I’m Old Enough To Remember…

Thanks for leaving us $40 trillion in debt and rising that we will have to pay off somehow not you. pic.twitter.com/vlNirYYbsh

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 21, 2026

... when $86,000 a year WAS rich. When I entered law school, I dreamed of coming out and earning $35,000 a year. For me that was practically beyond the dreams of avarice. By the time I ever did earn that much (decades later), it didn’t mean what it had before.

What my parents paid for a house in 1960, would buy a nice car today. Not a luxury car, just a nice one. And so in and so on. 

I won’t even veer off to the argument that we’d be better off pursuing spiritual enrichment (putting your neighbors and fellow humans first, and yourself last; not idle navel gazing and worrying about your karma). We’ll stick with the material American Dream, even though we have a unique religious foundation (people didn’t stop coming here seeking religious freedom when the Pilgrims landed).

It is still money that matters in the U.S.A. 🎶

But all we’ve done is create a world where we need more things. Look at 1950’s Warner Brothers cartoons; or Disney’s House of Tommorow in Tomorrow Land (the 1950’s version).  Wildly oversimplified visions, which make it seem like everything appears without effort. At the same time, the houses are remarkably spare. Most houses today rival the clutter of Sherlock Holmes’ Victorian bachelor digs. Which is not the only way the ‘50’s got the future wrong.

Bradbury got closer with home “TV rooms,” where the walls were TV screens. But the BBC retelling of the Dracula story tops them all. There is a great scene where the vampire, having been trapped for a century or so, and escapes into the modern world. He rhapsodizes to an English housewife in her cluttered home about modern creature comforts that kings in castles of old would envy, and says if people then had what we have now, no one would ever leave their house.

Would that it were that simple, right? None of that stuff is free. It’s all a question of perspective, and the perspective of a man who doesn’t have to work for those comforts, is not the wise position he thinks it is. And as Thoreau pointed out, what we own ends up owning us. Acquiring stuff becomes a burden no amount of income can alleviate.

Dracula’s analysis, and Gingrich’s, is also a grossly misplaced set of values, and valuation. 

But then, it’s Gingrich; what else do you expect?