Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Aug 08, 2008, 06:07AM

Financially Obese

The "recession" is all over the media lately, but we're not exactly hiding our money in mattresses. The new Batman movie just broke box-office records, sports stadiums are full, and we still spend more money on fast food than we do on the Iraq war. Has the economic crisis really set in if we're not facing up to the financial belt-tightening we all need?

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Photo by Randy Son Of Robert

The fact that our economy has dropped $400 million on a single movie in that short amount of time and the fact that stadiums around the country are still filled to capacity for baseball games (unless you're a Nationals fan) are but two very un-recessional symptoms in our economy. Throw on a quickly-simmering presidential campaign, and it almost begins to feel like the good old days again.

That, despite soaring foreclosure rates, a nose-diving dollar and a staggering rise in prices on everything from fuel to groceries. You'd almost be hard pressed to notice that there's an economic downturn in attendance unless someone told you so, and there's no shortage of that.

A nation that can't make its mortgage payments, but has spare cash enough to set records for theater proceeds: Seems a bit odd, doesn't it?

Moreover, a nation that spends more per year on fast food than on supporting their troops in a war in a certain foreign country, all the while demanding a handout from the government in order to pay for the mortgage they never should have gotten in the first place. Seems a bit disgraceful, doesn't it?

The essential question is this: If we Americans really are in as much financial trouble as the news media and the politicians tell us we are, then why aren't we showing it? Where are the soup lines, the bread kitchens and the "Will work for food" placards? Certainly, judging from recent observable events, we show no signs of treating our money any more responsibly than we did before. For instance, Americans currently hold nearly $1 trillion of revolving debt - mostly in the form of credit card accounts - and show few or no signs of halting that binge.

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