Originally Posted by
The Famous Grouse
That's a great though, NH.
I think one of our biggest problems in American today is simply an addiction to affluance, to be honest. Now I know someone out there is winding up to send me down in flames with a "that's fine if you're rich" reply, but let me explain.
I've been fortunate enough to take a few trips to some interesting places on this planenet and it's given me a small bit of insight: The rest of the world, on average, doesn't have even half of the comforts and luxuries that we enjoy here. Even the poorest of the poor in America have it far, far, far better than the middle class in a few of the places I've visited. Really, by a world standard, we have no poor in the US.
But that level of affluance has given us as a nation, for both good and bad, a set of expectations about how things should be and for us as Americans our expectation is that things should alwasy get bigger, better, faster, cheaper, and we should always make more and eat more. Is that ever going to be sustainable?
Sometimes we just need to take a step back and say even with $4 a gallon gas and a subprime mortgage crisis, do we really have it all that damn bad? IMO, no, not when you look at what people went through during our country's history.
I read somewhere a few weeks ago that if gas had kept pace with inflation between 1950 and 2008, we should be all rights be paying over $5 a gallon. Now I don't know if that's right or not, but I've read many similar things over the years in various car magazines, so I suspect it's roughly accurate.
Grouse
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