I rarely watch Home Alone these days, because as a father, it’s painful to even imagine such a nightmarish scenario as my beloved child ruining my Christmas trip to Paris. However, the 1990 John Hughes hit has become annual holiday viewing for most folks, including apparently the staff at right-wing garbage site Breitbart (NO LINK!), which made a big fuss over how the everyday grocery items Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) buys were so less expensive back during the George H.W. Bush administration.
USA Today also ran with this “wow, inflation exists!” feature. “Bidenomics” just can’t catch a break.
Kevin picks up milk, bread, toilet paper, laundry detergent, fabric softener, cling wrap, macaroni and cheese, a turkey TV dinner, orange juice, and a bag of plastic Army men. The damage is $19.83. Apparently, those same items today would run you about $44.40. Thank God they finally indicted Hunter Biden. Our long national price-gouging nightmare is over at last. A half-gallon of milk is $1.71 again. It’s a Christmas miracle.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy from Louisiana claimed these items would cost $72.28 (thanks to #Bidenflation), but I’m more inclined to trust the nice lady on Tik Tok. Anyway, this might blow your mind, but it’s been 33 years since 1990, when Color Me Badd was blowing up the charts. Chicago’s minimum wage at the time was just $3.80. It’s now $15.80. Chicago’s median household income in 1990 was around $32,252. It’s now about $70,000. None of these figures explain how Kevin’s parents afforded that straight-up mansion where they lived, but there’s nothing to indicate that Joe Biden’s economic policies have “crushed family holiday budgets.”
Kennedy is a stupid man (no, I’m not impressed that he attended an Ivy League school) who thinks his supporters are even dumber. If Biden had wrecked the economy with the same efficiency that Scar’s leadership devastated the Pride Lands, there would be a more drastic inflationary impact from Trump’s reign of terror to now. There isn’t. Biden never pulled the “Emergency Socialism Self-Destruct” lever. Maybe the grocery items Kevin bought were slightly cheaper over Christmas 2020 when we were all stuck home alone, but I prefer our current reality to the Quarantine Times.
It’s interesting to compare 1990 prices to 33 years prior in 1957. The median income when Grease was the word was about $5,000. Every item at McDonald’s cost less than 25 cents, and a hamburger was 15 cents. The average movie ticket price was around 62 cents, and a comic book was 10 cents. I vividly recall 1990 as the year when all comics were suddenly a dollar, and my parents were aghast.
Maybe Andy Rooney might’ve grumbled on “60 Minutes” back in the day that Cary Grant’s character in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House paid $56,000 for his “dream property” in the country, but now you’d have to pay at least 10 times that! Rooney was a professional curmudgeon. You should demand more from your elected officials, although you can’t really expect more from Republicans like Kennedy.
Anyway, here’s an adorable Google ad featuring the then 38-year-old Macaulay Culkin safely and legally home alone.
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I have the TV on in background while I write some stuff and I just heard the announcer say “Taylor Swift n’est pas présente.” Guess which game I’m watching. LOL, even the French are into Swift spotting.
I do not normally do a nightly sign off, most of the time because my brain just shuts down and I wander away I admit, but I feel compelled to mention a thing tonight before I skip off to booboo land and I hope maybe it might be a thing that helps at least a little:
Everything you are feeling right now is 100% valid and more than that, ok to feel. Goes for everyone here.
I hope you'll be kind to yourselves and each other and know that in this great crazy fucked up wonderful horrible world, there's at least one random person who appreciates you.