Whiny Crybaby Americans

Yesterday Phil Gramm, former senator, proclaimed that Americans are a bunch of whiners. The exact quote isn’t as bad as the media portrays and of course both Presidential candidates jumped on it too. Why is it that when the truth hurts we run to mommy? Gramm could not be more correct.

America has turned into a clan of greedy, me-too, one-uppers. We work too hard and spend too little time with our families for what? So we can get a bigger house than we need, drive a car that we don’t need, send our kids to schools they don’t need, and get the American Dream that we don’t need. You know that dream of owning a house and all that crap that we are fed by the media and then when it doesn’t happen it’s another story for the never full media Godzilla. I wish we were still in the ‘50’s. One person worked, kids grew up at home and not in daycare, a household had one car, and whole families lived in, gasp, a 1,200 sf house. There were no cell phones, people didn’t spend time watching TV because it didn’t exist, no email or voicemail, and the appliances you bought lasted longer than two years. Families even saved money.

Nowadays everyone wants everything yesterday. Kids out of school get a job and immediately want a new car. People get married and go house hunting the next day. You realize your neighbor has bigger rims so you throw yours in the trash and go buy some spinners. I still think the invention of the credit card and it’s proliferation through all of society has caused this. On top of that, the easier it was to get something the easier it is to be tired of it and want something else.

I’m not sure if this is due to bad parenting or not. I don’t think it is taught to kids but if those same kids were involved in the finances of the household they would be the first to ask “How do you buy that if we don’t have the money?” It’s more of a learned trait than a taught lesson. I have read so many cry baby stories about people who bought a house and now they are getting foreclosed on. Unless you lost a job, there should be no reason to lose your house. If you do, you couldn’t afford it in the first place. Here is a perfect example http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/10/news/economy/rios/index.htm?postversion=2008071014 a woman who makes 25k a year bought a 400k+ home. REALLY? And I am supposed to feel sorry for her? Her “Low payment” was 4,100. Do the math, that’s 49,200 a year. I didn’t take Calculus II but I think that’s more than her yearly salary. It wasn’t the real estate agents fault it was her own fault! We aren’t in a recession, we are in a brain-cession.
We need to stop looking to the govt for help. Neither candidate is going to do anything for you. You need to do something for yourself. We need to go back to basics. What’s important and what isn’t. We are a bunch of whiners. We whine about everything (Yours truly excluded. I get a free pass) and anything and we get ourselves into a load of shit and always expect someone to pull us out. We need to make the changes at home and there needs to be a paradigm shift in America but I doubt that will ever happen. Maybe now that things are more expensive, people will have to decide if they need two cars or all the crap they buy. Once they make those changes, just like corporations did after 9/11, they may realize they don’t need all those things and once their situation turns around they will be in great shape. Yeah right.

Gift Cards Part Deux

I was listening to the best morning show in the world when they started talking about a topic I have ranted on before. The biggest scam in business. No, not oil companies making a profit (God forbid) or Google buying the US government. No, it’s gift cards. Remember when a gift card was actually a gift certificate? Remember when you spent $18 of the $20 on the certificate and you got two bucks back? Everyone knows why you don’t get change (So you spend more then the card is originally. I have touched on all this before but I neglected to mention another hypocrisy. For accounting purposes (flip your Firefox to youtube if you don’t care about money or math) a business cannot count that gift card as income until it is used. So technically it is not even their money that they are keeping from you. It is stuck in electronic purgatory like the bully holding your lunch money over your head while you jump around like a meth head.

The interesting part is that after two years they are able to start taking a percentage of the balance of cards each month. Needless to say there are millions of dollars of unclaimed gift card balances each year. Of course no one in govt is willing to bring this up as an issue except for California where Arnold has proposed legislation to require balances be returned in cash when they reach a certain level. I am sure that the Dems in the CA assembly will suggest those balances go into the General Fund but that’s a whole other column.