It always blows my mind when I hear someone from a lower income bracket sympathize with anybody from the Richie Rich set. What is there to feel sorry about? Have no doubts: the lives of these people are full of wine, women, and song. They wake up in the morning to a squadron of sexy chamber maids in low-cut blouses ready to wash them thoroughly with warm bath sponges and gentle suds; cleansing their palette with chilled champagne and feeding them ripe strawberries; dressing them carefully in the finest wool blends and silks. Then, the Lord Fancybottoms of the world receive their perfectly creased Wall Street Journals parked expertly next to their steaming hot cup of Hacienda La Esmeralda coffee—hand ground by immigrants and brewed to perfection inside of a flawlessly polished French press. And then it’s off to work! where they spend much of their time “cultivating relationships” at some damned English sporting event or on the back nine of the most “exclusive” country clubs while some poor slob of a loading dock worker back at corporate headquarters is peeling dead rats off of glue traps and making stew out of them for the kids squealing hungrily back at the shack. Later, Prince Softskin will eat lobster salad and roast duck off of silver platters, sipping cognac, wearing satin slippers, and so on, and so on…

I hate them. I wish I was one of them.

Why am I talking about this? Because I spotted an article today that sited a new report by a couple of smarty pants economists named Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from the Brookings Institute (a place where smarty pants hang out and study cool things and stuff) which states, basically, that money can in fact buy happiness. To be more exact, it buys the things that can make you happy. Better healthcare, more time to visit friends, and the piece of mind that comes when you don’t worry about spending the night out on the sidewalk. You can see the report in its entirety by clicking here.

So big deal. I think most of us instinctually knew this long before Betsey and Justin decided to make some charts illustrating the numbers (click here to see one). I guess I like it because now I can roll up a copy of this report and keep it handily in my coat pocket so that whenever some wealthy punk-ass saunters up to me in his deer-skin jacket and Moss Lipow sunglasses and tries to bemoan how he has pain like any man, that his tears are just as salty, that all hearts break the same, and how he always wanted to pitch for the Yankees and never got past watching his dreams slowly die right in front of his pampered eyes, I can take out this report and stab him in the throat with it.

Christ. I wish I had a swimming pool.

Yes, I’d love to be rich. I would fucking LOVE it. I would have loved to be born into it and not to have had to work for it. I would love to win the lottery today. And I can guarantee you this: I would never talk to any of you pitiable assholes again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under News and Science, The Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.