Friday, September 30, 2011

Andy Rooney

You'll get your last regularly scheduled "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" this Sunday. Rooney may not be entirely happy that 60 Minutes is laying him off at age 92.

Rooney doesn't write about high finance much, but in one of his later columns he did rise to defend an oppressed minority:
It's time we started being nicer to the rich.

People of this Country should be aware of the contribution made by those who make a lot of money. For too long they have been aligned by politicians, trashed by journalists and portrayed in a bad light by such artists of novelists and motion picture producers. If they rich were an ethnic group they could make the case that they are the persecuted victims of financial profiling. ***

Candidates for office and the majority of the electorate talk and act as if the rich got where they are by luck or dishonesty. Nowhere do we hear anyone say they did it with ability and hard work. No one says it is the financially successful people who make the wheels go 'round.
Rooney remembers the days when a bankroll was a bankroll, not a piece of plastic:
There's something about having a thick stack of money in your pocket that gives you a feeling of wellbeing. I smile more when I have money in my pocket. *** Most of us get no kick at all from a computer printout of a bank's idea of our net worth. What we want is that lump in our pocket.
Now that we're going to have to pay the bank a monthly fee to use those plastic debit cards, carrying a wad of currency may be an idea whose time has come … again.

No comments: