What American Vacation?

Americans do not take vacations anymore. Not really. Paid vacation days are down from even 2011. Fourteen days was the average then and now we are down to twelve days. But here is the kicker. Most Americans didn't even take them all. Ten days. That's the average. The Europeans bust out at twenty five days of vacation and take every one of them. It gets worse. If we do take them we don't even go away for a week. Three days. We take a whopping three days then it's back to work. So I go back to my original question...what American vacation?

It used to be our right. We deserved a vacation for busting our collective hump all year. And that vacation was a glorious two weeks or more. But somewhere that all was lost and vacations became something to be looked down upon. I know a man who ends up with two weeks at the end of each year of vacation days and then he stays home because he has to take them or lose them. What does he do with his two glorious weeks? He said he does projects around the house. Fuuuuun!

When I was growing up we always went to beach for at least two weeks and usually three. My dad worked for a corporation and was a manager and so he had good perks. We would go to North Carolina and hang out in a cottage for our two, then three, then (are you ready for it) five weeks of vacation. And this wasn't odd. Everyone went on at least two week vacations. Many on three weeks. And here is the kicker. My dad would drive down to some salty weather beaten store after the first week and half and use the phone.  He was on the phone for about ten minutes and then that was it. That was staying connected!

Now we can't be disconnected for a day. That's really what killed the American vacation. Us. Sure the companies are stingy but we bought into that we have to stay connected or the world will fall in. The sad thing is those family vacations are what I remember most about my childhood. Everyone was relaxed and while I was bored (what kid isn't) I still loved being at the beach and reading and going out to dinner and just being with the family. Who wouldn't right?

Compare that to my vacation in the North Woods where I tramped through the woods in the middle of the night to get a Wifi signal for my Iphone. Pathetic. But I have bought in too and while we used to always go on a two week vacation now if we can squeeze in a week then it is a victory. Such is the state of the American Dream.

Or at least the American Vacation.

Rocket Man...the American dream turned upside down
 

Why People Are So Mad

I was listening to a man talking about how the middle class has no one to blame but themselves. He pointed out that people should have saved and foregone luxuries and reaped the benefits of their frugality in retirement. It is a common charge. That the people who bought too much house and too much car and too much of everything have no one to blame but themselves for losing their homes, their jobs, their savings, and having no retirement. Basically they screwed themselves out of the American Dream.

But the reality is different. Marginalized by globalization, tech, downsizing, outsourcing, a devastating recession, a derivatives crash and a bank bailout...the people who did everything right also got screwed and this is the source of anger that manifests itself in anti government rants and basic disenchantment with anything smacking of the American Dream. The meritocracy we like to paint is in fact an oligarchy where the pie was stolen and not even a slice left behind. And so we have a huge segment of the population left at the alter.

And yet we persist in finger pointing as if we could have avoided all of this. I know lots of people who have  lost their homes. I know people who have moved back with their families. I know twenty somethings who cannot get going. And I know people literally teetering on their feet because they are exhausted after twenty years of unrelenting hard work. They did nothing wrong except belive in the precept that hard work will produce a benefit. But they are not reaping the benefits. A lot of them will die before they retire.

And people know it. They know that they have used up the best years of their lives and now have little to show. The I did everything right crowd is especially pumped with righteous anger. They feel like the bargain was violated and in a sense they are right. The rich has taken too large a bite and they were played by derivative traders that left them with devalued homes. And there is little anyone could do. The fact of the matter is the rich will get richer.

And the middle class will be played right up to the day they die.

www.billhazelgrove.com



http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/1938467582/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358702258&sr=1-2&keywords=william+hazelgrove+rocket+man

 

I Think It's Going to Be A Long Long Time...

I don't know if anyone cares about housing anymore but it is the problem. Middle class people have no value in their biggest asset and they can't do anything about it. They can't refinance or buy a house or sell a house and they can't get an equity loan. In Rocket Man I put forth the idea our best days our behind us because we were sold a bill of goods. We really didn't want all of this, we just wanted the middle class childhood that slipped through our fingers like the contentment that eludes us now.

And you really have to wonder when it will come back. Nobody even talks about housing anymore. It just is. But the reason there is no demand is there is no backbone to the middle class anymore. There is no nest egg. It all vanished in the crash. And now you have people who don't want to spend a nickel and worse they are losing their home or walking from their home or thinking of walking. And no one in either party even talks about the problem anymore.

As Dale Hammer says in Rocket Man. "This is what I always imagined my childhood should be, a car parked by a modest home on a snow covered street with everyone safe and warm in middle class slumber. I realize now that is what eluded us in our drive to have it all....our contentment, our happiness."  And the way things are going I think it's going to be a long long time until we see that again.

