Remember when greed was good? It was waaaaay back in the ’80s, when a movie called “Wall Street” came up with the brash anthem for a decade: “Greed is good!”<\/p>\n
It was a shocking notion at first, this brazen embrace of avarice. And yet the evidence was all around us. “Dynasty” dames dripped diamonds and pearls. Captains of corporate America – Donald Trump with his jets and helicopters, Ted Turner and his hyperactive empire – became the new American heroes.<\/p>\n
Where once we may have felt reluctance and even shame at talking about how much money we made and how much stuff we could buy, America was now getting cozy with greed.<\/p>\n
But in some ways, those were the good old days – when greed was a remarkable thing. For as we ride a wave of unprecedented economic expansion, with a red hot (if unpredictable) stock market and unemployment at a three-decade low of 4.1%, greed has gone from good to just a part of the landscape in American life. Accepted, hardly noticed. Unremarkable.<\/p>\n
Some local teens get a few hundred dollars a month in spending money (in addition to allowance). Many top athletes not only get multimillion dollar salaries, they don’t want to give autographs unless they get paid for that, too.<\/p>\n
This year, Americans are expected to spend a record $376 billion on dining out, says the National Restaurant Association. That’s more than $1 billion a day spent on “food prepared away from home,” and exceeds the gross national product of countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Austria.<\/p>\n