Out in the Street

For a few years here I've been screaming to people that you know, you are closer to ending up on the street than you are to becoming some uber-millionaire a la Bush etc. I think there's a LOT of voters that see someone like Bush/McCain, dudes that are super-rich, and they think that you know what, if I keep voting for them, I'll somehow end up like them. Which is the Babe Ruth of mirages.

"Keep voting for me, so I get richer, and maybe you will too!"

Forgetting, of course, that neither of these men's (Bush/McCain, for example) generations had anything to do with their own prosperity. The fact is, as I said before, you have a greater chance of mishandling your mortgage payment and ending up on the street than you do hitting the lottery and ending up like those that you aspire to be via the polls.

I've said this repeatedly here on this blog; but for some reason what Matthew Yglesias mentioned a while ago struck me as being relative:

If somebody was trying to sell you a $7 hamburger, you might get upset and complain that it cost “nearly $10″ but you certainly wouldn’t complain that it cost “nearly $300 billion.” And yet, $7 is closer to $300 billion than $700 billion is to $1 trillion.

There's a connection there somewhere. If enough people realized how close they were to being thrown out into the street as opposed to being heirs to some unattainable throne, we might be in better shape than we are now.

And hell, just for kicks, my fave Xmas moment of all time:


“That’s right, $10 for me, or $25 for all three of us. No kissing on the mouth.”