A friend just emailed me:
I had a guy actually tell me that he doesn’t believe that the middle class is faultering because he sees big screen TV’s in his friends’ houses.
Big screen teevees aren’t that expensive (here is a tv-related product that is expensive, it’s called cable). When and why did they become such a potent symbol of American prosperity and/or decadence?
Joey Maloney
They’re just flailing. It was cell phones long past the point when you could buy one in the supermarket for ten bucks.
Mike
Back when they were expensive, I’m sure. Old habits die hard.
A week or so ago, I heard that NWA song with “F*&kin with me cuz I’m a teenager with a little bit of gold and a pager” and remembered that at that time (1988 or so), owning a pager was a symbol of havin something going on. A few years later it was a portable phone.
Zam
Fuck every college student I know has one now.
Roger Moore
The problem is that their memes are out of date. Yes, mobile phones and big screen TVs used to be very expensive, but that was 15 or 20 years ago. Now they’re reasonably priced. This should let you know about how far behind the times the pundits actually are.
edmund dantes
Because if you are poor, you shouldn’t have it nice. You should suffer for your sins.
Corner Stone
Tangentially related, and right in your wheelhouse DougJ, but who in the hell are those commercials for The New York Times “The Weekender Package” supposed to be selling to?
“I’m fluent in 3 sections, actually.”
I intensely dislike every one of the people in that commercial.
Corner Stone
@Joey Maloney: The people in soup kitchen lines had a cel phone and the wingnuts freaked out.
Corner Stone
Lots of people on this very blog will castigate you for having any TV at all, much less a nice new $1000 one.
I’ve had my eye on a Sharp 46″ LED for about a year now but have failed to pull the trigger. My 8 year old 32″ Toshiba keeps turning on every time I push the button.
Sigh.
Comrade DougJ
@Corner Stone:
I hate them too. I hate all that NYT weekend shit.
Roger Moore
@Mike:
Yeah. The big question is not when big screen TVs became a symbol of decadence. The question is why they’re still a symbol of decadence years after they became as affordable as normal sized TVs used to be. If you voted for “pundits need to get out of the bubble more often”, you’re a winner.
dan
You can’t buy 19″ tube tvs anymore. They don’t sell them.
Corey
I agree that whoever this guy was was probably just being glib, but consumer surplus in the form of better, cheaper technology is one thing that’s mitigating the neo-Gilded Age and that complicates the picture on income inequality.
Mustang Bobby
When and why did they become such a potent symbol of American prosperity and/or decadence?
About 1984, about the same time home computers did. Now you can get one for the same money as an analog (i.e. cathode-ray) TV… if they still make them.
These folks desperately need to catch up. Not only do they revere the memory of Ronald Reagan, they haven’t rebooted since he was in office.
artem1s
last go round it was SUVs that were the symbol everything was OK. Anyone can still finance most of this stuff as long as you are willing to pay rent-a-center 30%.
the fenian
When Some People bought them while You couldn’t afford to.
Legalize
Poor people shouldn’t have anything nice. Last time I checked, most waiting rooms at auto mechanics’ shops had tv’s of some kind in them. Why can’t poor people just watch tv there instead of eating t-bone steaks in front of nice tv’s in their lavish tax-payer-funded housing?
Tim Ferg
This view isn’t as uncommon as you would think.
I had a facebook friend post something very similar to this the other day…His post was something like “The very same people who are complaining about the top 400 persons share of the wealth in the Unites States are buying $400 iPhones.”
As if you can’t complain until you’re totally living in poverty.
Rainy Day
As a person who has grown up in the rural South, TVs were NOT a sign of prosperity, but rather a sign of values. You’d see decrepit trailers with those HUGE satellite receivers (remember those?) on the lawn with the shiny, muscle car parked in the muddy, washed out ‘driveway.’
Later, you saw smaller satellite dishes on a somewhat nicer trailer with a nice truck in the muddy, washed out ‘driveway.’
If your house is crappy and small, about the only thing that makes it a ‘home’ is a nice TV for many folks. And, having a nice ‘ride’ seems infinitely more important than having a nice home for many down here.
And, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to buy a big ass TV than to buy a nice home.
