Monday, August 17, 2009

pitying the Joneses

It happens a lot these days, it seems: millions of people lose their jobs, thousands pack the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps. event in Los Angeles because they can't afford basic health care, seniors choose between their drugs and their heat, others find themselves needing food stamps for the first time in their lives just as the government cuts funding for the program, but the Washington Post wants me to feel sorry for a woman in a $2.5 million house, a woman who pays her nanny more than my annual salary and receives more than twice my salary in child support.

What the writer calls "standard of living," the rest of us call "conspicuous consumption."

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