You read a lot about criminals who incriminate themselves with social media, but what about police who do themselves no favors?
Milbank on the end of the era of Beck.
Kristof on irony. He's spot on. I'm not thrilled about the prospect of a forced unpaid vacation, but I'll manage it. I know that had it happened when I first got out of grad school, I'd have had trouble paying my rent, and I'm more concerned about people in that situation. I'm definitely going to cut down on spending to the extent that I can--my monthly payment eats about 72 percent of my paycheck, not including utilities--but I'd rather cut back than see an EPA eviscerated and reproductive rights trampled on. Anyway, here's more on spending hypocrisy.
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Having finally taking the extra steps of organizing all of our accounts and making firm budgets for a family working w/ two possible future scenarios: that we aren't able to have anymore kids or that we end up giving birth to twins, I'm realizing that we're blaming the gov't for something most of us as a country can't do: That is handle a budget. My head is about done in after 3 weeks of working with our own family budgets. I've had to re-educate myself, renegotiate with my husband, reset goals -- I mean finances are supposed to be boring, but it's been really, really insane. And I'll tell you in the 3 kids scenario, we had to get brutal with her charitable giving and with the hypothetical kids college fund as well. We had to make unhappy compromises and give up luxuries that we thought we'd always have. In the no more kids scenario we can afford to be way more generous to ourselves, our daughter, and the world in general. I can't help but compare our experience with what is going on now. If we want more kids, then you have to give up all of these luxuries. If you want to fully support our ideals, then then we can't have any more kids.
I worry that many Americans along with being financially selfish (don't cut MY programs, but don't tax me for like anything) just don't have good financial sense. And that makes us ... how can I say this -- perhaps not the best constituency. I worry that we as a people aren't acknowledging our part in this current debacle. Somehow it's all the government's fault, even though we as a nation on average are financially ignorant, seem incapable of agreeing to certain sacrifices, blame the government and those outside of ourselves for everything.
For example, I live near a metro line and would really like to be able to zip to the beach on this metro as opposed to driving hours on our infamously congested highways. However, I understand that because my property and state taxes are rarely raised and because we're benefitting from the Bush tax cuts that I'm going to have to suffer a nearly two hour drive back from the beach during rush hour traffic from now on, b/c the money that could be used toward this hypothetical train is going towards other things, some of which I support, some of which I don't. But basically the more money not going out of my pocket toward taxes, the less money going toward the stuff I want for myself and my family like CalGrants for my daughter's college education and Metro services and an at-home-care stipend if my MIL gets sick. So we have to save more for my daughter's education and put more money into our emergency fund and pay more money to get to the beach. I get that. But from what I'm observing with our own budget debacles here, most Californians don't get this.
I come back to your statement about what you're going to do to curb your own spending, and I fear that most Americans won't respond to the current fiscal crisis in this way. I fear that we're all going to complain about furloughs and not getting our tax returns, rather than fixing our own budgets to protect ourselves against these surprise events. Basically, I think this entire recession is a a learning moment for all Americans, and we're really not learning anything from it, except that congress (which sucks almost as bad as we do at budgeting) should be blamed for all of our financial woes as opposed to our own voting trends, lack of planning, and unwillingness to budget our own dang selves.
It's gotten to the point that if a person is middle to upper class and they don't have a budget of their own, then I don't want to hear anything they have to say about the current fiscal crises.
This is not to say that Congress is blameless, but hey, where are the op-eds talking about where the American people went wrong.
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