off my fingers. It's all insane. (Is saying they're all insane impermissible "hate speech"?)
What is this, North Korea? Well, they used to hang Quakers in Boston and burn witches in the suburbs. Veritas, indeed. They should change their motto to "Political Veritas du Jour" instead.
Fortunately for me, I now work for an increasingly-profitable evil Capitalist busiiness where my job is to add value and productivity, instead of for wealthy Harvard which hoards its charity-given, tax-deductible billions and refuses to share it with the struggling 99%. Catch you all around the corner. I'm headed north for family and skiing with friends this week. I'd better play it safe here before I get in trouble, so Happy Kwanzaa and Merry Solstice to our wonderful readers.
How come 99% of the people shopping in the malls, at Macy's, etc. are either overweight or plain fat?
I took a little seasonal tour in Manhattan, where, for sure, the average person on Madison Ave. or 5th Ave. looks a lot more shipshape than the average person in America. But other than that, do all of the fit, skinny people shop online? Or are most people wide loads these days? What's that about?
All the people I work with are pretty trim, in good shape, reasonably fashionable, and they do not go to malls, discount stores, or to Macy's. Nothing against Macy's, which is a fine store with tons of useful and pleasant stuff which I do not need but, at Bloomies, Saks, and Tiffany, people certainly are generally more attractive. Some people there clearly spend more money on Yoga, working out, and Botox than they spend on stuffing their faces with carbs, and I guess that is a strange segment of today's America too - people paying hard-earned money for the opportunity for physical effort at the gym. Sheesh. People should get paid for that effort instead of paying for it. Women used to say that "you can't be too thin or too rich," but I think both are in error.
There was a time in America when people paid you for physical labor, and a time when prosperous was fat. Crazy world. Oh, well, fat, medium, or fit - it's a free country. Best to be whatever you want, as long as you shop and spend!
All of my own minimal Christmas shopping is online, at my wine shop, or at my cigar shop, but I like to poke around town at holiday season for the fun of it. NYC is magical at Christmastime, Christmas cheer and decorations, and highly annoying Christmas Muzak (if I hear Drummer Boy one more time I promise to shoot myself), and wonderful Christmas Capitalism.
Put it on the Mastercard, suckers! It's priceless. Do it for Jesus!
“THERE IS NO MEANS OF AVOIDING THE FINAL COLLAPSE OF A BOOM BROUGHT ABOUT BY CREDIT EXPANSION. THE ALTERNATIVE IS ONLY WHETHER THE CRISIS SHOULD COME SOONER AS A RESULT OF A VOLUNTARY ABANDONMENT OF FURTHER CREDIT EXPANSION, OR LATER AS A FINAL OR TOTAL CATASTROPHE OF THE CURRENCY SYSTEM INVOLVED”
For competitive college admissions, it is tough for Asians to dodge the Asian quotas by labelling themselves as "white." Goes to show how insane this preoccupation with race has become.
What race is a half-Asian? What race is an American Indian or an Eskimo? (Asian, right?) What race is Obama, who "passes" as black to his great advantage in life?
In my opinion, private colleges can do whatever they want (eg Morehouse College), but taxpayer-supported schools should be racially blind. After all, our taxes are racially blind. Ignore race and ethnicity, and just think about their potential to benefit from, and to add something to, the place.
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
It's the corollary to "For a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail."
Re my post yesterday, I still cannot understand why a jelly shop needs to be licensed and regulated. Haven't farmers been selling jams, jellies, and pies to happy customers for hundreds of years?
Lengthy and complex regulations are employment schemes for government employees and lawyers as much as anything else. Forget state regs -there are 86,000 pages in the Fed Register. Nobody knows what is in there, but it you violate one of them, you can be screwed.
The rules are stacked against even the smallest of entrepreneurs. If and when I decided to set up my own thing, I already know what I'll need to borrow money for: Lawyers.
So proclaims Andy Stern in the WSJ: China's Superior Economic Model - The free-market fundamentalist economic model is being thrown onto the trash heap of history.
