Gross is writing for and about the NewYork upper class, who fill their minds and conversations with such topics, much like their parents talking about the best corned beef and cabana clubs. Shoes back then had to be fitted by Murray Lavigne, formerly of Bam's (Macy's). That was before the advent of Stride Rite and Salamander.

YECH!!!!!

No wonder their kids turn gay or screw 17-year old hockey slobs without rubbers and keep the baby.

I wonder if anybody really knows what is going on. The GOP yells that things are pretty darn good for almost everybody. The GOP slams Dems for claiming that USA is in a Depression, where people can't get health care.

Somehow, journalists are bringing their garlic-smothered kasha varnishkes to the school lunch cafeteria, with limburger cheese, and smearing it on the rest of us.

Why refer to the current faddish status-symbol cheeseballs in an article about the economy's dying?? Is it dying really?? Or does Palin know better?

And yes, I've had Allen-Edmonds shoes on and off since the '60s, but I don't like Sushi (parasites inevitable) or Tuscan cooking.

Bam's? I'm sure Macy's (opposite Gimble's) was already in place by the time of WW2. I remember being taken to view the Christmas window displays when I was very small. When was it Bam's?

You seem to focus disproportionately on food. I know New York itself was largely about food in the old days. But that is no longer the case, is it? My impression is that the city is so wound up in itself about being the business center of the world that little else is important. I know they saw London as a worthy competitor for a long time, but I think they must be worrying now about such unlikely places as Bahrain and Shanghai. Would it matter if they just left the computers running and moved to the countryside where the air is fresher? When I was young, Manhattan was a force in manufacturing for some products. The garment district probably supplied a significant chunk of the nations fashion clothing. My uncle took me to his factory to show me the bandsaw that cut our dress parts a hundred or two at a time and the long rows of sewing machines still driven by overhead belts. I worked in another uncle's candybox factory (I was less young than when I visited the clothing factory) fetching material for the half dozen or so girls who were assembling, by hand, fancy heartshaped boxes for Valentine's day. Have all of those businesses been driven out of town now? It was such a vibrant contributing atmosphere - many of the lunch counters were at a height that allowed people to eat standing up so that less time would be wasted. The streets, even at 3 o'clock in the morning, were alive with people, especially at the all-night auction sites near Times Square, but even in the Bronx, there were nightcrawling pedestrians.I don't think I would be very comfortable with it now, but as a teen-ager it was great fun.

Incidentally, while it is worth being wary about sashimi, I think sushi is somewhat less of a gamble.

Also - Was Murray Lavigne really Murray Levine? Or am I just being naive?

Bamberger was the guy who "owned" Macy's in NJ at least and I guess nationally. He funded the Inst for Advanced Study and the importation of Einstein. In Jersey, there were no stores called "Macy's."

Murray was, no doubt, a version of Barney F**, who was absolutely idolized by mothers (with gay mishpoche especially) during shoe-buying season. If you wore shoes not fitted by Murray, rumor had it that you'd pay for it by needing surgery from a chiropodist or suffering crippling disease in old age. I, however, was an exception. My mother got me custom-made shoes from old-time German-American shoemakers. Meanwhile, the kids best at running, basketball, softball, etc all had shoes and sneakers with holes and sometimes torn, flappy soles.

I don't know the guy's real last name; but he was friends with the Bam's lady fashion buyer (single) who later owned Charivari in Manhattan. She was from my shtetl. I think she was named Selma Weiser, and she loved me as a little kid -- more than any other kid.

No more bustling cafeterias or standup rush lunch places. Few hot dogs in stores (mostly streetcarts). One server in Coney Island used to serve about six times more people than eleven servers do now at Nathan's.

While consuming my lunchtime chicken noodle soup (canned) and a flatbread (from Trader Joe's), I remembered the name Bamberger and figured that was probably what you were referring to. However, I knew nothing about any Macy's connection, or even where the Bamberger stores are(were?).

As to the non-exotic nature of my lunch - I figure I have had about 75,000 meals and none really stands out in memory particularly, so I am not terribly picky. I do try to visit a Chinese buffet once a week, but that is habit more than event. I grew up fat and, now that I am reasonably trim, I don't want to blow it by getting unduly excited about food.

Phil: many of the lunch counters were at a height that allowed people to eat standing up so that less time would be wasted.

LeRoy: Indeed! It might take half a minute to sit down, and another half a minute to stand up! Or, even if you cut those times in half, that is still a half-minute wasted on the 'round-trip' process of sitting down and then standing up. All just to eat! And if you add up those half-minutes over the course of a year, that is roughly 180 minutes or three hours wasted per year, just sitting down and then standing up, all just to eat! Over a typical forty-year career, that would add up to 120 hours, or five whole entire days, just sitting down and then standing up, all just to eat! Or, if you broke it down to just eight-hour work days, that would add up to fifteen entire workdays wasted over the length of your career, just sitting down and then standing up, all just to eat! Neither America nor any other advanced industrialized nation can afford to have lazy people wasting fifteen entire workdays over the length of their careers, just sitting down and then standing up, all just to eat! Ben Franklin understood that time is money, and would not approve of such glaring inefficiencies.

And, while you might accuse me of wasting ten minutes writing this absurd and surreal post, I have at least been eating while I did so, thus saving time that might otherwise have been spent more productively.

So there.

You people amaze me.

The last time I saw this kind of energy expended on nostalgia, members of the one-time Grateful Dead were playing and the audience was mostly on chemicals. Now those were the days. A couple months ago, actually, but my point is, I thought old hippies were the dry-land champions of nostalgia, but wrong is wrong, and you have shown me the light.

