What GOP Policies Mean to Upward Mobility

Republicans constantly argue that for America to prosper taxes on the wealthy need to be cut drastically and the working poor basically thrown to their own devices since the GOP would dismantle the social safety net.  And all too often, Europe is held up as the bogeyman for what might befall America if the GOP policies aren't implemented.  Truth be told, we should want to be more like Europe which now has more opportunity for upward mobility than the United States.  Moreover, with largely national health care systems, European don't need to go without preventive care or live in fear that a serious illness will drive them into bankruptcy.  Talking Points Memo looks at the reality of where we are as opposed to the disingenuous claims of greed driven Republicans and their Kool-Aid imbibing followers.  Here are some story highlights:

In his widely trumpeted speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation Wednesday, Republican budget guru and liberal bogeyman Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin rejected the notion that wealthier Americans should pay higher taxes to sustain or broaden a social safety net for poor and middle class workers and retirees.

Instead, he argued, policy should be geared toward allowing high earners to grow the economy, and to facilitate upward mobility for the working class. America, he argued, exemplifies the latter model while European economies illustrate the perils of the former.

That is what they do in class-riven Europe, he said, where “Top-heavy welfare states have replaced the traditional aristocracies, and masses of the long-term unemployed are locked into the new lower class. The United States was destined to break out of this bleak history.”  Turns out that is — not true. 

There are a lot of data available on this issue, but the clearest chart comes courtesy of the Economic Mobility Project, which looked at the correlation between parent and child income in various countries. Turns out in America, you’re more likely to stay rich if born rich, and stay poor if born poor, than you are in most European countries.

These findings are more striking when put in comparative context. There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. If anything, the data seem to suggest the opposite.”

The entire report on America's declining upward mobility can be found here.   As is the case with the Christianists, if a Republican's lips are moving, nowadays the best approach is to assume that they are lying.  It's unlikely that you'll be proven wrong.

The Disingenuous Republican Budget

To me it's no coincidence that the Republican Party increasingly has a problem when it comes to a lack of truth and veracity - the party is merely mirroring the dishonesty and extremism of its Christianist base. A group that is, in my view, among the most dishonest and truth challenged on the planet. Ezra Klein looks at this problem in the Washington Post in the context of the latest budget proposal being floated by the GOP which seems to assume that the public is completely made up of moron (perhaps an accurate assumption with the Tea Party crowd). Truth be told, the number simply do not add up. Simple math exposes the lie. Here are some column highlights:

The Republicans have a problem: Their budget promises don’t add up. They’ve committed to new tax cuts. They’ve proposed spending more on defense. They’ve promised they won’t change retirement programs for the current generation of seniors. But they’ve also promised to cut the deficit, and fast.

That’s left them with one option: deep cuts to programs for the poor. That’s what you see in the Ryan budget. It’s the basis for the Romney budget. It’s what Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul and Rick Santorum have proposed. But there’s a problem with that, too. Cutting programs for the poor isn’t popular. So Republicans have come up with a solution: Don’t call them “cuts.”

The Ryan budget’s section on these cuts is titled “Repairing the Social Safety Net.” It explains that “the welfare reforms of the 1990s, despite their success, were never extended beyond cash welfare to other means-tested programs.” It proposes to extend the welfare reform model to Medicaid, to food stamps and other unnamed “low-income assistance programs.” Romney’s proposal is almost identical.

[I]n the Romney and Ryan proposals, the grants to states would grow much more slowly. Medicaid, for instance, would see its budget increase at the rate of inflation, not at the rate of health-care costs.

In 1996, before welfare reform passed, 68 of 100 families living in poverty with children received welfare benefits. In 2010, two years into the worst economy since the Great Depression, only 27 of every 100 such families were receiving benefits. And that’s not because they were all holding good jobs or because states had somehow managed to make the grants go further. Quite the opposite, actually. . . . The end result is that fewer families get welfare. That’s not a “reform.” It’s a cut.

In Saturday’s New York Times, Jason DeParle looked at Arizona, which has cut its welfare caseloads in half since the recession. “The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet,” DeParle reported. “They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.”

