Say It Ain't So Already

Wall Street’s Partying Like It’s 2006

November 30, 2009 at 1:59 PM Leave a comment

On Saturday the New York Times published an article titled: Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades:

From the ailing resorts of the Florida Keys to Alaskan villages along the Bering Sea, the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day.

There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times.

The counties are as big as the Bronx and Philadelphia and as small as Owsley County in Kentucky, a patch of Appalachian distress where half of the 4,600 residents receive food stamps.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article about Wall Streeters who are “spending money like the financial crisis never happened:”

From $15,000-a-week Caribbean getaways to art auctions to $200,000 platinum wristwatches that automatically adjust for leap years, signs of the good life are returning.

“What we’re seeing in the last four to eight weeks is a fairly substantial uptick” in demand for extravagant purchases as Wall Street employees grow more confident that the market’s steep rebound so far in 2009 will soon bring them fat bonuses, says David Arnold, senior vice president at Robb Report, a magazine targeted at the super-wealthy.

I volunteer at a food bank.  I see the people who don’t even qualify for food stamps.  They could live for years and years and years on what people are paying for a watch.

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