And, I would say that having a big ass TV means you’re NOT prosperous. That means you can’t afford to go to movies or engage in other forms of entertainment. You’re pretty much stuck at home, so you find ONE thing that makes that bearable. I think big TVs are sort of a sign of resignation unless you’re really well off. They are an affordable and durable and socially acceptable form of escapism
Skipjack
Actually if you can get more and better stuff while being paid the same amount of money, then you are richer. That’s in absolute terms, while relatively the people getting ahead are getting far far ahead.
But I think that is always what confuses these debates. In absolute terms the middle class really has gotten richer alongside the country. But the wealthy are not paying their fair share so it’s hard for me not to begrudge their accelerating success.
4tehlulz
Unless you’re shitting in a pit in the backyard, you don’t have the right to complain about poverty.
dan
Yeah, they’re buying $400 iPhones. To use while they drive their Toyota Corollas.
Roger Moore
@dan:
Do they sell any kind of tube TV anymore? I haven’t seen one in a store for quite a while, and I don’t see any in a quick look online. There’s no particular reason why anyone would want to buy one, either; they use enough power that you’ll probably save money in the long term by buying a LCD TV instead.
Holden Pattern
Your friend’s friend is an idiot. Cost of, say, a quite nice 46″ LED flatscreen is around $1200. Far less for a lower-end version.
That is about 4 months of single-person catastrophic coverage health insurance on the individual market. In other words, it’s absolutely nothing at all.
Rent is expensive. Housing is expensive. Insurance is expensive.
Technology gewgaws are cheap. They’re cheap in part because of Moore’s law, and in part because we’ve outsourced the manufacture of those items to cheap labor in the developing world. But they’re cheap.
Nylund
I for one believe your friend, because, as a far as I know society doesn’t have any means by which someone can buy electronics by borrowing money they do not have.
Kidding aside, I moved to Dallas and was very surprised by how many people with less-than-average incomes were able to have such nice cars, apartments, TV’s, etc. It came as no shock when I learned that Dallas ranks very high in terms of cities with the most credit card debt.
And, there are other options for buying. The local Mexican grocery store sells big screen TVs that you pay for with small weekly payments ($10-30 depending on the model). Of course, you have to pay them for years and the final price ends up being two to three times as much as if you bought it outright, but, in terms of week to week finances, a big screen TV isn’t hard to afford at all.
I can remember when a VCR was $1,000 and you had to spend at least that much to get a 32″ TV. Now a few hundred can get you technology that even the richest man in the world couldn’t have access to just 15 years ago.
Parallel 5ths (Irish Steel)
@4tehlulz: This is why my dogs are always begging?
But what are the real markers of wealth? Mercedes? Extra house?
Fancy blog?
Woodrowfan
I once heard a woman say that she didn’t think those kids on the ads on TV were REALLY starving, because they had such fat bellies. (actually distended due to malnutrition).
If you don’t look and live like you just stepped out of a off-broadway production of “Oliver!” you’re not REALLY poor or hungry.
Steeplejack
As ThatLeftTurnInABQ put it so well the other day: “[. . .] we have become a land of cheap luxuries and expensive necessities.”
Our gizmos have gotten cheaper, in relative terms, but housing, health care and education have gone through the roof. And wages have remained stagnant for 30 years. Our prosperity has been hollowed out from the inside. Those who can’t look past the big-screen TVs–or don’t want to–are missing the truth right under their noses.
Roger Moore
@Rainy Day:
No. Just about everyone I know, prosperous or not, has a big ass TV. The only people who don’t have them are people who are deliberately avoiding TV for one reason or another. Even people who don’t watch much TV have them so they can watch movies or use them as huge computer monitors. The thing about huge monitors is a big deal for older people with presbyopia, since it means they can use computers without eyestrain.
Cat Lady
Your friend’s friend should be very grateful that TVs are relatively cheap, cuz if the working class ever woke up from their self-induced TV stupor, the pitchforked mob wouldn’t be long in assembling.
dan
I have a 27″ tube tv and would love a flat screen but I can’t pull $25/mo. out of my ass to afford one.
