Just Say No

I am not referring here to drugs, or was it sex, that Nancy Reagan was telling the youth of America to abstain from back when I was one of those youth in the 1980’s, although I have come to the conclusion that both are vastly overrated in our popular culture, which sells the notion of using both without consequences and which can both lead to addictive and destructive behavior if used without morality. What I am saying no to, and encouraging all other consumers to do likewise, is ridiculously priced items that are constantly marketed and peddled to us, items ranging from tickets to ballgames, certain foods at the grocery stores, to the enormous amounts of money that our Congress and President feel fit to spend on our behalf for wars we don’t support and for welfare to the very same corporations that are charging us outrageous prices in the first place, or as in the case of the mortgage industry, selling us snake oil in the form of unrealistic home loans.

Let’s get one thing straight, we as consumers are complicit in all of this, the last example of the mortgage broker snake oil is a readily available case in point. I saw one of those feel sympathy for the poor victim pieces you so often see on the news channels the other day about a lady who was being evicted from her home, the typical foreclosure story that everyone by now is aware of. The only problem with jumping on the sympathy train was that here was a single mom, making a respectable 50,000 dollars per year, who bought a house worth over 560,000 dollars. There is a serious disconnect here between reality and fantasy land. Who in their right mind thinks they can afford a house worth over ten times their annual salary? The expression that comes to mind, which describes not only this consumer but our consumer oriented society in general, is having champagne tastes while living on a beer budget. Put aside for the moment that a quality brew is infinitely better than some overpriced and overrated French wine, the point is that we have allowed ourselves to live well beyond our means, and it is finally about to catch up with us.

I say about to catch up with us because we are still living in denial, as is evidenced by a trip to the local shopping mall, restaurant row, or movie theatre complex, not to mention the drive there with all the big monster gas guzzlers still clogging our roads. Apparently many Americans think this current recession is just a blip on the radar screen, something that will be nothing more than a small bump in the road to unending economic prosperity and unlimited spending. Our national philosophy has become buy now, pay later, and then buy some more before the original payments even come due. While no one, including your humble correspondent, can predict the economic future, it seems to me as a longtime observer of such things that this is much more than a short term economic detour and more of a long term fundamental shift than many seem to realize. Gas prices do not seem likely to drop substantially for any prolonged period of time , and housing prices are unlikely to rebound strongly anytime soon, certainly not to the insane levels they were being driven to just a couple short years ago. Prices for basic commodities, many of them tied to oil prices due to transportation costs, such as food, are likely to stay at high levels, and energy prices don’t seem likely to drop substantially either. In addition to high gas, energy, and food prices, lower housing values, we have the fact that banks and lenders are sobering up from the Wall Street financed bender they went on during the first part of this decade and are tightening the availability of credit. Unable to apply for yet another credit card, or to open or extend their home equity lines, the middle class is quite simply tapped out. Prospects for increased income from work are bleak as well, as corporations are more focused on keeping shareholders and executives happy with dividends and immoral bonus packages designed to allow the rich to keep getting richer while the rest of us fight for the scraps left over at the table. Stock prices continue to dip, the Dow average which was humming around 14,000 at the height of the most recent period of irrational exuberance less than a year ago, is now sputtering along at around 11,000, a drop of over 20% in a relatively short period of time. As a result, corporations are losing paper valuation at a pretty steady rate. Since we live in a gilded age, where the executives and management at the top have little to no sense of responsibility and ethics for those that build and support the economic pyramid, it is highly unlikely that the fat cats in the corner offices will give up their share of the shrinking pie, which means that the rank and file workers in the cubicles will start losing their jobs. Once you throw unemployment into the mix, the shiite will really hit the fan, and it will be anything but a sunni day for the typical American consumer.

This gets me back to my original premise, which is that we as typical consumers need to draw a line in the sand and start saying no to outrageous prices for stuff we don’t really need to begin with. We can start with our federal government, and demand accountability from our Congress and our next President in how our tax dollars get spent. Recently the cabal that manages our shared resources decided to spend another 162 billion dollars on the war in Iraq and whatever else they presumably threw into this spending bill. While one side claims to be opposed to the war and the other side claims to be in favor of paying as we go, in the end both sides gave each other enough of what they wanted so as to allow for each to compromise on their principles and get the deal done. If this is what is meant by reaching across the aisle and achieving a bipartisan consensus I’ll take a pass on that notion. What’s another 162 billion you ask? In addition to being 540 dollars for each citizen, around the same amount as the recent stimulus checks meant to placate us by the way, it is a lot of money that could have been spent on desperately needed priorities such as failing schools, crumbling bridges, or a 300 year-old city in Louisiana that is still not rebuilt after nearly three years. Where was the coverage of this in the media, the so-called fourth estate that is supposed to serve as a watchdog of the government but is more inclined to cover the birth of celebrity twins or the latest Hollywood star to enter rehab? Where was the public outrage over this spending measure, and the countless other bills like it that allow the federal government to take our hard earned income and use it for whatever purposes they deem will allow them to continue to keep their jobs as overpaid public servants? As consumers and taxpayers we need to start following the money, as Woodward and Bernstein taught us, and start demanding accountability from our elected officials. If the people lead, the leaders will follow, and if we don’t then those in charge of our money will continue to spend recklessly on priorities that benefit those who ensure their perpetual reelection. We need to have our Senators and Representatives on speed dial, their email in our contact list, their websites in our favorites, and a handful of stamps nearby to write the occasional old-fashioned letter expressing our outrage and concern when necessary, and our approval when they do the right thing.

