Signs of excess disposable income

---by Micheal

A surefire early sign that Christmas is coming is that every day, your mailbox is filled with stacks of mail-order catalogs. This year, the influx of catalogs seems thicker than before. Only a few of them have familiar names. Most of them look pretty much alike -- all colorful and slick, with an affected air of sophistication. What they all have in common, is that they are all trying to entice me into buying this gizmo or that bauble.

After leafing through dozens and dozens of this year's full color enticements, a couple of conclusions emerged.

Conclusion Number One: Our industrial base is far too busy building totally pointless and painfully useless products. One catalog proudly offered a life-size animatronic chimpanzee head. It would make different facial expressions and utter four different chimp calls. Only 150 bucks! Another catalog advertised a whole product line of robot dogs that would move about and do tricks. They ranged from $50 to $2,000. Obviously, the more you paid, the more tricks you'd get. Are real dogs not subservient enough?

13-in-1 multi tools. A butter dish that will heat or cool your butter to its optimal spreading temperature for a mere $60. T-shirts with some smart-alecky phrase on it, which if you'd uttered in front of your father, you'd have gotten smacked. Who in blazes "needs" this stuff? Why are factories producing this stuff? Who goes home from a hard day at the factory and proudly says, "Well, honey, I made sixty two boxes of pointless expensive junk today. Let's celebrate!"

Conclusion Number Two: Americans have far too much disposable income. At least, the catalog marketers think we do. Who do you know, that would say to you, "You know, I think I need me one of them two thousand dollar robot dogs."? Or, would say, "My life is just a living hell because my butter is too hard to spread on my toast."

I'm not turning into some closet Marxist or anything, but doesn't it strike you as just a little bit indecent that there are people out there (such as those formerly from New Orleans) who have next to nothing, but there's an army of marketers out there trying to coax us into buying a two thousand dollar robot dog, an animated chimp head, or a heated butter dish? Do we have that much, too much, money?