And there’s nothing to watch anyway. Big Bang Theory doesn’t get any funnier at 42″.
gbear
This is timely. I just had a visit from a student who bought a TV stand/cabinet that I was selling on Craigslist. First he tried to talk me way down on the price by saying he was a poor college student (at St. Thomas in St. Paul MN) and then telling me it wasn’t wide enough because he had a 46″ TV. He then hauled it away in a new looking Chrysler 300 that he had parked up the block so I didn’t see it. At that point I was just glad we didn’t have to try to fit the cabinet in an old Corrolla.
I think that big-screen TVs are the new Ford Explorers. Seems like everyone who wanted to be a serious urban family person had to have one.
JPL
@Corner Stone: I bought a 40 or 42 inch..don’t know which, LG, the day after Thanksgiving for under $475.00. (free shipping, no lines and no sales tax) Just be patient. I replaced a Toshiba that was 15 or 20 years old, so you still have time for them to reduce in price. I do use my antenna though because I hate monthly bills.
RossInDetroit
TV. Bah. I’m a TV hating crank. Food and TV have always been the cheap entertainment of the poor. Just try buying a small one these days. It’s installed in the headrest of a $40K SUV.
I sell vintage home electronics, so I’ve done some research on the cost of things in the ’50s. A 25 watt/channel Scott tube amplifier cost the equivalent of $1200 in 1958. You can get the same specs for 1/10 of that now. TVs have come down even more drastically. In the ’50s a TV may have been a family’s 3rd largest purchase, after house and car.
Joel
Part of this is
1) people on fixed incomes (i.e. old people and the invisible poor) don’t buy big screen tv’s generally.
2) a lot of upper middle class people own things for status purposes. some time ago, a big screen tv conveyed status. now it doesn’t mean shit, and that pains some of them, I’m sure.
RSA
@Roger Moore:
I suspect that there’s a time in your (the generic “you”) life when you look at some product and think, “I might like that, but it’s too expensive,” and you put it in the “expensive” category. It takes years for it to leave that category. My in-laws grew up poor during the Depression, and they talk as if everything is expensive, even the most trivial everyday things.
Wolfdaughter
Mustang Bobby:
This. This sums up, in one pithy sentence, one of the HUGE problems with conservatives’ thought processes. They don’t process new information well.
How many people, on a civil rights thread, will post that the Republicans were the ones pushing for integration back in the 50s? Or Robert Byrd, Robert Byrd, Robert Byrd, who belonged to the KKK for about 5 seconds back in the 30s or 40s?
Or Bill Ayers, Bill Ayers, Bill Ayers, who was involved with a DFH group in ’69, but who has led an exemplary life since then?
Most conservatives I see posting these days, dwell in the past (usually a mythical past), or in some dystopic future down the slippery slope. Concerning themselves with what is going on now just never seems to occur with these people.
Grover Gardner
That about sums up what I was going to say.
Corner Stone
@JPL: BestBuy has the one I want and it keeps oscillating on sale between $1099 and $1199 (reg price $1400).
I’ve been comparing for a while and am fixated on this one for now. I told myself I would buy it the first week of Jan 2011 but oddly I never did. Just been in full savings mode I guess.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Looks like it’s time to add the middle class to the list of “friends” numbnuts refer to in order to justify some stereotypical belief about a particular group.
And I can’t wait for Megan McCurdled’s first bus stop conversation with a nice Middle Class man.
Corner Stone
@RossInDetroit:
It also would’ve been the 3rd physically largest item too, if my family’s ginormous stereo cabinet TV is any example.
schrodinger's cat
I no has Tee Vee since I discontinued cable about a year ago. I hardly watched any TV and was paying Comcast about $50 for basic cable. I miss it sometimes. I wonder how easy it is to rig up an internet connection for your TV needs.
RossInDetroit
I work with a lot of people who make a couple of bucks over minimum. They all have cell phones – practically a necessity these days. A surprising number don’t regularly have a car. Or they have a family & one car between dad & mom. This severely limits their prospects for advancement, since the next step off the bottom job rung requires 24 X 7 mobility.
RossInDetroit
@schrodinger’s cat:
We’ve never had cable. There are lots of ways to stream on a computer, but the interface from PC to TV is not trivial. If you feel like watching something, lots of shows are on DVD and rentable.