A centrally-controlled Communist economy? Brilliant idea, Andy. Quite a novel idea. You in charge, of course?
You just have to laugh. I remember when the left envied the Soviet economy, the Cuban economy, the Japanese economy, the West German economy, the European economy. Now, the Chinese - until it blows up.
#48 is a good one: You beat 50% of the people by just showing up. You beat another 40% by working hard. The last 10% is a dogfight in the free enterprise system.
"We created a group of self-entitled monsters." Hey youths, this is for you. Hey, OWSers, this is for you, too. Adam Carolla tells it like it is (language not entirely SFW, and h/t, SDA):
"Life is difficult." That book did me a lot of good, a few years ago. Got me into a little therapy, changed my life for the better, helped me realize that I was my biggest obstacle in getting on with life. Corny as it sounds, that empowered me. Shrink told me that there was nothing wrong with me except for being a "blaming and excuse-making a-hole" and I had to get my shit together, quit blaming and making self-flattering excuses, and take charge of my life like an adult who was willing to deal with reality instead of fantasies. Mean SOB was spot on. That's why I am, at present, having a very good life in New York City.
It is also why I don't do the morning posts here anymore. I am grandfathered in, to post whatever I want, whenever I want.
Those greedy 1%ers (household AGI $350,000 and up) are Hollywood and Broadway actors, rock and hip-hop stars, sports stars, popular writers, entrepreneurs, TV people, fancy restaurant owners, artists, theater impresarios, prosperous small business owners, some accountants and portfolio managers, opera stars, the CEOs of big businesses, neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and some other high-income medical specialists, NYT columnists, college presidents, retired politicians, law partners, real estate magnates, and a few high-level investment bankers.
Not exactly an evil bunch of people. I plan to join that crowd, at least for a while. How many people are permanently in that group? Very few, I suspect. Careers rise and fall, which is why people need to save a little of their money while making sure to fully enjoy and make good use of the rest.
...as (Keith) Richards noted about the band’s early days, “Benedictines had nothing on us. Anybody that strayed from the nest to get laid, or try to get laid, was a traitor. You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.”
Read it. HuffPo, working on the envy meme: U.S. Income Inequality: Top 1 Percent Take Home 24 Percent Of U.S. Income. The economic ignorance, or feigned ignorance, is astonishing. There is no set "pie:" the pie is infinitely expandable. It's is called "Growth in GDP." Wealth can be created out of thin air, out of effective, creative, and unique qualities of work and investment. The Rolling Stones, on their next final tour, do not "take" their greedy % of American income. Those old boys earn it.
I see no reason to care about income inequality in America: I hope the very prosperous 1% spend and donate their money wisely and enjoyably. The poorest have more comforts and conveniences than middle-class Americans had in the 1960s, and, in fact, live in larger quarters than members of the European middle classes do today.
The poorest, most dysfunctional or unfortunate have abundant governmental and charitable supports, but, unfortunately, these supports are not counted in their income status thus exaggerating disparities. Just Medicaid alone is equivalent to around $10,000 of income.
And, of course, income varies over the course of life; down, up and down and maybe up again for many, so statistics do not tell you who is newly poor and who is newly but perhaps only temporarily prosperous.
Of course, one way (if you want to address the statistics alone and ignore the people behind the numbers) to reduce income disparities is just to tax the hell out of the upper 10%. They'll quit working, of course, if they can afford to. Seen many big entrepreneurs in Europe lately?
Barone makes a few good points. Here's one:
...surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That's because, in Ryan's words, "the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers."
In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don't pay income but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.
Politicians love it, because they can pay for votes today, and the next generation can worry about it after they have retired. I can buy a boat today, and hope I keep my job so I can pay it off over the next five years. Or I could buy a tiny 1 BR condo in NY, and pay if off over 15 years while taking an interest deduction from my crippling federal, state, and city income taxes. Businesses need it, in fact, require it, for investment purposes, in the hopes that they can grow. Banks love it, because they can lend the money and profit from the interest. Students love it: they can go to school now, and hope to pay off their loans in the future. Christmas shoppers love it, of course, because Santa is credit.
