2009 or Bust
So it’s over. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, New Year’s. The end of the year orgy of holidays. It’s time to stop partying and settle down to serious work.
A lot of people go into the holiday season with the best of intentions. They’ve been living mostly paycheck to paycheck but they’ve managed to pay down the credit card balances a little bit and they plan to be a little conservative and make it through to the end of the year responsibly. They splurge a little bit on Halloween costumes for the kids, but it’s not anything they can’t put right before buying the turkey. Except that the price of candy, for the trick or treaters, takes them a little by surprise. Then their brother-in-law gets “downsized” and needs to borrow a little bit to keep going, and as Christmas comes sliding towards the chimney they find themselves not only buying presents for their own kids but putting a little extra towards their nieces and nephews to make sure that they don’t feel left out while Daddy looks for a new job. Then January rolls around and the credit card statements come in and the real hangover begins.
So here it is, 2009. We’ve had eight years of the Bush regime. They started out cautiously enough but pretty soon Haliburton was feeling poorly and needed a little something to tide them over. Then they made it through reelection and managed to make sure that businesses everywhere had enough credit to carry them through. Money was flowing freely to everyone in the top one percent of the income brackets and to the companies that put them there, even if it trickled down even less now then when Reagan first proposed his “voodoo economics.”
And now President Obama gets to open the credit card statements. I don’t envy him, but I do thank God that despite decades of Republicans telling us we don’t need intellectuals, we’ve finally elected somebody that I can clearly point to and say, “He’s smarter than I am.”
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