Crash
Can you even buy a “small” tv anymore? My girlfriend’s family used to own an absolute monster (in terms of bulk) of a tube tv. This thing took 3 grown men to move around, and even that was a major chore. Yet for all its size the screen was only about 40″ inches or so. It was the largest “tube” tv I’ve ever seen in my life (and I’m sure they paid a pretty penny when they got it), but now even the cheapest flat screens will start at around 40″ and go up from there, at a fraction of the adjusted price that the old “big screens”.
JPL
@schrodinger’s cat: It’s not really if you don’t mind wires running across your room. I hooked up ESPN 3 before and the problem I had was my computer would go in sleep mode. I have an antenna and if you are close (within 30 miles) of a major network city, it’s a good solution. I also have a roku so I can stream Al Jazeera english channel for free besides watching netflix instant. Not counting the internet fee, I pay less than ten dollars a month.
My antenna is in my attic. You can probably pick up reception further out if you have one mounted outside.
schrodinger's cat
@RossInDetroit: That’s what I do now.
Crash
Depends on your needs, but I can say that the Internet has served me well for years. Pretty much every major network or cable show is available directly from the networks websites, and there are tons of other sites which will rebroadcast episodes without permission.
If you are a sports fan then cable might be a worthwhile investment, but even that depends on what you like and how willing you are to get indirect streams of games. ESPN3.com shows tons of games, mostly college football and basketball if that’s what you like. And the entire NCAA tournament is being streamed online by CBS.
RossInDetroit
@Crash:
There are compact units for bedrooms and offices. Often they incorporate a DVD player. The quality can be pretty decent.
We bought a $1000 30+ inch Trinitron CRT unit 10 years ago. I’d replace it with something with better specs for watching movies but it works fine and I doubt I could lift it now anyway. I think the last time it was on was December, so it’s not a priority.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Corner Stone:
if cons were more clever, i would suggest they were ironically mocking “liberals” as some sort of “in” joke.
at once wrecking the image of liberals, from a conservative vantage, and inviting a more conservative readership.
Roger Moore
@RSA:
That’s great, but when you get to that stage in your life, it’s time to leave your job as a pundit. Once your ideas about the world become sufficiently divorced from the way the world really is, you are no longer qualified to comment about it intelligently. The problem is that the media gatekeepers seem to be unwilling to move people from “serious person” to “doddering old fool”. I assume that some of the problem is that the people in charge of the media are moving into the “doddering old fool” category themselves, losing their ability to recognize the symptoms in others. Of course that extends well beyond media personalities; it’s why anyone takes John McCain seriously, for instance.
trollhattan
Wasn’t Haley Barbour(sp?) just yapping about young bucks drivin’ BMWs to pick up their Medicade prescriptions? Never mind I could go buy a decrepit ’85 3-series for a thousand bucks this afternoon, it says “BMW on it! This shit will never stop–you’re poor because you deserve to be and shut up, that’s why.
Short Bus Bully
It’s like playing a game for them. Ever play a sim game where you have to manage the happiness of your peasants? Give them cheap entertainment so they don’t revolt?
No difference here. We are the dirty unwashed masses that these Masters of the Universe are forced to deal with from time to time.
JPL
I volunteer for a charity organization that helps those who are struggling either with food, bills or clothing. Our resale shop will get big screen tv’s donated from folks that want the latest model. We sell used tv’s from 25 to 75 dollars which is the price that our customers can afford. Not all those with big screens paid full price. Our customers buy used cell phones also, too.
Keep in mind folks if you are changing out your cell phone, you do not have to turn it in. Donate it.
RossInDetroit
@Short Bus Bully:
Bread, circuses, repeat…
PurpleGirl
@Holden Pattern: I believe we haven’t manufactured a TV domestically since the last Zeniths was made in the early 1970s. American companies subcontracted the manufacturing to Asia.
Dennis SGMM
@JPL:
Verizon provides a postage paid envelope that enables you to donate your old cell whenever you replace one via their website.