In the end, using credit makes people, and governments, debt slaves, slaves to bond markets and slaves to banks who offered the loans. This is annoying to debtors, who have already enjoyed spending the money and are peeved, if not in trouble, because they owe it. The bond market now controls the global economy, not because "it" wants to, but because of governments and people willingly, freely, democratically, taking on debt to pay the bills instead of taxing the heck out of the people who work. Borrowing is all voluntary, the loans are from one's neighbors, - and it is a big house of cards.
I was raised by parents who refused to ever go into debt. They viewed it as a temptation for the weak. They never even had a credit card. They saved for 15 years to buy a modest house, and never viewed it as an investment. They made it home, and live there now while the trees they had planted become enormous, dwarfing their home. They have hardly ever gone anywhere, or had much fun or adventure as I think of it, but they love their church and their little town where everybody knows them. A simple life. In my adult life, I have learned to take out loans for no reason, and to pay them back after a few months, just to have a good credit rating. A good credit rating, today, is like a grade in reality living. Someday, I might want to use some credit, but today I do not. I use credit cards as if cash, to keep my rating perfect.
I might need a loan, someday.
Easy money is dangerous. Living within your means, whether as a family or as a government, is just no darn fun. There's always a good excuse or rationale for taking on more debt. I fear that the world will soon see the economic consequences of excessive debt in which everybody has borrowed from his neighbor, and his neighbor from him. A bank, after all, contains nothing but one's neighbor's money, leveraged.
"I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today":
Gee whiz, the banks won't lend them any more money to maintain a fake, debt-based life style. Why would they, if they know it cannot be repaid?
Some of these countries have been, in effect, ripping off gullible lenders just as much as people taking mortgages or student loans who know they can never really pay them unless they get very lucky. It's close to theft, or fraud, or something.
One is tempted to conclude, at this point, that the political theory of the EU today is being written by financiers and financial analysts in their credit reports. They are anxious, after all, only secondarily about markets. They are primarily anxious about governance and structures of governance — because the markets are trying to figure out whether the institutions of the EU and its members are serious about their legal and political commitments, and in what ways and to what
Who cares whether it's hacked? It's government-paid science, isn't it? We paid for this crap. What their emails show is that these guys argue amongst themselves about how to twist and spin to present the data they want people to get. It is disgusting, a major scandal. Somewhat happily, some amongst the cabal actually want to be honest.
I have known science majors and scientists, and they never talked like this about things they were curious about. This is money politics, not science. Sounds more like a Wall Street bond sales meeting than science, to me. "How to we unload this crap to the suckers without totally and permanently compromising our reputations?"
Revkin wants to focus on the hacking, not the content. Well, Watergate was basically a pre-internet hacking, was it not? And Teapot Dome? Our thanks to the mystery hacker who cares more about the truth than these scientists do. I think there will be a third email dump in the future.
"But, gee whiz, we sure have had a lot of weather lately, haven't we? Storms and droughts? Terrible."
The climate alarmists are corrupt and contemptible, but we try to be sympathetic to their scam. They need government grants to pay their mortgages, and we also understand why governments like this stuff - it means more tax income for them. Governments will take tax income anywhere and everywhere. They don't care where it comes from so they will get on board with any "crisis," real or imaginary. (With the MSM in the tank with them: See the NYT's "near-poverty crisis." We are all near poverty, for heaven's sake, unless we work. That's life unless you are on the dole or, on the other end of the bell curve, hit the jackpot and live in Hollywood.)
How many "crises" have governments used to rip us hard-working souls off in the past 30 years? It's always something, if only to justify their existence. Always a crisis to be addressed, and only government experts can deal with it. Who believes that baloney anymore? You can only cry wolf so many times until people learn the game. And you can model anyway you want. That's the beauty of models: you'll be retired when the long-term results come in. Too bad Corzine didn't have time for his models. Neither did Long Term Capital.
I think I'll fly to Paris in my plastic glued-up model of a P-15 I made in 5th grade.