You can argue that the money that used to fund welfare is better spent on other priorities, or that fewer Americans should have access to Medicaid and food stamps. But that’s the argument we’re having here, and it’s the argument Republicans need to own up to making. Their proposal is to cut services in those areas to fund tax cuts, deficit reduction and defense spending. The Democrats’ proposal is to raise taxes, cut defense spending and do somewhat less deficit reduction to protect programs for the poor and other government services. That’s the choice voters face in 2012. There are no free lunches. Just ask those single mothers in Arizona.

What I find most outrageous, of course, is that the Republicans who are pushing for budgets that treat many citizens as disposable trash are the very same ones who profess their religiosity on their sleeve. In reality, they obviously have nothing but contempt for Christ's Gospel message.

Is The Tea Party A Liability for the GOP?

While the Tea Party extremists - some 85% of whom identify as conservative Christians - remain stalwarts of the GOP base, the image of these (in my view delusional) individuals appears to be plummeting with the majority of voters. Moreover, some now see the Tea Party and the extreme anti-government and anti-social network policies espoused by the Tea Party may well be the straw that breaks the GOP's back in the 2012 general election contest. A column in the Washington Post looks at how the Tea Party may help insure that Barack Obama remains in the White House. Here are some highlights:

The tea party may have won Republicans the House of Representatives in 2010. In 2012, it’s looking like it could help Democrats retain the White House. The tea party movement, now nearly three years old, has fallen out of favor with Americans. And Democrats are prepared to use it against Republicans in the 2012 election.

A recent Fox News poll showed just 30 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the tea party, compared to 51 percent who viewed it unfavorably. . . . That suggests opposition to the tea party is more strident than the tea party itself, which means the movement may be doing the GOP more harm than good.

In addition, the fervor and enthusiasm spurred by the tea party in 2010 appears to have dissipated, with no major tea party rallies taking place this year and fewer Republican candidates latching on to the label. On the presidential campaign trail, the tea party is rarely mentioned. In contrast, Democrats are actually starting to wield the tea party label as a tool in their campaigns.

Democrats say the issue works for them as they continue to define a Republican Party whose brand is already struggling. “It’s no longer viewed as a populist, grassroots organization, but a dangerous group with extremist views that don’t reflect the mainstream values of America’s middle class,” said Democratic media strategist John Lapp. “The Republican establishment allowed the inmates to run the asylum in 2010. And now they’re paying the price electorally.”

The Washington Post/ABC poll showed just 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP, a new low. Some Republicans, who were granted anonymity to speak privately about the party’s strategy, acknowledged that some Republicans who latched on to the tea party in 2010 will have to take care not to identify too closely with it in 2012.

Meanwhile, as the Post story notes, the anti-women meme continues to do significant damage:

Murkowski accuses fellow GOPers of ‘attack on women’: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) just handed Democrats a gift.

In comments recorded by a local newspaper, Murkowski criticizes her fellow Republicans on the issue of women’s rights, saying they weren’t quick enough to denounce Rush Limbaugh for his “slut” comments and that they’ve handled the issue of contraception poorly.

“To have those kind of slurs against a woman ... you had candidates who want to be our president not say, ‘That’s wrong. That’s offensive,’” said Murkowski, who favors abortion rights. “They did not condemn the rhetoric.”

Murkowski added, of the GOP’s response to the contraception controversy: “It makes no sense to make this attack on women. If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.” Ouch. These are the kind of comments that will make this issue even tougher for the GOP to shake.

Republicans Are Causing the Moral Crisis in America

On a number of occasions I have noted that the policies of the Republican Party - who wrap themselves in religion and false piety as they pander to the self-anointed Christian set - are in reality the 180 degree opposite of what the Gospel message urges true Christians to pursue, especially in terms of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and providing shelter to the homeless. But then, hypocrisy and lying are now synonymous with the terms Republican Party and "Conservative Christians." A new op-ed in the Washington Post looks at this phenomenon and the moral crisis that is being fomented by Republicans and Christianists. Here are some excerpts:

The real crisis of public morality in the United States doesn’t lie in the private decisions Americans make in their lives or their bedrooms; it lies at the heart of an ideology — and a set of policies — that the right-wing has used to batter and browbeat their fellow Americans.