Roger Moore
@RossInDetroit:
On newer TVs it certainly is trivial. They all have VGA ports so you can easily connect your PC to the TV. Most reasonably recent computers have DVI or HDMI connections, which make them even easier to connect. If your current computer doesn’t have one, you can buy a video card with a HDMI out for less than $50. If that’s too complex, you can buy a nettop PC that’s designed specifically to connect to your TV for $200-300.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Corner Stone:
washer/dryer
my grandmother resisted for years, she handwashed and line dried clothes et al for 5 children and various other family members who were in need of a place during the depression.
my grandfather finally made the purchase without telling her(apparently her resistance was fierce) anyway she didn’t want to use it at first, until someone just suggested to try it, she never went back to the old way….
and my grandfather mockingly entered “all you do is press buttons” into the family lexicon from then on out
FlipYrWhig
My TV is the one I got as a present from my parents when I first moved out. In 1992. When it was not exactly top of the line. I’m impressed that it still works. Until it stops working, though, I’m sticking with it. House needs too many repairs to justify spending X * $100 on something that isn’t a necessity. Sigh.
ruemara
My tv crapped out last year. Just went pouf. It was all in one with dvd, vcr and a sensible 25″ that I got at discount because it was going out of production, so $90. Which I had won on a lottery ticket. When I went to price replacements, tube tvs no longer existed and suddenly, fancy schmancy doing better than others flat screen hds ran $200 for a 19″. I’m not rich and my hodgepodge living room proves it. Your friend should shut up. Or visit me for a while so we can have a chat. With some charts.
RossInDetroit
@Roger Moore:
True. New TVs are wisely configured to anticipate displaying computer originated content. If all your older set has is composite, component or S-video inputs the interface does require active hardware. I looked into this and was surprised that there weren’t a lot of cheap options available for computer interfaces. It would seem like a pretty basic function to design. I think the expectation is that people upgrade their TVs frequently so why bother making hardware to connect new tech with old.
lol
@RossInDetroit:
If you have an current generation game console like an Xbox 360 or PS3, you can use that to stream video from a computer. Windows 7 has a service built-in that works okay but TVersity (free) does the job better and can handle almost any video format I throw at it. It’s not trivial to setup but it’s also not as difficult as you might think.
Allen
Moreover, if you bought an expensive TV, then lost your job, does the ownership of the TV now make you rich, despite the fact that you had to cancel cable? Should you now sell the TV, probably bringing in barely enough to feed a family of four beans and macaroni (the store brand) for a week?
Cain
@Corner Stone:
Shit, I waited 14 years before I bought my tvs.. and I’m still using the old one. I have two LCD tvs now.. and I don’t have cable. I live on high ground and can see all the tv towers so I get 30 channels of tv I can watch, and they pretty much have everything I need.. lately we’re just listing to public radio on the npr channel on weekends and then doing heavy on the movies/shows.
Cain
@Tim Ferg:
I remember rolling my eyes when I saw some guy rocking out on his ipod while sitting on an onramp saying “no money, need job”.. Great visual, dude. :-)
cain
Cain
@dan:
They do however use up less electricity.. especially the LED ones.
cain
Interrobang
For a lot of right-wingers, the “screen inches index” is the only measure of poverty they care about. It reminds me a bit of my parents, who are still living in the era when long-distance calls were expensive.
Roger Moore
@RossInDetroit:
I think the bigger point was that standard definition TVs were much worse for computer displays than even VGA monitors, so computer people weren’t terribly worried about providing a way of showing computer content on them. Now that TVs have caught up- to the point that most monitors are now sharing hardware with similar sized TVs- it makes sense to make them compatible. It’s funny to see people using their TVs as computer monitors again, since that’s what we were doing back in the days of the Timex Sinclar and TRS-80 Color Computer.
Yutsano
@Cain: I have noticed the urban campers up this way tend to be rather well dressed and neatly groomed. I choose to credit our shelter programs for that.
The Other Chuck
Sorry kid, your school can’t afford to serve you breakfast because someone poor once bought a big TV.
Naw, that’s not realistic. They never say “sorry”.
patrick II
The price of fancy electronics has come down, and more people can afford them, so when things are going alright it may seem like we are richer. However, less ostentatious things like education and medicine, things we really need, have, relatively speaking, gone way up. Also, security has gone way down. People used to work 30 years with health insurance at the same place and could make plans. Now, they don’t know if they will be lose their job or get sick or find out their mortgage had some hidden clause, and they will be broke next week. Fear of the inability to continue to meet basic needs makes us poorer, even though we can now watch “Pawn Stars” on the History Channel large and in color while at the same time informing ourselves about how to deal with our own possible future.