Rahm Emanuel said it best: "Let no crisis go to waste." Meaning, government should grab power at every opportunity. These incompetent, sleazy, professional politicians know best. That's the Chicago Way, the old Big City machine way. It helps them maintain their meal ticket while others work to pay them for attending meetings, lunches, and lobster dinners while picking up chicks. Models, whenever possible, of course.
Of course, most of us at Maggie's would welcome a global warming trend. It would be a blessing to the darn human species, and would lower our heating bills in the Northeastern US.
Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street - Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?
And this: Damn It Feels Good to be a Banker. I'd rather be a kick-ass banker than a Consultant - or an OWS lowlife, but really do not wish to be any of those things:
The recovery of the American Wild Turkey populations, like that of Egrets after the turn of the last century, has been a giant success of intelligent conservation.
Whether you want to shoot 'em and eat 'em, or just look at these huge birds (I like to do both), their resurgence is a great gift to America - thanks to conservation organizations.
The WTF has basically accomplished their goal. Turkeys are everywhere now, and huntable in most places. However, like government programs, non-profits rarely close up shop when their work is done. They tend to find something else to do, if only to keep their jobs. It's a sad fact that Ducks Unlimited still has much of their original mission to accomplish - wild duck populations, and the other wetlands critters that inhabit the habitats that DU protects and rehabilitates - remain far below where they were in years past.
There are a number of species of Wild Turkey in the New World. None native to the Old World.
Photo above: You all know that the males only display like that when they are overcome with love and/or horniness. Photo below: Our Editor-in-Chief Bird Dog (before he gained weight) with a bird in the hand.
Even the NYT can see the Green Energy Scam now. It's a scandal, if not criminal. Freebies to the 1%, and feel-good nonsense for the benighted greenies.
I had a good morning of bird-hunting today. How about you?
Just like Jefferson County, Alabama, you cannot borrow forever, and when you begin borrowing (as we have begun to in the US) to make your interest payments, it's a bad sign, not sustainable unless God intervenes.
In my view, all Euroland can do now is to pray that somebody strikes oil in Provence or Tuscany - and I don't mean olive oil. Problem is, they don't pray over there anymore. I think they are screwed, and it will affect all of us. A slo-mo death spiral.
The Euroland project is in hospice care, it seems to me, on oxygen and IV morphine. There is not enough money available in the world to cover their crappy debt from their crappy, lazy, hyper-regulated welfare states, and they will never be able to pay it back. Never. Furthermore, as my Wall St. friend tells me, defaults will trigger more CDSs than anybody in the world can cover. It's a shit show, as they say.
I would advise getting popcorn to watch the earthquake unfold, but it can hit us in the US with a financial tsunami here, across the pond.
Maggie: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money." She never mentioned that you can run out of credit, too.
David, I am sorry to inform you that Americans have no interest in being ruled by our betters. We just don't believe they are better, and have little evidence for it since after the founders.
William F. Buckley Jr:
I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
Good grief. 44% of NY residents support these smelly low-life losers, bums, perverts, slackers, paranoids, anthropology majors, commie wannabes, community organizers, and potheads? I don't believe it.
The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.
Former Soviet Citizen in Dust Up with the Useful Idiots of OWS (h/t Moonbattery). In my limited experience, Russians and Cubans value freedom more than many Americans do.
As the Left leads America deeper and deeper into a welfare state in which we take money from our neighbors to pay for our personal responsibilities and to cover our losing risks (after government takes its hefty cut, of course), I found this proposal amusing: Free Diapers
At the risk of pissing off most of our readers, I would assert that anyone benefiting from unemployment, mortgage interest deductions, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, government pensions, Social Security, welfare checks, disability, SSI, etc etc is in diapers.
I am sick of that old "I paid into it" line. Maybe you were fooled into thinking you did, but you did not. I never hear any gratitude from the recipients, just endless demands for more money to be extracted from the shrinking pool of taxpayers - who I term "neighbors" because that is who they are.
