What do the following have in common?

• Sports gambling
• Prescription drug TV advertisements
• Thousand-dollar concert tickets
• Monster pickup trucks
• Monster RVs
• Monster waistlines
• Monster wives
• Monster children
• Cigarettes
• Soda pop
• Fingernails
• Credit card debt
• Lottery tickets
• Fast food
• Pot
• Tattoos
• Expensive phones
• Fast food

The answer is this: The consumers of these goods and services are often relatively poor. Poor people are bad at both making money and spending money. They make too little of it and they spend too much of it – on things that are wasteful or even harmful to themselves and to society. Much of what they spend is on credit cards with 22% interest rates.

It’s as if their poor spending habits and poor earning habits share a common cause. I wonder what that might be.

As for the poor earning habits of poor people, I can’t think of easy ways to help them. But as for their poor spending habits, I can.  

Make it harder to buy some of these things. Some of them should be banned, others should be heavily taxed, and still others should be socially shunned.

The ones we should ban include sports gambling, prescription drug TV ads, cigarettes, lottery tickets and pot. Those things impose a burden not just on the consumers of them, but also on society at large. The cost to taxpayers for Medicare and Medicaid treatment of diseases related to cigarettes and pot, for example, amounts to billions of dollars.

The ones we should heavily tax are expensive concert tickets, soda pop, tattoos, monster pickup trucks and monster RVs. Those items entail no societal benefit. Some, such as soda pop, are a real detriment to society. Their nutritional value is worse than zero.

The ones that should be shunned are fake fingernails, monster waistlines, monster wives and monster children.

Until those bans, taxes and shuns happen, and even after, expect to hear the incessant whining of society’s losers that they can’t afford everything they want to buy because wealth is shared unequally and – gasp! – inequitably.

Expect to hear the complaints of Generation Z – which has air conditioning, luxurious automobiles, the world at their fingertips in magical phones, ten paid sick days along with additional “mental health” days, paternity, maternity and no-ternity leave, four weeks of vacation and eleven paid holidays including Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and shelves of cheap trophies for having participated in whatever – that life is very tough for them.

They work sooooo hard, they claim that they need to cut back. They need to balance what they call “work,” which is really half-assed, part-time fooling around, with what they call “life,” which is buying foolish things and endless meaningless recreation.

The end result is that they fail at both “work” and “life.”

I first visited Europe when I was 29. It was on a four-day business trip that stretched into nine. I worked all but one day. I didn’t see the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or Big Ben or the Roman Coliseum. Instead, I saw the inside of a suburban office building where I negotiated a deal against four hard-bitten, tag-teaming, middle-aged Germans working for Siemens AG.

In contrast, my children had been to Europe half a dozen times, all on vacations, by the time they were 29. Their negotiations with Germans were limited to discussing chocolate cake.  

I’m glad to see that my children came out splendidly despite the spoils of German confections, and that I seldom hear complaints from them about how tough things are. I wish I could say the same about the rest of their generation.