Actually, I'm a little too old to have been a hippie. But I do remember stuff that you would probably want to hear about - like the chain drive Mack dump trucks with the solid rubber wheels and AM only radios in their oak and mahogany inlaid cases, and ... Well, you get the idea. We've actually been unusually topical and have delved into the social significance of the changes. Now is just the tippy-top of a pyramid of times and experiences. If you throw that away, you are back at ground level and you stay there, waiting like a cat for the bowl to full up again.

We voice a type of objection by pointing out how a journo like Gross simply flings "junkthink" in a reader's face. Nobu, Allen-Edmonds, Tuscany are all Yenta things in the petit-bourgeois world.

THE issue is whether the economy (USA) is DYING. GOP accuses Dems of GROSSly exaggerating healthcare problems. Today Pete Peterson and his allies lie about "entitlements" having $53 Trilion in unfunded liabiities. Actually they are not "entitlements," which is a word meaning that people are ENTITLED to it (unjustly and undeservingly). AND there are ZERO liabilities and funds. Social insurance cannot be funded; only trend-anomalies can be funded.

I don't want to hear about pockabooks and toenail spas when the issue is the economy in crisis.

Sovereign,

You have now lost me in the tall grass.

Clearly, you have opinions regarding the Social Security fund and probably Medicare as well. Fine and dandy. But the urge to accuse those with whom one has a difference of economic opinion of sloppy language, form which of course derives their (obvious!) sloppy thinking is the fundamental impulse of the Blowhard (genus: Blovius), from Oliver Wendell Holmes to William Safire.

Phil,

When I was a kid our milkman used a rubber-tired wagon, pulled by a very old horse. I vaguely remember when this arrangement was replaced by a modern box van. I heart nostalgia. It is, in fact, what innoculates us against ideology. Ideologues always go after the "four olds," and I saw that as pernicious, even when I was young, and not merely jejune.

History (I feel a bit of blowharding coming on) doesn't just exist as a prophylaxis against repeating itself. If history weren't a repetitive bore, why would all the Harvard Club guys be such a fan of it? History's primary task, like all institutions, is seductive. It wants you to love it; to love the old STUFF of it, whether it's Natural History or Social History.

Yes, the consumer economy is in sad shape. Gross was trying, I think, to identify a specific slice of "bitterness;" those of us who CLING to our lattes and our more durable consumables because we are aware that in the near future we are/will be screwed. Did your diversified little portfolio include a comforting slice of Fannie Mae preferred? Mine did. A nice secure stock; good for the widows and orphans. So I drown my sorrows in a latte,and with them the awareness that I will always be merely PETIT-bourgeois.

So explain to my poor tired old pseudo-hippie ass, how Social insurance cannot be funded. If it can't be, shouldn't we prosecute all the insurance companies for fraud? Details, please.

Well, I think the predictions of Social Security's immanent death are vastly premature. I have suggested, in these very pages, what should be done with the plan. The bonds which the SSA hold are "special bonds", but redemption is guaranteed by the self-same US Treasury which issues negotiable Treasury Bonds and Notes. Each year, the special bonds are bought by the SSA with surplus funds collected from all workers and their employers. The interest on those bonds reflects the interest on the Treasury Bonds issued at the same time. It would be a simple matter (compared to a lot of things!) to replace those special bonds with negotiable Treasury Bonds with the same redemption value and interest rate and some negotiated redemption date ladder. Thus, the SSA would be assured of their liquidity since it would be the same as it is for all other Treasury Bonds. As an additional step, I would remove all national government officials from the board of administrators of the SSA and elected by the agencies clients and contributors from a cohort of experienced upper level managers of the SSA. This would put the SSA in relatively the position of a mutual insurance company, but with the power to tax wages, which would be comparable to the arrangement wherein drivers and mortgagees in various states are required to buy various types of insurance. I mention that comparison to show that it isn't an economic principal of recent Martian origin.

I don't know why you wanted an explanation of "how Social insurance cannot be funded" from me. It is Sovereign who always states that the SSA Trust Fund will not be repaid. I see a method which requires only a single respectable administration and Congress to achieve a rectification and separation which would be very hard to reverses.

Thank you. I was, actually, trying to put my request for detail to Sovereign. I've never understood how or why some future insolvency of the trust fund was inevitable. This has always seemed to me to be part of a fearmongering campaign, designed to stampede us into privatizing the fund, and dumping it all into the Market, where money is made and lost -- mostly, these days, lost.

Privatization looked like a great idea to some back when a twenty-year bull market had robbed them of their senses. Then it looked like an even BETTER idea when the market was flagging and a big injection of public money might hype it back up again. As i vaguely recall, even bubble-boy Greenspan thought that was a bad idea. Isn't McCain still enthused about it?

Oh, politics. Wrong queue.

Thanks also for your short program for SSA reform.

Social insurance is a far cry from private insurance, which is 100% FUNDED with fully marketable investments that are regulated and diversified.

SOCIAL insurance simply transfers money from active workers to dependents.

In future years, it will become harder to qualify for SS. As a result, there will be less need to raise income taxes in order to "redeem" the unmarketable "bond"-papers in the SS-Trust-Fund filing cabinet. Those bond papers have no purpose whatsoever. Congress can raise taxes with or without them. Congress has spent ALL taxes collected by SS. The last SS tax increase should have been invested in marketable private investments. The Trust Fund now shows that over $2 Trillion of SS taxes have been diverted. You can thank the abject ignorance of Greenspan and Moynihan for the theft, as well as a lot of our current economic problems.