They dress these policies up sometimes, give them catchy titles like Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” But they never cease to imbue them with the kind of moral decisions that ought to make anyone furious. Ryan’s latest budget really is case in point. It’s a plan that says that increases in defense spending are so essential, that massive tax cuts for the wealthy are so necessary, that we must pay for them by ripping a hole in the social safety net. The poor need Medicaid to pay for medicine and treatment for their families? We care, we really do, but the wealthy need tax cuts more. Food stamps the only thing standing between your children and starvation? Listen, we feel your pain. We get it. But we’ve got more important things to spend money on. Like a new yacht for that guy who only has one yacht.

It’s hard to point to a single priority of the Republican Party these days that isn’t steeped in moral failing while being dressed up in moral righteousness.

It is a very strange thing that the people who lecture most fervently about morality are those who are most willing to fight for policies that are so immoral. They watch Wall Street turn itself into the Las Vegas strip, take the economy down and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods. To that they say, “By God we need less regulation. Get me the hose, I have things to water down!” They see a CEO of a bank or a corporation, someone who passed off all of the risk and took on all of the reward, and they say, “Get that man a bigger bonus! In fact, get him two!”

So yes, Rick Santorum. Yes, Mitt Romney. Yes, Paul Ryan and Republican politicians all over this nation. You are right, as right as you’ve ever been. There is a moral crisis in this country. A horrifyingly, back-breaking, bankrupt-the-core-of-this-nation style crisis. But it isn’t women or the poor or the middle class or the gay community or health-care advocates or environmentalists that are causing it.

The column well describes why I left the GOP many years ago. The Party is morally bankrupt.

The GOP's Assault on the Social Safety Net

I have noted before that the current Republican Party seems to want nothing less than to restore the so-called "Gilded Age" of the robber barons when the wealthy knew few limits on excess and everyone else struggled to get by. It was a time of few safety regulations and a time where the unfortunate often had nowhere to turn for help and support. Today, we are seeing Newt Gingrich attack child labor laws and a political party that obstructs every tax increase against the very wealthy yet resists any breaks for the already struggling and shrinking middle class. Adding to the utter hypocrisy of it all, the GOP claims to be the party of "family values" and most of its demagogic leaders wear Christianity on their sleeves - even as they totally disregard the Gospel message. In this setting, Obama is argued by some to be the true conservative seeking to maintain social stability. Here are highlights from a Washington Post column that contrasts the competing visions for America:

At a moment when the nation wonders whether politicians can agree on anything, here is something that unites the Republican presidential candidates — and all of them with President Obama: Everyone agrees that the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in U.S. history.

Obama could not agree more. “This is not just another political debate,” the president said in his theme-setting speech in Osawatomie, Kan., earlier this month. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

[T]he Republican Party is taking a run at overturning the consensus that has governed U.S. political life since the Progressive era.

Obama is defending a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation’s economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages.

The GOP is engaged in a wholesale effort to redefine the government help that Americans take for granted as an effort to create a radically new, statist society. . . . . . Republicans are increasingly inclined to argue that any redistribution (and Social Security, Medicare, student loans, veterans benefits and food stamps are all redistributive) is but a step down the road to some radically egalitarian dystopia.

Obama will thus be the conservative in 2012, in the truest sense of that word. He is the candidate defending the modestly redistributive and regulatory government the country has relied on since the New Deal, and that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush dismantled. The rhetoric of the 2012 Republicans suggests they want to go far beyond where Reagan or Bush ever went.

America has already reached a level of income inequality that would make a former banana republic dictator blush. Yet what we are seeing is only the beginning if the demagogues of the GOP get to have their way.

