After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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A luxurious holiday
George W.'s latest tax cuts are working! They produced a bonanza of consumer spending in the recent holiday season!
What? You say you didn't get enough of a tax cut to even notice, much less enjoy a bonanza of consumerism?
Well, bucko, that's because you don't shop at the right places! While Wal- Mart and Target had low holiday sales, Neiman Marcus, Tiffany, Saks Fifth Avenue, and other purveyors of luxury goods enjoyed booming sales to the Cadillac and Hummer crowd.
How so? Well, while a typical family might have gotten a $600 tax cut, the millionaire families averaged $93,000 each. This is why the CEO Neiman Marcus exulted that holiday shoppers in his swank stores "proved that luxury is alive." Indeed, sales of such stocking stuffers as $5,000-to- $10,000 watches were up 16 percent this season over last! Neiman reported that sales of Chanel, Prada, and Gucci handbags were "absolutely miraculous."
Actually, there's nothing miraculous about it. When the president takes cold, hard cash out of the public treasury and hands it to the high rollers, they do what high rollers always do—roll out the Escalade and go to Neiman's.