Barb (formerly Gex)
If you want to even consider any programs to help working Americans they must first be homeless and own nothing but the clothes they are wearing. And even then, the God-botherers would be able to explain to you why those people deserve to suffer so.
Roger Moore
@The Other Chuck:
You got that right. They’ll say “tough luck” instead. Or maybe “life isn’t fair”, as though it’s a universal excuse for being assholes.
jonas
Yes, a lot of consumer electronics are much cheaper now than they were a generation ago and yes, you can afford a small flat-screen TV now even if you’re living at or below the poverty line in some instances. But you know what these people can’t afford? Fresh food, a decent college education, health care, etc. So they figure, what the fuck, might as well enjoy some HD.
Unless the poor are wallowing in street gutters with tattered rags on their shoes, asking wealthy passersby with downcast eyes to “spare a ha’penny guvnuh?” they’re really not humiliated and debased enough to be considered worthy of any charity or consideration. Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?
Corner Stone
@jonas: I for one love the Wal-Mart commercial where the couple talks about how cashing all their checks at WM could save them up to $200 a year. And the pretty, totally not poor lady says, “And believe me, there’s a lot we could do with that!”
And then the totally not poor husband magically stretches out a 15″ monitor and says, “Oh yeah!”
The pretty, totally not poor woman then says, “Works for me!”
I love that commercial.
pseudonymous in nc
“Cheap(ish) luxuries, expensive necessities” is indeed the answer, and “perverse social Calvinism” explains the objection. My sixtysomething parents now have a considerably bigger TV than mine, and it’s their entertainment.
Our honkingly heavy 38″ tube TV was a $150 Craigslist deal, picked up when our crappy RCA box crapped out, just when everyone was starting to shift to HD and flat-screens.
Which is another point: the digital switchover, to accommodate HD broadcasting among other things, made plenty of people’s TVs obsolete overnight; instead of getting a converter, many of them thought “fuck it, might as well get rid of the old boob tube” and bought whatever was on the market. Hence the flat-screens.
Stefan
Tangentially related, and right in your wheelhouse DougJ, but who in the hell are those commercials for The New York Times “The Weekender Package” supposed to be selling to? “I’m fluent in 3 sections, actually.” I intensely dislike every one of the people in that commercial.
Every time I see that ad I want to punch that guy in the mouth.
And I’m actually a NYT subscriber and a snobbish, poncy, self-satisfied hipster Ivy League twit, the very target audience they’re shilling to. If it has that effect on me, I can’t imagine the level of intense loathing that ad produces in others.
RossInDetroit
@Roger Moore:
Oh, don’t get me started eyeing the crowd on the lawn again.
Chris
@Corner Stone: That commercial always makes me think they’re referring to “the quickie”, “the nooner”, and “the weekender”…
(of course a lot of people would love to have it last more than an hour :-) )
RossInDetroit
Not to go all contrarian, but I still feel pretty damn rich with 1/3 of my pre-crash income. People who consider the poor greedy may be thinking in global and historical terms. True, they’ve been royally hosed by the elites for 30 years and have lost ground in standard of living, the number in poverty is a national disgrace but if you compare them to middle ages peasants our poor live like kings.
See? It’s all in how you frame the issue.
Chris
@RossInDetroit: A cell phone and no land-line is often cheaper than no cell phone and a land-line.
In other words, having a cell phone, these days, is like having a regular mounted-on-the-wall phone was in 1960, which is when most of these people still are, mentally. :-)
RossInDetroit
@Chris:
I was surprised to learn how many people under 30 have no land line. Even more now under 20 never will have one. We need ours for DSL, the only viable internet option with no cable, or we would have ditched the line years ago. I hate to talk on the damn phone.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone:
I say there should be a Thunderdome-style battle to the dismemberment and death between the people who love the New York Times on that commercial and the animated douchebag all-stars who populate the commercials for Charles Schwab. “Really, a vineyar—AAIIIIIIIAAOW!” “There’s no debating th—(@&*#$(&* urkgurglesplat”
Donald G
Doug, your friend should come to my little hovel. One 25 inch analog CRT and two 13 inch CRT’s (one pure anolog, one digital/analog hybrid), no HD, no cable/satellite, and no Blu-Ray.