What Failed GOP Policies Have Wrought for Generation Y

All three of my children fall within what is often referred to as "Generation ," namely young adults between the ages of 18 and 28. What this younger generation is experiencing as a result of the failings of my baby boomer generation and in particular the failed policies of the Bush/Cheney years is disheartening. Despite the harsh reality of what has been done to the nation's economy, the majority of the would be GOP presidential candidates want to implement even more of the same policies that have wrought the economic current debacle. A story in American Prospect looks at what this reality is meaning for Generation Y. Here are some highlights:

Young adults entering the workforce today think they'll be worse off than their parents—they're not wrong.

The recession officially ended nearly two and a half years ago, in June 2009, but for the generation of young adults who’ve been trying to take their first steps into adulthood, its effects could shape the future for decades to come.

Why is this recession different from other sharp downturns? The standard economic indicators fail to tell the whole story. Yes, unemployment rates for young people remain at the record-high levels they hit at the Great Recession’s peak in 2007, but this is typical for young workers, who tend to be the last group that recovers after a recession—and tend to feel its effects far after the economy has rebounded.

For youth entering the workforce today, not has the sour economy delayed their careers; they are entering a workforce that offers historically low wages and, unlike their parents, they're coming in with massive amounts of student-loan debt.

A poll we commissioned of young people ages 18 to 34 shows that 32 percent of employed college graduates—and a shocking 53 percent of young workers with only a high school diploma—are working jobs that do not advance their careers. Given that the Federal Reserve, in its most recent projection, predicts unemployment will remain at about 8 percent until the end of 2013, and 7 percent until the end of 2014, that means many young workers will not get their first career-track job for another two or three years.

Millennials’ soaring debt burden is largely due to crushing college tuition rates that have risen far faster than inflation. In 1968, when the first boomers entered college, a student could have paid for tuition and fees at a public university by working just 6.2 hours a week at minimum wage; today, they’d have to work full-time just to cover tuition costs.

ising debt, un- and underemployment, and dim job prospects have forced many Millennials to postpone the key decisions that historically marked entry into adulthood. Nearly half of the 25- to 34-year-olds surveyed said they’ve put off purchasing a home; 29 percent say they’ve delayed starting a family; and 26 percent still live with their parents. These decisions have long-lasting effects.

The lower wages, skimpy benefits, debt burdens, and persistent unemployment that young workers face today are not simply the result of random economic fluctuations or forces beyond our control: They're the direct consequence of decades of bad government policy and inaction. The assault on collective-bargaining rights, the loosening of corporate oversight, the deregulation of the financial sector, and the repeated reductions in taxes—particularly for corporations—have all combined to create a bleak economic landscape.

But there are many ways policymakers could help Millennials start their lives with a greater chance of economic security and prosperity. Increasing the minimum wage, for instance, would raise the wage floor and help combat a decades-long slump. . . . . policymakers need to take action right now to prevent a lost generation of youth whose parents simply did not pay forward the social benefits they inherited.

Do John Boehner, Eric Cantor or the Koch brothers give a damn about this dismal picture? Of course not. They are focused solely on aiding the wealthy and pushing the rest of us towards quasi-serfdom. Would that the idiots in the Tea Party would wake up to the fact that they are backing the very people and policies that have screwed them over.

The GOP and the Supercommittee Debt Impasse

Will the Democrats let themselves get rolled by the GOP yet again as the so-called supercommittee works to come up with a debt reduction plan? My bet - and that of Michael Thomasky at The Daily Beast - is yes. The Democrats seem to only know how to be played for fools and how to prematurely surrender. With leadership like that now coming from the White House and Democrats back during WWII, we'd all be speaking German now. As a previous post indicated, the USA is rushing towards a third world style society of a small group of "haves" and the rest in the "have not" category, yet the GOP continues to want to give more to the obscenely wealthy while flushing more and more Americans down the economic toilet. Here's Thomasky's analysis of the coming Democrat surrender:

[P]olitically, it would be nice to see Washington function for a change. Hard experience suggests to us, however, that when all the smoke clears, there will be no deal. What will happen then? The Republicans will then go in for even emptier posturing than they’re engaging in now, this time with regard to defense cuts. You think things can’t get worse? Just wait.

