Worst. Column. Ever.

Bitch

The other day when I checked my email inbox, I noticed a friend had sent me a link to an Op-Ed written by a woman named Terry Savage at the Chicago Sun-Times. I am both glad and sorry that I read it. Glad because I now know that Terry Savage exists, but also sad because I now know that Terry Savage exists.

In her column Savage proudly recounts how she berated three little girls at a lemonade stand. Their crime? They were giving away lemonade for free.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs—how much the lemonade costs, and the cups—and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

There is something sinister in wanting to disabuse small children of the notion that giving is good and telling them basically that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing for money.

Then, using her sharp inductive reasoning, Savage concludes,

The kids are learning from the society around them. No one has ever taught them there’s no free lunch—and all they see is “free,” not the result of hard work, and saving, and scrimping.

Believe me, Terry, I think I can speak for all people under thirty years of age when I say that we got the fucking message on this one. Not only do we know that nothing’s free, we also know that we are going to be worse off than your generation, which to reiterate, is the most selfish generation in history. I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to collect a Social Security check even though I currently pay into it. And I don’t know what Medicare will look like by the time I’m sixty-five, but I’m sure it will be there for you in the twelve years you have to go. Asshole.

The arrogance and cluelessness of Baby Boomers never ceases to amaze me. If young people today are learning from the society around them, where exactly are they getting the impression that shit is free? Personally, I’m in student loan debt up to my eyeballs, I can’t afford health insurance, and home ownership is a total fantasy for me right now. And that goes for millions of people my age and younger. We hold no illusions about any of this.

Boomers don’t want to admit it, but their kids have it tougher than they did—way tougher. My father—a Boomer—was able to go to college full-time while paying for it with a part-time job. There was no loan, no debt. That’s unimaginable today. What’s also unimaginable today for younger people is buying a house that they won’t be paying off until the end of time. Even with the recent drop in real estate prices over the last four years, home prices still exceed what they were thirty years ago in terms of inflation adjusted dollars. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated, benefits have been slashed, public services have been cut, and people like Savage and Baby Boomer tea partiers are calling for more punishment. For example, Nevada senate candidate and quintessential teabagger Sharron Angle has called for the elimination of the Department of Education and wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare, presumably after she’s eligible for those programs. And a good case can be made for scrapping them. Those programs are in trouble thanks to the Boomers who continue to sap their funding, so Boomers want to do away with them, but gradually. After all, they don’t want to send themselves up the river with no paddle.

Here’s one more awful sentence from Savage:

And so the voters demand more—more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.

Ironically (or maybe expectedly), Terry Savage supported the bank bailouts (TARP) in 2008. That means according to Savage, it is ok for the government to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that were struggling due to their own insatiable greed and risk appetite, but it is not ok for children to hand out free lemonade because it sends the message there is such a thing as a free lunch.

That sounds about right. It’s nice to see that the business pundits are once again bashing the American people for thinking they should be cut some slack. I mean who do these American citizens think they are? AIG? Citigroup? Memo to the unwashed masses: Welfare and bailouts are for businesses, not for you. At least, that’s what Terry Savage seems to think.

Newsflash: Millions Of Americans Stupid, Southerners Dumber Than Most

On Monday the Boston Globe published the ugly results of a survey asking Americans from which country the United States gained independence:

Twenty-six percent of those surveyed did not know that the United States achieved its independence from Great Britain, according to the poll, conducted by the nonprofit Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

Six percent named a different country, including France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain. Twenty percent said they weren’t sure.

The pollsters broke down the numbers and found gaps in knowledge according to region: 32 percent of Southerners weren’t sure or named the wrong country; 26 percent of Midwesterners were in the same category, as were 25 percent of Westerners and 16 percent of Northeasterners.

Well imagine that, the South has the highest percentage of ignoramuses in the country. Nearly a third can’t answer what is arguably the most basic American history question. You know, I don’t knock Southerners because I think we here in the Northeast are better; I knock Southerners because they think they’ve cornered the market on everything from morality to individualism. You hear it in their rhetoric: they’re the “real America,” not like us East Coast Elitists who exist only to undermine their traditional American values and kowtow to terrorists.

I was going to write a longer post on this, but then I remembered that everything I wanted to say has already been said—quite beautifully might I add—on fuckthesouth.com

P.S. I have decided that from this point on, I will refer to the American Civil War as Lincoln’s Folly.

- Max