Marie Antoinette is back on her play farm.
"I’m enjoying this," said Becky Martin, 52, who has cut up her 10 credit cards, borrows movies from the library instead of renting them, and grows her own fruits and vegetables — even though her family is comfortable.
...
"It’s a chance to pass along the frugal lifestyle that my mother gave to me," she says, noting that her sensibilities seem to be rubbing off not just on her sons, but also on her husband. "We’re on the same page financially for the first time in years, and it’s fabulous."
Isn't Ms. Martin brave -- smiling through the tears!?
Isn't she amazing!? With all this misery around here, she's able to "enjoy it all."
Well, not quite:
Ms. Martin is a real estate investor, her husband is a plastic surgeon, and their home sits on the 12th hole of a Cincinnati country club.
Oh.
Okay ...
Leave it to the New York Times to lecture us on how exciting being poor is. We get to shop for new clothes at stylish, yet thrifty boutiques! Stylists -- yes stylists -- will assist us in figuring out which of this years tremendously affordable fashions suit us best!
Gee!
Being poor turns out to be a lot of fun!
And -- not only that ...
It is a unique opportunity reassess your values.
Yes, it's true:
Wall St. might have done you a favor. By bankrupting the country and filling their pockets with all that is left, they provided you a unique opportunity to examine your values!
Do you think ...
Do you think ...
Do you think anybody at the New York Times has any idea that maybe, just maybe, it really sucks to be poor? It sucks to be unemployed. It sucks to have no insurance. It sucks to have a house in foreclosure.
Being poor is not about recycling expensive organic dishrags or meeting with stylists to help you plan next year's attire.
Jesus Christ.
Marie Antoinette set up her little farm at Versailles and played at being a milkmaid to show France's starving peasants that their lives were not so bad after all -- even a queen would live as they live!
All the same, the peasants despised her.
As she said to her attendant:
"Come, Leonard, dress my hair, I must go like an actress, exhibit myself to the public that they may hiss at me!"
You know, I feel like hissing.
I admit that the New York Times article redeems itself at the end:
Indeed, economists call it the Paradox of Thrift. While saving is desirable, if everyone does it then consumption falls, businesses fail and the economy grinds to a halt. Professor Olney, from Berkeley, said that the increased rate of savings would most likely slow down the pace of recovery but she also said that a higher savings rate was not inconsistent with a strong economy; from the 1950s to the early 1980s, the savings rate hovered around 9 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
And it does provide valuable links for those of us who, you know, actually have no income and for whom being thrifty isn't a fashion trend or a game!
But the real paradox here is less about thrift, but about declining incomes and the declining share of wealth earned and owned by the working person in this country.
It seems more and more clear to me that Barack Obama intends to "right-size" the economy, through measures designed to 1) decrease consumer dependency on credit, 2) increase the personal savings rate and 3) make American wages competitive with wages abroad.
Without a corresponding "righting" of the income and wealth gap in this country, we're going to be doing a lot more than giggling over coupon-cutting parties at our country club McMansions. We'll need government to take action to make sure that the average working family doesn't become the average poor family as the system downsizes.
And we'll need a dramatic increase in the strength of our social safety net as well.
All the frugality in the world is not enough substitute for government policies that watch over the economic interests of the many, as opposed to the few.