Mea culpa. My apologies for misunderstanding the intent of your post. I obviously missed the facetiousness of your tone. One of the misgivings of text only communication.

But this allows me to state another peeve of mine. People will gripe and moan about how things are not right, yet what do they do? "You can't fight city hall". They give in.

There's a saying I have, "Things are the way they are because people let them be that way."

For example, nearly everyone I know thought I was nuts to fight a traffic ticket I got recently - failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. But I didn't give in. I knew I was right. Skipping the details, I won. (BTW, the pedestrian DOES NOT always have the right-of-way)

Yes, sometimes it's very difficult to fight the wrongs, but does that mean you stop trying? No. Even if you loose the battles, you can still win the war. The Continental Army lost more battles than it won. It was ragtag. It was immature. It suffered more from disease, lack of supplies, and desertion than it did from the Brits. Yet, we won.

I guess what I'm trying to say in the context of the economy is that we cannot continue to do business as usual. If we do, we will only continue to suffer the consequences of our poor decisions. It is an error to think that we cannot do anything about it.

More specifically, if you earn $50k a year, you cannot spend $70k a year for very long.

Brian