Bah-humbug Christmas for the wealthy?

Commentary by Patrick Keller

The potential for a bah-humbug Christmas seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. You can’t tune into the news without hearing talk of economic doom. The consumer confidence index, dreamt up by Ottawa’s Conference Board, indicates merchants are being hit with the biggest bad news since the early 1980s. With a skinny 71 points on the shop-o-meter, the 1982 recession proved so thorough that the bottom dropped right out of the leg-warmer market. But money is fickle. Now that Wall Street’s Golem is crashing through the markets, is seems a given that poor folks will get hit. Fortunately, they have less to lose! A wealthy family worth $20 million might have gotten hit hard if their investments were flaky. Maybe they lost half. Now, that’s got to hurt! Now, consider a family that makes $50,000. Losing half of that could very well land them in the soup kitchen. ‘Tis the season. According to 1999 Statscan data on the distribution of wealth in Canada, the poorest 40 per cent of families saw little or no increase in their wealth during the previous 15 years, while the richest 20 per cent of families enjoyed increases in the order of 39 per cent. The same study shows that the wealthiest 10 per cent owned 53 per cent of total wealth, while the poorest 10 per cent had negative wealth. Now that the economic bubble which had inflated for the chosen few has burst, chickens across the nation are coming home to roost. Strangely, the economists answer is to spend. But don’t just spend – spend lavishly. Despite a bleak outlook, their best advice is to go for that loan. Buy high ticket items. Buy a new car. You won’t believe the savings! In ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Charles Dickens’ character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a financier and money-changer who devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and the Christmas season. In the story, Scrooge is visited by a series of ghosts, each more harrowing than the last until finally he is shown as a pathetic man whose death saddens no one. ‘A Christmas Carol’ asks people to recognize the plight of those whom the industrial revolution had displaced and driven into poverty, and the obligation of society to provide for them humanely. Failure to do so will result in an unnamed “doom” for those who, like Scrooge, believe their wealth and status qualifies them to sit in judgment on the poor rather than to assist them. It is said of Scrooge that he “embodies all the selfishness and indifference of the prosperous classes who parrot phrases about the ‘surplus population’ and think their social responsibilities fully discharged when they have paid their taxes.” Like Scrooge, it’s hard to generate sympathy for the money-changers. In Dickens’ story, it takes three ghosts to scare Scrooge into some form of decency. How many scares to the money-changers it takes to change their ways, remains to be seen.

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