{"id":210,"date":"2005-04-13T10:55:44","date_gmt":"2005-04-13T18:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/04\/reaganomics_takes_manhattan.html"},"modified":"2005-04-13T10:55:44","modified_gmt":"2005-04-13T18:55:44","slug":"reaganomics_tak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/04\/reaganomics_tak.html","title":{"rendered":"Reaganomics Takes Manhattan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New York Magazine&#8217;s Daniel Gross wants us to believe that <a href=\"http:\/\/newyorkmetro.com\/nymetro\/news\/culture\/features\/11721\/index.html\">there is a trickle-down effect of &#8220;ridiculous wealth&#8221;<\/a>, and sommeliers all over the city should be counting their lucky stars.<\/p>\n<p>Point taken &#8212; rich bastards spend absurd amounts of money propping up an absurd service economy, but I&#8217;m skeptical.  Doesn&#8217;t the housing market &#8212; one in which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/news\/local\/story\/299238p-256213c.html\">a frightening number of New Yorkers spend more than 50 percent of their income on<\/a> &#8212; quickly become unaffordable as average housing prices rise?  To be sure, it&#8217;s part of their &#8220;to be sure&#8221; paragraph:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Before we get too carried away in enumerating all the great gifts New Yorkers humbly receive from the very rich, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s admit some limits. The ever-climbing cost of living hits us all. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just the price of apartments; everything from sneakers to a jug of milk costs more here and prices are rising fast. The Consumer Price Index in New York City has been growing at a 30 percent greater clip than the national rate. For the vast majority of people, inflation cuts directly into their standard of living.<\/p>\n<p>As for real estate, if this boom does turn into bubble, the really rich will be bummed, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll disappear for a week to St. Barts and return good as new. People with mortgages they can barely swing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlike those three-year, fixed-rate, interest-only \u00e2\u20ac\u0153deals\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcould be wiped out.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But it&#8217;s inescapable.  Of course rich people make our lives better &#8212; they fix Central Park, they contribute to MoMA, they subsidize <em>two<\/em> operas (take that, L.A.!). So on behalf of the squeezed middle class all over the city, thank you for helping us eke out a living.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New York Magazine&#8217;s Daniel Gross wants us to believe that there is a trickle-down effect of &#8220;ridiculous wealth&#8221;, and sommeliers all over the city should be counting their lucky stars. Point taken &#8212; rich bastards spend absurd amounts of money propping up an absurd service economy, but I&#8217;m skeptical. Doesn&#8217;t the housing market &#8212; one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class_war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}