This week the same brief newscast featured two "stories." First, a report even the mainstream called "shocking:" one in four of the homeless (those sleeping on the street or in shelters on an average night) are veterans. I wonder what the number would be if we counted their wives, ex-wives and children.
About a minute later came a short feature about a $25,000 dessert concocted by a New York restaurant; one which probably doesn't serve the homeless. We probably haven't had this sort of extreme contrast since wealthy Londoners used special Sterling silver spoons to extract marrow from roasted bones during their nine-course banquets, while skinny and starving six-year-olds climbed and cleaned their chimneys, motivated by fires lighted to urge them upward.
This is a moral outrage--but it's also extremely poor financial planning by our national leaders. You cannot have a consumer-based economy (and by the way, in my opinion "consumer" is a very demeaning term--I'm not a consumer, I am a citizen) if most of the would-be consumers have no money because they don't have good jobs, health care or savings. As we see.
Even if they invest in Sterling silver marrow spoons and $25,000 desserts, the very wealthy can't buy enough of them to keep us all afloat. Even Karl Marx and Henry Ford understood that.