Another thing we can say no to is paying too much for stuff we don’t need to be paying too much for. We need to put gas in our tanks in order to get around, that is simply the reality of modern life, and while we can drive less and drive more fuel efficient vehicles, most of us are pretty well locked into the vehicles we drive and the commutes we must make. We also need electricity and water and food and internet access and high definition cable TV with DVR boxes. So one man’s luxury is another’s necessity, the point is that I’m not proposing we live a Spartan existence and give up all of life’s simple pleasures. Everyone obviously needs to decide for themselves what is and isn’t worthy of spending their hard earned money on, and those decisions are dictated by a number of factors, how much money you make, what your interests are, and what your family wants and what you wish to provide them with. For me, there are many things I would give up before the ability to record TV programs and store them on a hard drive and to watch ballgames in high def. What I have decided I won’t spend my money on however are outrageous prices to attend live sporting events.

Doing a little searching online the other day for ticket prices for the upcoming football season put me in a most sour mood, when I realized that exorbitant salaries being doled out to often unappreciative and undeserving professional athletes are having a direct impact on my ability to take my son to a ballgame once in awhile. Here are some sobering stats for you fantasy football players, which to me fantasy football is now referring to the dream that a middle class high school teacher can afford to attend one of these games in person to support the local team. Tickets to sit in the upper reaches of the new, taxpayer funded football stadium that the Arizona Cardinals call home are 70 to 80 bucks a pop. Multiply that times two, never mind by four if I wanted to take the whole family, and throw in the cost of gas, parking, 10 dollar beers for me and 8 dollar hot dogs for my boy, and you’ve got quite an expensive outing. Mind you, this isn’t to watch the defending champs or even a contender, this is the Arizona Cardinals we are talking about, a team that in its now 20 year history in the Valley of the Sun has managed a grand total of one winning season.

So I figured that with the price of pro football out of reach, I could always take my boy to see my alma mater, Arizona State play some football at my old stomping grounds on the ASU campus and Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe. Surely tickets for college football, especially for a program that has only been to the Rose Bowl twice in nearly 30 years of Pac-10 play, and one that is trying to rebuild and compete for a fan base in what has become a pro sports town, surely they would offer reasonable prices for alumni and the general public alike. Think again average sports fan, not only is there no alumni discount for single game tickets, but the primo game of the non-conference season, against the highly ranked Georgia Bulldogs, is primo priced at over one and a half times the level of a regular conference game. 65 dollars to sit in the upper decks, and even 40 dollars to sit in the no longer appropriately named cheap seats for a conference game. I won’t pay, and don’t come crying to me ASU when the stadium is half filled with visiting Georgia fans who will pay these silly prices and make a desert vacation out of the deal. I’ll be watching the game on TV along with the rest of the fans who simply can’t or won’t pay.

Which gets to the point of just saying no. If enough of us consumers simply stop paying for tickets and restaurant meals and premium cable channels and magazine subscriptions and greens fees and so forth that are overpriced and overrated, perhaps the prices will eventually come down. The law of supply and demand dictates that such would be the case. Everybody has their own threshold and their own priorities, far be it from me to be some liberal Nazi telling other people how they should live their lives and shaming those who don’t go along with the party orthodoxy as the enviro-fascists and global warmists are wont to do. But here is my personal rule; I am calling it the 25 dollar rule. Quite simply, I am no longer willing to pay more than 25 bucks a pop for what I consider to be luxury items. That includes tickets to a ballgame, play, or a concert, green fees to play golf, a book, DVD, or CD collection, or takeout food. I will make exceptions as necessary, rules are made to be broken after all, but I will try to limit those exceptions to special occasions, a box set CD of the Grateful Dead or John Coltrane, and Ray’s Pizza. But to my way of thinking, if consumers just say no often enough and strongly enough, maybe things that are now out of whack will come back into line. Perhaps our government will stop spending like the proverbial drunken sailor on leave and will start to spend on priorities that will benefit ordinary middle and working class Americans rather than, and even at the expense of, the upper class. Maybe the price of certain food items, namely dairy products, cereal, and meat will come back down to earth, and possibly the price of going to a ballgame or playing a round of golf will not require us to bust the weekly budget. And if the law of supply and demand turns out not to work its magic, at least we will have gained some measure of fiscal discipline and a sense of control over our economic lives, not to mention that we might find some interesting alternatives to activities and products that we once thought we couldn’t do without.