Rocket Man Paperback or Download

 

The Three Percent

What is really behind the AIG bonus rage is the suspicion that there is a group of people in this country who are laughing their way to the bank. It is that old idiom that ninety seven percent of the money is given to three percent of the people and the remaining ninety seven percent must split the remaining three percent. AIG bears this out. But what is really behind our collective outrage is that this group of people who seem to have it all don't work for their money. They don't. Ivy League schools dump out business graduates and they are snapped up by companies like AIG who put them in positions that require six figure retention bonuses. Normal people do not get hundreds of thousands of dollars for staying on the job. But once you are the three percent then the Christmas baubles rein down. You not only get the bonuses but outrageous salaries and stock options that set up people for life. For Life. The deck is surely stacked. Imagine what has gone on under the wire. We are getting a fraction of what really goes on in the land of three percent. Millions of dollars are paid out that we will never know about. And these people are not putting in brutal hours, making life and death decisions. These are derivative traders, glorified mortgage brokers who just have a much much more lucrative yield spread. Instead of making a few thousand on a loan they make a few million. America was founded on the precept that yes anyone can become anything but we also demand a level playing field. That was what the Revolution was all about. We should not be put in a position where others can take advantage of of us. So we have a representative form of government that says we all have the same rights under the law and the same opportunities. But it would seem that the three percent have an unfair advantage over the rest of us. The three percent get their money regardless. Why? Because they are entitled and entitlement goes beyond a bankrupt company or an economy teetering on a depression. Americans hate the thought that one group of people are somehow more deserving because of the accident of birth or an Ivy league school. Sure, give them their money, but lets see them earn it. That's what the rest of us have to do. We have to work and earn our money. Maybe the three percent should earn theirs now, because I don't think America can afford to have a slacker class anymore.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Titanic and the Economics of Class

Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. When they rescued the fifteen hundred people from the icy Atlantic they found a disproportionate amount of first class people. There were some from second class, further down in the ship, but very few from steerage down in the bowels. It seems the Captain and his crew had concentrated on saving the wealthy over the the middle class and lower class passengers. When a crisis occurs there is a run for the boats and those of privilege usually get in. Recently, there was an interesting quote from a banker in the New York Times. He said they were going to use the bail out money to shore up their accounts and invest in "banks of interest". In other words, the bankers are going to buy other banks with the bail out money and make sure they have enough reserves to weather the storm. They are going to make sure they are in the boats and well away from the ship. The real tragedy of Titanic was the fact that over a thousand people drowned in the frigid waters in range of people sitting in half filled boats. Yet, no one returned to help them. They were afraid, they later said, of being swamped. At the Bankers Association Meeting other bankers reiterated the mantra that they were going to concentrate on opportunities but that they had no real plans to lend the bailout money to consumers. So the American middle class, strangling on a lack of credit and asking for this needed money, will not get it. The boats will not return. When the inquiry into the sinking convened in New York, there were many who cried class warfare. The immigrants in steerage mostly died while the upper crust of the world managed to get into the few lifeboats. The officials of White Star said there was no choosing between classes of passengers, but there were simply not enough boats. The banks are still hemorrhaging. Bank of America just asked for another twenty billion and experts say that still won't be enough. Seems all that speculating in derivatives and mortgage backs was kept off the books. So they will continue to suck up all the bail out money and the middle class will get none of it. The gilded top will sail through for a while but will falter because the coal of any steam engine is the lifeblood and the middle class is the coal of our economy. Even the bankers must know their ship is taking water faster than they can bail now. Like Captain Smith, who asked his ship's architect about Titanics fate with four of her watertight compartments gashed open, the bankers know the words floating up from the depths of our economic distress...she will founder.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Revolutionary Road

Back about four months ago a reviewer said, "Rocket Man reminds me of Revolutionary Road." I thought, well, interesting title. That was it. Another review came in a few weeks later, same comparison. I still did nothing. Then came another. And another. Then I heard about the movie and I finally went to a bookstore. Richard Yates struggled in 1961 to get readers. His book came out and basically dropped from site. Now why is that? Here is a book that pegs suburban living in the 1950's, nails down the monotony, the feeling that we should be doing something more than just going to work and coming home to a house in a suburb among other people doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the reason Richard Yates novel found a hard audience is because people do not like a mirror put in front of them. Now the novel and the movie are deemed brilliant. Seen through the safety of almost fifty years we can safely relate to this suburban couple. I have had people react violently to Rocket Man. Some had defended the suburbs. The Daily Herald just came out and termed the article "Author's new Novel Takes on Suburbs" http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5The assumption that an author is attacking an institution is implicit in the headline. There have been fears from other people that Rocket Man would be alienating, neighbors would stop talking to us, we would be politely shown the door back to the city. In Revolutionary Road, the couple see themselves apart, some would say in the year 2009 they see themselves as the "cultural elite." People who have reviewed the novel have been dismayed with this view and see their eventual comeuppance as just deserts. We are told from day one to not rock the boat and we don't appreciate our art pointing out our foibles, posing the question that there must be a better way. Yates named his novel, Revolutionary Road, thinking that the placidity of the fifties had to give way to something. It did, the sixties. But here we are in 2009 with another novel questioning the way we live in the year 2009...I wonder what the teens will be like?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0615213073/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1