They told you that you did, that you did pay into it and deserve it, and they told you that fiction so you would feel entitled to it and eternally grateful to "government" - not to your neighbor - for supplying it. However, you did not pay into "it." There is no "it" there, to distort Gertrude Stein. There is no money there, waiting to be used. It's just all borrowed from the Chinese, who will soon own the USA as a semi-dysfunctional subsidiary - a "distressed asset."
We Americans should be ashamed of ourselves, or at least own up to our condition in which dependency has become socially and politically acceptable instead of being viewed as charity. It's not the way our tough ancestors lived, and mine led fine, honorable, sacrificial, difficult lives as far as I know, without expecting anything from anybody except spouse, family, and neighborly helping. Good lives, no mooching.
In America, they put you into diapers, sooner or later, whether you want the freebies or not. Most people welcome the freebies, because, however undignified, it's human nature and we want to convince ourselves that we are entitled to it, somehow, to rationalize our sponging off of others and to reduce the shame of dependency in adulthood. I suppose I would accept the money too were I in dire straights, but I would not feel good about it because I would know that it is taken from my neighbor - not voluntarily, but by force. That's the plan - a nation of dependents. It might be the European Way, the Serfdom Way, but I do not think of it as the American Way.
All of this weakens our people, our nation, our spirit, and our backbone. It is designed to do that. It is a political strategy.
It's a shame Ron Paul is such a (partial) nutjob. A shame that Cain doesn't know what he is talking about, compared with your average Maggie's reader.
Yesterday, Buffett declined the request of a Republican congressman to swap tax returns and reiterated his pledge to publish the form if other billionaires would do the same.
The Congressional Research Service report found that, on average, millionaires paid federal tax at a 30 percent rate, while moderate-income taxpayers, defined as those earning less than $100,000, were taxed at 19 percent.
The overall average, though, “obscures a great deal of variation,” including the finding that 25 percent of millionaires pay lower rates than 10 percent of moderate earners, the report found.
The findings “would be considered a violation of the Buffett Rule, but not to the extent alluded to by Mr. Buffett,”the report says.
The numbers are, of course, the effective rates (ie after deductions), not the marginal rates.
Here is the story. In 1929, we had a top marginal tax rate of 24% on all income over $100,000. And, according to Historical Statistics of the United States, the federal government took in almost $1.1 billion that year from income taxes. In 1935, after FDR successfully enacted a 79% tax on multimillionaires, the federal revenue from income taxes had been more than cut in half, down to $527 million. Granted, we were in a Great Depression in 1935, but that is in part because we were steadily adding new taxes and raising taxes on income from 1929 to 1935, and those rate hikes helped cause and perpetuate the Great Depression. Why should entrepreneurs invest and take risks when they have to turn more than half of what they might make over to the government?
During World War II, FDR further expanded the federal government. He did not let that crisis go to waste. On taxes, he eventually raised marginal tax rates on the rich to 94% on all income over $200,000. In making the case for huge tax hikes on the rich, Roosevelt’s supporters argued in Congress that government had the first claim on the wealth people earned. On March 30, 1943, Rep. Emanuel Celler (D.-N.Y.) argued, “The government can at any time make income taxes as thumping big as the necessities of war require. Thus, if any plan does not raise enough money, taxes can at any time be increased. The government always has a moral if not actual lien on all our income.”
"Wall Street's Gullible Occupiers. The protesters have been sold a bill of goods. Reckless government policies, not private greed, brought about the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis." One quote:
Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007.
Read the whole thing. The government essentially forced lenders into the subprime markets and to violate their own lending standards. Naturally, they didn't want these crappy loans on their books, so they packaged them as derivatives and sold them to eager buyers worldwide (unaccountably rated triple A when any fool could see that they were below investment-grade). With that, combined with low interest rates and people using their suddenly-valuable homes as ATMs, the housing and construction debt-bubble was created and inevitably burst.
Why the world's financial geniuses didn't see it coming is beyond me. Everybody on the internet saw it coming. All bubbles burst, but this was a biggie-sized one just like the internet bubble. Based on my reading, I had shorted housing-related equities, did not buy my living quarters which I could not have afforded anyway, and made out like a bandit. It was just too easy, even for an amateur. Call me greedy.
