During the worst of the recession, the big movers on the stock market were YUM brands and MacDonalds. That's because the food their is cheap enough for people living on unemployment to afford.
It's four years later. About 10M people could not find jobs and gave up looking altogether.
Household median income is down almost $2500 since Obama took office.
Obama fought hard for a tax hike on the rich for his signature achievement of his second term, so far. It came at the expense of a tax hike on the middle class as the witholding tax cut was allowed to expire.
http://twitchy.com/2013/01/04/hope-...hecks-of-2013-stunned-lib-asks-what-happened/
Those obstructionist republicans are preventing Obama from doing anything about it? Utter bullshit. The man got a $800B emergency stimulus package passed, spent another $350B of TARP money approved in the last 3 months of the Bush 2nd term, a permanent $600B hike in the federal budget in a way that doesn't require congress to do its job (pass a budget every year) thus bypassing any possible Republican obstruction, added over $6T to the national debt in 4 years, and the Fed printed another $3T (and $85B a month from now on) that doesn't show up in the debt figures but is spent as if borrowed.
Trillions of dollars spent so we can have underwater mortgages, extended unemployment instead of jobs, and even bigger banks (they used govt. money to buy other banks) too big to fail. Oh yeah, the people get food stamps!
The stock market is at 14000, though, which is good for... who exactly?
So yeah, I think it's plenty fair to compare this BK horse meat story with Soylent Green. The society depicted in Soylent Green is exactly where we seem to be headed.
Something for you to think about. That $800B. They could have written 3.2 million people a check for $50,000 a year (pretty close to median income!) for 5 years with that money. That's wage equivalent of over $20/hr. Or at $10/hr (more than minimum wage), they could have written 6.4 million people checks for $25,000 a year for 5 years.
People making $50K pay taxes and make their mortgage payments on time. What a contrast to the alternative we've been dealt.
All these things I presented are pressures on people to eat at BK. It's what they can afford.
"Let them eat horse meat!"
