In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Tim at Balloon Juice wonders what the purpose of putting a story on the front page of the WaPo that a family with an income of $300,000 is having rough times in this economy happens to be.

I do not doubt that it hurts a parent to tell a little girl that she cannot have a designer cell phone like her friends at school. The problem is that highlighting these stories as preeminently important, which both WaPo and the Times do irritatingly often, facilitates the perspective that the people with ‘good enough’ insurance are fine and therefore America is fine. As much as my heart warmed when the article’s protagonist straightened her dark Armani suit and declared, “I can ride this out”, a lot of poor and uninsurable people are not riding this out. They are sick, young and broke, and the current crisis has put a lot more in that position than ever before. The state of America will be perceived as a crisis that we need to solve to the degree that major newspapers treat their plight as a bigger deal than Susie’s generic brand cell phone.

Well, let's take a look at the article's message about the single woman and her three kids:

Laura Steins doesn't mind saying that she is barely squeaking by on $300,000 a year. She lives in a place where the boom years of Wall Street pushed the standard of living to astonishing heights. Where fifth-graders shop at a store called Lester's that sells $114 tween-size True Religion jeans. Where a cup of fresh spinach and carrot juice called the Iron Maiden costs $7.95.

By local standards, Steins occupies the lower rung of affluence -- the rung where every dollar now matters.

As a vice president at MasterCard's corporate office in Purchase, N.Y., she earns a base pay of $150,000 plus a bonus. This year she'll take home 10 percent less because of a smaller bonus. She receives $75,000 a year in child support from her ex-husband. She figures she will pull an additional $50,000 from a personal investment account to "pick up the slack."

The nanny and property taxes take $75,000 right off the top, but Steins considers both non-negotiable facts of her life and not discretionary. When she bought out her husband's share of the house after their 2006 divorce, she assumed the costs of keeping it afloat -- $8,000 to $10,000 a month. There's a pool man, a gardener and someone to plow the snow from the quarter-mile-long driveway.

As tight as money is, she has decided that living in a 4,000-square-foot house on three acres is the practical thing to do. "A), I couldn't sell the house right now," she says, citing the slow real estate market. "B), this is where my kids go to school. And C), it's where my job is."

The answer is simple: you're supposed to feel sorry for this single mom and think to yourself "Boy, Nancy Pelosi wants to tax this poor woman an extra $3,000 a year to help pay for health insurance for people that don't have it. That's a terrible thing to do to a single mom. I don't like the Democrats or their health care plan, no sir."

Laura Steins is the poster mom for the Down And Out In Beverly Hills crowd. You don't want to raise taxes on the rich, the article is saying. The rich are just as broke as you and I are.

Oldest story in the class war book. Get the single mom making $30,000 a year to relate to to the one making $300,000 a year and say "Yeah, we can't afford health care reform right now." Sympathy for the Devil, indeed.

And it's working perfectly. Gotta love our liberal media.

The beltway movers and shakers and staffers and lobbyists in that income bracket already (or aspiring to be) are the targets of this article. This article's to remind them of The Way Things Are. The people making decisions in Washington and the people making decisions in the Village, they're letting you know not so subtly that they're not going to pay for health care for poor people, dammit.

They have nannies and poolboys and designer cell phones to worry about, after all. And that's what the Beltway thinks. They want you to think this way too...and more importantly, they want Congress to think this way.