Grinches glooming when it's booming

While the boom times keep booming in the mainland, some there seem surprised that the unproductive and the slothful haven’t received their fair share of the goodies. Indeed, there’s some kind of warped instinct in that spurs reporters to do slippery human interest pieces that somberly imply that the hard workers and the productive are somehow cheating the have-nots. This stuff always crops up before Christmas. The Grinch factor.

One example crossed my desk yesterday. It’s an AP story giving us the grim details of a Ms. Connie Tort, introduced as a “25- year-old single mother of four.”

Not divorced, mind you. Nor widowed. Single. Four kids. You go, girl!

Ms. Tort, who is roughly the size (and fertility) of Pagan island, is photographed in a room so squalid that the television appears to be of late 1980’s vintage. Perhaps she doesn’t even have cable service. Oh, the horrors of life in America.

Anyway, where all these kids came from isn’t an issue worthy of mention, I suppose, but there they are, living in poverty amidst the glitz and wealth of northern California’s Silicon Valley. Average rents in the area are reported to exceed over a thousand bucks a month for apartments.

Ms. Connie Tort doesn’t have a job, apparently, but the government doles her $500 a month disability. The nature of the disability, however, isn’t an issue any more worthy of mention than the origin of her kids. The article–as all such articles do–doesn’t seem to trace how she wound up in this situation. However, it insinuates–as all such articles do–that it’s somehow my (and your) fault that she’s not a happy camper.

Enter the obligatory bleeding heart expert. “It’s shameful that anyone is in need in the Silicon Valley,” the piece quotes Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity International as saying.

Yo, Millard, do you think perhaps that Ms. Connie Tort ought to consider (gasp) moving? A lot of hard working people and a lot of responsible (and even married!) parents can’t afford to live in the Silicon Valley. I don’t have anything against Ms. Connie Tort, but maybe she’d be better off in a Milton, Fla. trailer park than in one of the richest places in the world, complaining about it.

It gets better. Millard sounds the rallying cry of the dingbats and offers this observation: “If that (Silicon Valley) brainpower could be focused on making sure that everyone’s needs are met, you would have no substandard housing, you would have no food lines, you would have no homeless families.”

You go, Millard! Where did you find that profound economic theory? Was it printed on the side of a Grateful Dead memorial bong? If we misguided our brainpower away from economic production and exclusively for the Ms. Connie Torts of the world, we would have no housing at all (let alone substandard housing) and probably no food, either (hence, no food lines). In the overall picture, we can’t consume any more than we produce.

Ayee, enough already. Never mind the Grinches. The boom times are booming in the mainland, and Santa is going to be very generous this year.

Here in the Commonwealth, sure, we’re up against tough times, but we’re still better off than most folks are. Santa might not completely fill my stocking this year, but at least I’m hanging it on the island of Saipan, which is a great place to live. For me, that makes for a Merry Christmas indeed.