Thursday, December 09, 2010

“I Want My Tax Hike!”

How many bigoted, condescending caricatures can Tom Friedman jam into one paragraph?

More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and will be leaving them in a few months. What to do?
Just a little reminder to the reader, that all of the characters, strange ethno-stereotypes, theories, evidence, and conclusions arrived to... are entirely hypothetical.

Which makes any paragraph after it that expounds on it superfluous.
One strategy would be to hunker down, don’t spend a dime on anything other than food, the mortgage and paying off their credit card debts. They would get by, but there’s not much future in it. Another strategy would be to borrow against their life insurance policies to make up for the loss of income, keep living like they’re living, and hope that the husband’s job comes back before his unemployment checks run out.
Bear in mind this is supposed to be an example used as an analogue for the path of a nation.

Mr. Friedman, despite all evidence, is a professional writer, and an Opinion-editorialist for the New York Times. It is assumed that he lives in the United States, and might be familiar with American social life. The subject of his column of yesterday was supposed to be about the failed effort of the Obama administration to raise the taxes to continue fuelling the expansion of the Federal Government, which the left has grown from 20% to 25% of GDP during a recession.

Elsewhere: Marxist twat lionized.

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