Of course, the rest of my quite modest portfolio did horribly. Equity baskets have been a bad bet for many years now. Munis stink too. Sorry I didn't buy gold, but I always thought gold was for end-of-the-world nutjobs.
I am no economist nor do I play one on the internet, but my take on things today is that fear of government is part of what is holding back investment in the US. That, plus people freaking out about their debt - and their lower-to-zero incomes.
It is not particularly mature to blame banks who were willing to lend you money, though, even when they perhaps doubted your ability to repay it. An adult who takes on debt is supposed to be an honorable citizen who will repay that debt, or have their credit and reputation ruined for ten years or more. Employers check your credit rating.
My only debts are my student loans which were such a good deal that I am in no hurry to pay them all off, as long as my career proceeds on course. However, periodically I borrow money from my local bank or my credit cards. Small amounts - $5000-10,000 - then pay it back after a couple of months. I use that trick to keep my credit rating up to date and in good shape (I rent). One of these days, I will really use my credit card to take a good girlfriend or future spouse on a bike tour around Sicily.
Apparently, most of the protesters are white, middle class kids who somehow got the idea that the world owes them something because they had the remarkable privilege of attending college.
Quite the opposite: they owe us something in return for all they have been indulged. Surber says Occupy Wall Street? Grow up. He lived in a trailer when a young adult. What's wrong with that? Everybody should have to.
I lived in one room over a grocery shop, on beans, macaroni and cheese, cheap beer, and no-brand cigarettes when I got out of college, and I felt independent and happy despite having a go-fer job at a slowly-dying country newspaper, for minimum wage. Boo hoo. It took me 6 years of farting around while broke to make a good plan for my life.
And here's a good idea, children: Go march on Washington - It’s the real author of our woes. Protest Obama! Oh, almost forgot - MoveOn is providing financial support to these losers so they can't protest the government. So why not Evil Big Corporations instead? Yeah, they're the bad guys this time.
As best I can tell, these kids want fun jobs with no heavy lifting - and they also want money - my money. I guess they didn't get the memo that their Obama's economy is not generating jobs and investment. If they had any sense, they'd be out there trying to figure out how to start a business or to make themselves useful to somebody.
I am half-disgusted with myself for giving these spoiled brats any of our precious bandwidth since it's really a media-ginned-up story, but I had to get it off my chest. As a New Yorker, I can report that these people are having essentially zero impact on our vibrant life in Manhattan except when they walk on a bridge and mess up the traffic from Brooklyn. It might get a little more amusing and colorful when the union thugs join the stoners and losers. Perfect together!
Almost forgot one item: the cops are getting good OT for the babysitting. It's good for their incomes, so there is some benefit for the good guys.
We are blessed with all of our thoughtful, brainy, and often amusing commenters, but new commenter "Ten" (near the bottom of the comments) took the time to give our Maggie's Farmer fishing pro Capt. Tom a good whuppin' on the topic of space exploration.
Happily, Capt. Tom took it with good humor. Like most us here, he is a just plain happy fellow.
This is the sort of thing
How come 99% of the people shopping in the malls, at Macy's, etc. are either overweight or plain fat? 
I love the old phrase: "We have the answer. Now what was the question again?"
Those greedy 1%ers (household AGI $350,000 and up) are Hollywood and Broadway actors, rock and hip-hop stars, sports stars, popular writers, entrepreneurs, TV people, fancy restaurant owners, artists, theater impresarios, prosperous small business owners, some accountants and portfolio managers, opera stars, the CEOs of big businesses, neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, and some other high-income medical specialists, NYT columnists, college presidents, retired politicians, law partners, real estate magnates, and a few high-level investment bankers.
As the Left leads America deeper and deeper into a welfare state in which we take money from our neighbors to pay for our personal responsibilities and to cover our losing risks (after government takes its 
Apparently, most of the protesters are white, middle class kids who somehow got the idea that the world owes them something because they had the remarkable privilege of attending college.