Had second round of layoffs yesterday at my company. My name wasn't on a piece of a paper. Was in doubt about the economy being in a recession...but there's no doubt about it now. I almost had to take a break from adding to my pus collection. So I'm curious, are you guys curtailing your spending?

we've been having layoff at our company, but i think i'm in the clear. our team stays pretty busy. the economy is absolute garbage right now, but i keep trying to stimulate it because i keep buying dumb shit.

Yup. Gas is up to 4+ bucks here in Fresno and all prices keep rising accordingly. Economy just keeps looking worse, but I have yet to cut my spending on chunks of colored vinyl.

Occasionally I feel a fleeting moment of guilt or think, " Maybe I should be saving this money in case the shit hits the fan FOR REAL." But it passes quickly.

Glad you stayed off the chopping block.

I work at a marketing firm that deals within the auto industry, its been insanely slow. Djing has been kind of steady so far but turn outs at clubs are down dramatically, people are less inclined to pay 6 bucks for beer and 10 dollar and up cover charges plus cost of gas for basically nothing right now.

The people that I FART A LOT about economy problems usually were the biggest contributors to causing the downfall. Idiots that drove huge SUVs just for the hell of it, 20 somethings in the mortgage industry and clueless people that bought homes with adjustable rate mortgages thinking in five years they will be making more anyway and could afford the adjusment on the over inflated million dollar homes that were about 300k a few years prior and voters that complain about no change but don't pass any propositions that could prompt it.

Toy buying has not slowed yet, but if something REALLY tragic happens (like my skin cancer getting fatal or my court case going bad and ending up in jail for a while) I might just have to post all my vinyl on here with the story to make some bucks, just kidding, that would never happen.

TIME magazine printed a statistic recently that explained a lot for me ... It polled Americans and (among other things) asked them - "Are you in the top 5% of Americans as measured by income?"

NINETEEN percent answered 'Yes,' and another TWENTY percent said they would be in the top 5% within the next five years.

So, essentially, forty percent of Americans think they are or soon will be in the top five percent of income - Sorta like Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average."

But, this outlook, both mathematically impossible and shockingly unrealistic, has serious consequences. When politicians talk about whether or not 'the rich' are paying their fair share of taxes, forty percent of Americans think to themselves: "They are talking about me" ... and 7/8 of them are dead wrong.

The GOP works this misperception for all it's worth. Remember all the hoo-hah over abolishing the 'Death Tax'? Current US tax law allows a married couple to easily pass $4 million to their kids with absolutely zero estate tax. Generous as that may seem, when your estate is measured in the billions-with-a-'b,' $4 million is chicken feed. If the GOP were honest with the numbers, 95%+ of people would realize that the odds of this ever being a real problem for most of us are ... low. But, instead, they break out the rhetoric and make statements like "Americans shouldn't have to visit the funeral home and the tax man on the same day," and talk about 'making W's tax cuts permanent*,' while ignoring the fact that 99% of estates pay zero tax, and that the estate tax is really only an issue for the megarich (who could save themselves and their families over $71 billion in taxes if they ever actually manage to sell this lie to the rest of us).

For the ugly underside of politics and PR, and the details of how the seriously wealthy of the US seek to screw the rest of us, see this report from Public Citizen - http://www.citizen.org/documents/EstateTaxFinal.pdf

So, Collin, you are literally correct - people really do think they are far, far wealthier than they are. (In case anyone's curious, in order to be in the top 5% of American earners, your income must now be well over $170,000 per year - As of 2003, the cutoff was about $155,000.)

McCain has made his position clear - He would make all of Bush's tax cuts favoring the megarich permanent. So, unless one's assets are well in excess of $1.5 million, and earnings are over $200K per year, a vote for the GOP is a vote directly against one's own wallet - That is, it's a vote that you and your kids should pay more taxes, so that the Walton and Gates and Nordstrom families can pay less.

Certainly people vote for reasons other than finances and taxes, but it is deeply hilarious that the GOP paints the Democrats as the 'tax-and-spend' party, while the GOP has, over the last eight years, spent us from a budget surplus into into a debt hole we will be decades getting out of. (If you're an American, your share of this new GOP debt is about $35,000 - If your house has a husband, wife and two kids, your household's share is $140,000 - Got your checkbook handy?)

OK, rant over ... I'll skip the related rant on trends of income inequality for now.

Hope nobody minds, I'm moving this thread to Whatever.

Wow Miami, that was really interesting.
Cheers for the read.