But eventually and inevitably, the negotiators had to start talking numbers. And as soon as they got to specifics, two things happened. First, they realized how far apart they were. Second, the leaks started, at which point the rest of us realized how far apart they were.

Let’s compare the plans. The Democratic proposal, released by senator and committee member Max Baucus the other day, looks to cut $3 trillion from the budget. The Republican plan, leaked in parts to The Wall Street Journal and Politico after Baucus moved, cuts just $2 trillion. If it seems odd to you that Democrats are proposing more deficit reduction than Republicans, you aren’t alone. The reason is that the Republicans—surprise, surprise—are doing it all by cuts with no tax revenue, while the Democrats include $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion in new revenue.

The GOP plan says the government will raise $200 billion by cutting corporate and individual taxes. You know, the way the Bush tax cuts increased revenue, which is to say, not in the real world, but in the minds of Mitch McConnell and other delusionals who think the Bush tax cuts raised revenue.

It bears noting, once again, that the Democrats have said with the Baucus plan that they’re ready to deal if Republicans will. Their plan includes $500 billion in entitlement program cuts. . . . . But the Republicans are staying in the dugout. They aren’t even bothering to take the bus to the stadium. A trillion in taxes, one dollar in taxes, it doesn’t matter; Republicans will not permit a tax increase of any kind.

[T]he Democrats should not and cannot accept a deal in which there are no tax increases, because they have two-thirds of the country with them and because it’s the right thing.

Assuming no deal, here’s what I’m told is likely to happen after everyone has acknowledged the collapse. The Republicans will, as John McCain and others have suggested, turn up the heat on the question of defense cuts. They will introduce legislation to exempt the Pentagon from cuts. . . . .
Republicans, being the clever dialecticians that they are, will decide that the course of history has changed, and that deal will mean no more to them than one of those secret treaties Lenin routinely abrogated back in the day.

So they’ll advance a bill saying: cuts to domestic social programs, sure; cuts to Pentagon, nyet. It will pass the House. It will go to the Senate, and all the Republicans will be for it, and they’ll need 13 Democrats. So then the questions will be: will the Democrats be willing to hold the line and risk the silly accusation of being “soft on defense”? And will the White House also hold the line . . .
I think we know the answer.

So the Republicans will have killed another deal with their indefensible and immoral position on taxes, and then, having stuffed that carcass in the trunk, they will retroactively work to kill the deal they agreed to last summer . . .

Once again, the current GOP makes me ashamed that I was ever once a member of that party. Truth, honesty, and fair dealing, and the best interest of the nation as a whole mean nothing to today's Republican Party. It's all about greed on the part of a few and demagoguery.

What If the Tea Party Wins?

The Center for American Progress has a new white paper (you can read it here) that looks at the consequences of the Tea Party prevailing in its effort to rewrite the United States Constitution and/or read it so narrowly that many much needed federal programs would be labeled "unconstitutional" and cease to exist. While the extremist in the Tea Party largely identify themselves as conservative Christian, their underlying agenda is driven by greed and a desire to throw everyone but themselves under the bus. That they view themselves as Christian is beyond farcical. Some will say the white paper is alarmist and falsely crying wolf, but see what the Christianist/Tea Party crowd is doing in Virginia, I would argue that it is not. Here are highlights from an Center for American Progress overview of the white paper:

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

At least, that’s what would happen if the Tea Party succeeds in its effort to reimagine the Constitution as an antigovernment manifesto.

It is difficult to count how many essential laws would simply cease to exist if the Tea Party won its battle to reshape our founding document, but a short list includes:
■Social Security and Medicare
■Medicaid, children's health insurance, and other health care programs
■All federal education programs
■All federal antipoverty programs
■Federal disaster relief
■Federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs
■Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor protections
■Federal civil rights laws

The Tea Party imagines a constitution focused entirely upon the Tenth Amendment, which provides that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—which is why their narrow vision of the nation’s power is often referred to as “tentherism.”

