Something funny happened on the way to middle class Nirvana for millions of American families.
An alternate title for this entry is "Here I Go Rambling Again."
I can't quite put my finger how this happened, but suddenly, every family in suburban America lives in a mansion and drives a luxury car or even owns two. Where I live (in the Northeast), everyone is sending their children to private school.
People of average means (including myself) regularly take expensive, ambitious vacations overseas that our parents and grandparents never dreamed of.
The American middle class lifestyle is no longer a culture of consumption. It is a culture of luxury consumption. Our middle class has adopted the tastes of an aristocratic class. And the mentality of one, too.
And our middle class just can't afford to do it.
Yadda, yadda. We always talk about skyrocketing consumer debt, but we never talk about the underlying cultural changes that have brought this about. We know that the American middle class is financing a pretty extravagant lifestyle by means of credit cards, but we don't know why this is.
Something funny is happening. Middle class Americans have skyrocketing expectations about the kind of life that can they can lead -- in an economy where they are not significant wealth-holders. The fact of the matter is that middle class Americans own less of the wealth in America than they have in previous generations.
This generation is worse-equipped than the previous one to lead a life of wanton excess than previous ones ... and yet we're still doing it.
We are spending like spending is going out of style.
One of the big, hysterical lies pushed by people like Grover Norquist is that programs like Social Security and Medicare are running out of money and that they have to be privatized to be saved. To me, Social Security privatization simply means Social Security elimination.
Where will we end up, if Republicans succeed in stripping society of programs like Social Security and Medicare? Thirty years from now, a generation of Americans will enter retirement unprepared for the financial demands of supporting themselves without working.
Burdened with debts from a lifetime of luxury-class consumption, will we be able to fund our own twilight years?
And what is the general impact of the ever-heightening lifestyle expectations of the American middle class?