Moonbat Night Raises My Blood Pressure (A Rant)

I've mentioned occasionally that Friday night is Moonbat Nite here at El Casa Móvil De Pennington, wherein we take Sun Tzu to heart and watch PBS' two flagship Lefty shows, "Now" and "Bill Moyers Journal."  Or as much of those two shows as we can stomach... which hasn't been much, lately.  But last night's Now episode was pretty good, featuring a decent show on the Taliban in Pakistan.  I watched that with great interest...

Moyers, OTOH, was his typical proto-socialist self in his own quiet, smug, and supremely irritating way.  Last evening's show amounted to a one hour rant on eeevil Wall Street Bankers and other assorted Capitalist Pigs and how they devote their lives to doing nothing but raking in piles o' money while perverting our political system and gleefully screwing decent working class Americans.  Moyers' guests were David Corn and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones Magazine... and Mssrs Corn and Drum brought their collective wrong-headed opinions about what ails America to Moyers' table.  

These two twits proceeded to pontificate on their pet theories for the hour, egged on by Moyers in his self-assigned role as journalistic elder statesman, in what I consider to be a supremely paternalistic and patronizing way.  If that idjit talked to me in that manner I'd deck him.  But that's just me.   

All that aside, the stupidest shit I heard last night was this:

KEVIN DRUM: And remember one thing is that over the last 20-30 years, people have been told over and over and over again that the economy is doing well. The economy's doing great. The Dow is up. And yet, they themselves, most of them, aren't actually making more money. Median wages have hardly gone up at all in the last 30 years. So, you've got all these people who aren't really making any more money. They're treading water. And yet, everywhere they turn, they're being told the economy's doing well. And they start, I think, a lot of people start to blame themselves. They wonder, "If the economy's doing so well, how come I'm not doing better? It must be me." And what they don't see is, no, it's not them. It's the way the system works.

Do you know anyone who's been locked in place... in the same job, making the same money... for the last 30 years?  I certainly don't.  Let's go back 30 years...

Thirty years ago I was a TSgt (E-6) making $15,238.80 a year.  (I have no inhibitions about revealing my military salary as it's a matter of public record.)  About $3800.00 of that amount were non-taxable allowances, so you could effectively add approximately $700.00 or so to my gross to account for the tax I didn't have to pay on my allowances... which gives you a whopping $16K, nearly.  I supported a wife and two kids on that salary.  That $16K would be worth $45,208.59 today when one allows for inflation.  Today I knock down over 75% of that inflation-adjusted amount by doing nothing other than collecting my pensions.  I also managed to increase my income by a factor of nine in the years between 1979 and my retirement in 2002 or nearly tripled it, if one adjusts for inflation yet again (i.e., take that $45K in 2008 dollars and multiply it by 3).  The economy treated me pretty damned well, thank you very much, and don't think for a moment I'm the Lone Ranger in this regard.  

So I take issue with Drum's asinine assertion about median wages remaining stagnant for this period of time.  That may be true in a strict definitive way, but there ain't anyone in America... assuming they possess a normal amount of intelligence and motivation... who makes a median wage for 30 straight years without raises, promotions, or changing jobs.   No one.  There are "lies, damned lies, and statistics;" Drum is definitely playing that game.

One other thing.  Let's not talk about what the financial crash did to my 401(k) last year.  I'm pretty pissed about that... even though I recovered about half my losses in 2009... and I ain't the Lone Ranger here, either.  So... in one small way I kinda-sorta agree with Corn and Drum about Wall Street malfeasance, especially when it comes to bundling and selling trillions of dollars in risky derivatives based on sub-prime mortgages.  But Wall Street ain't the only villain in that movie... I blame scurvy dog mortgage underwriters, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bill Clinton, Dubya, Alan Greenspan, and... most of all... those stupid damned people who took out mortgages they KNEW they couldn't afford.  Thanks, guys.

I think mebbe I should watch movies on Friday nights from now on.