The Constitution gives Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” thus empowering the federal government to levy taxes and leverage these revenues for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A disturbingly large number of elected officials, however, insist that these words don’t actually mean what they say.

In a speech to the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, Texas Gov. Rick Perry listed a broad swath of programs that “contradict the principles of limited, constitutional government that our founders established to protect us.” Gov. Perry’s list includes Medicare and “a bankrupt social security system" . . .

[T]enther proposals to simply let the states take over Social Security and Medicare are nothing more than a backdoor way to eliminate these programs altogether. If the Tea Party gets its way, and our nation’s social safety net for seniors is declared unconstitutional, millions of seniors will lose their only income and their only means to pay for health care.

Education is also on the Tea Party’s chopping block. . . . The truth, however, is that the federal government has never told states how to educate their children—and it could not do so if it tried. . . . . So, the state of Texas is perfectly free to turn down federal grants if they do not like the conditions attached to them.

Sen. [Mike] Lee [(R-UT)] would go even further in cutting off assistance for low-income Americans. In an interview with a Utah radio host, Lee claimed that the framers intended all antipoverty programs to be dealt with exclusively at the state level. This would not only eliminate programs like income assistance and food stamps, it could threaten unemployment insurance, federal job training, and other programs intended to provide a bridge out of poverty.

You get the drift. Greed, false piety, a total lack of compassion, and a hatred of those deemed "other" are the hallmarks of the Tea Party.

America: Less Social Mobility Than We Like to Pretend

The chart set out above via Frum Forum shows a reality that most Americans like to pretend is not the case - much of "Old Europe" now has more social mobility that the USA. The chart comes originally from Brookings Institution study, published in 2009. And with the wealth disparity growing markedly in this country, the problem will likely increase. Faux religious freedom and declining social/class mobility - not exactly what the Founders supposedly had in mind.

Disgusting Extravagance

With millions of families facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes it is beyond sick that the very wealthy - those who have been the main beneficiaries of the Chimperator's policies - continue to spend money on what one might consider to be obscene levels. A case in point is this year's International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria this past Monday night. People are facing homelessness and millions around the world ate going hungry and these folks squander money on frivolity. I am not against wealth and I am not against gorgeous affairs, but at some point some sense of propriety under the financial circumstances gripping the country would not be unwelcome. Not surprisingly, the state with the most debutantes was Texas, home state of the Chimperator. These folk are the modern day successors to Marie Antoinette's alleged comment "let them eat cake." Here are some highlights from the New York Times:

*

You had to look hard amid the four-foot floral sculptures and the Vera Wang originals to see signs of the economy’s collapse at the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria on Monday night.

*

Champagne flowed. Men in tails waltzed and fox-trotted with debutantes in long white gowns to music by the 12-piece Lester Lanin Orchestra, a fixture at the ball almost since its inception in 1954. And shortly before midnight, the young debutantes, each flanked by a civilian and military escort, ascended the stage for a deep curtsy.

*

The director of the ball, Margaret Hedberg, brushed off the $14,000 cost of a table — “Watches cost more,” she said — although she acknowledged that perhaps the deepening recession accounted for the smaller crowd. “People are not going overboard,” said Mrs. Hedberg, who came out in 1963 and is the niece of the ball’s founder, Beatrice Dinsmore Joyce. “They’re not taking three or four tables and inviting everybody’s friends’ friends. It’s a little more conservative that way.”

*

Steeped in tradition, the ball is one of the most exclusive debutante galas in New York and around the country, and this year it included young women from 11 states and from England, France, Germany, Greece and Hong Kong. The biggest contingent was from Texas, 11 women who had perfected their signature curtsy, the “Texas dip,” which drew gusts of applause from the crowd.

*

And if all those little edible gold leaves adorning the chocolate boxes that contained plump raspberries for dessert seemed a little excessive, Mrs. Hedberg found a sunny side in the spillover effects. “There are a lot of people who make those dresses and are happy that these gals bought them,” she said. “There are a lot of waiters working tonight, so it’s doing something for the economy.