I don’t buy high-end consumer electronics unless I can get something useful enough for less than $250.
However, I do have cheap multiregion DVD players and recorder and one iPod which was a gift from family working for Apple. We also have an iMac (also a holiday gift from the same relatives) and a dying 10 year old PC with high-speed internet connections.
Also, we don’t do cellphones, which makes things awkward for the adolescent daughter.
Then again, we’re technically above the poverty line: Family of four on a single income of about $45,000/year, a decent sized house for $113,000 (larger than a lot of much more expensive McMansions). Oldest child about to enter third year of university as a comp-sci major on scholarship and grants (no student loans yet, thank goodness).
Credit card debt is kept at generally less than $2000 (and that’s high for us). Clothes are bought at thrift stores. Luxury travel is kept to a minimum. Nights out at first run movies are few and far between, as are restaurant dinners.
As long as I’ve got a roof over my head, food, an internet connection and my book and video collection, and the kids are safe and well, I’m happy.
JenJen
@Corner Stone:
I seriously want to smack that guy upside the head every time he shows up on my teevee.
J Edgar
@Holden Pattern:
That is about 4 months of single-person catastrophic coverage health insurance on the individual market. In other words, it’s absolutely nothing at all.
This is 100% to the point, but it is not the conversation that this smarties want to have. In the real world someone could live in a U-haul trailer and do all their communication by US mail, and whatever they “save” will be wiped out by a medical disaster that could happen to anyone, or by six months or more of paying this kind of insurance.
In the “I’ve got mine” conservative world both the person who buys the big-screen tv and the person living in the U-haul deserve whatever happens to them. Looking at it that way, the tv is the smart move.
Woodrowfan
@pseudonymous in nc:
My wife and I couldn’t get any converter to work in our bedroom so we bought a flatscreen TV on a stand at a Circuit City that was going out of business. (got my iPod at the same sale) We still have a big ol’ tube TV in the family room with the cable connection…
Cliff in NH
@RossInDetroit:
I have verizon dsl without a landline, you just have to ask for it.
RossInDetroit
@Cliff in NH:
Only ATT available here, and without the land line they manage to make DSL cost MORE. If I get one more appeal from them to sign up for Uverse I’m switching to smoke signals and semaphore. They just can’t understand a household that doesn’t want TV and hates to talk on the phone.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@JPL: And you’ve just hit on my biggest problem with conservatives. They don’t need to know the facts of a person’s situation to know that they don’t deserve what they have.
Barb (formerly Gex)
Let me just tell you exactly how the conservative in my life behaves. My dad is a Chinese immigrant who went to state schools. After school he went to work for a defense contractor. Built some wealth, acquired some property for rental income. He evades taxes on 2/3 of that rental income while deducting all the expenses. When I called him on it, he said, and I quote, “the government would just waste that money.”
To which I replied, “You mean wasting it like spending it on educating Chinese immigrants or building nuclear warheads we don’t need?”
And yet, he insists it was the right thing to do, because he needed to save that money to send his kids to school. Of course, absent all the tax cuts and spending cuts he supported, he wouldn’t have had to spend that much money sending his kids to state school.
It’s pretty much the conservative MO. Make the world a shitty place so you can say “See? I told you it was shitty!”
Joel
@FlipYrWhig: I don’t live in NY and hadn’t seen these ads, so I looked them up on youtube. It’s okay, generic claptrap for 30 minutes and then it takes a turn for the worse. Much worse.
jon
My computer screen is larger than all of the television sets I’ve ever owned.
As for the flat screen teevees in the world, most of my friends have castoffs from other, wealthier friends who wanted to get a larger and newer model. Among my poor and middle-class friends, only one purchased a big flatscreen television. All the rest came from freecycle or craigslist and were cheaper than a hundred bucks as long as they picked them up.
Pat
I think the middle class is doing alright if they can afford to misspell “faltering.” Conservation of vowels and the red squiggly lines used by word processor spellchecks is the primary reason the Chinese are overtaking us.