Bad Economy Trickles Up; Good Economy Does Not Trickle Down

Aaaaaw. Isn’t that just too bad. Even the wealthiest are tightening their belts.

Welcome to the real world.

According to SpendingPulse, luxury sales dropped nearly 35 percent at the beginning of December as compared to the same week last year, and were also down 23 percent for the five previous weeks.

High-end stores and the manufacturers of the brands they carry are feeling the pinch, too. It’s not like no luxury items aren’t being purchased; they are. The wealthy are just buying fewer of them.

Tuff. Things are rough all over.

I lived through Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics and all I saw was greed, the wealthier getting richer, prices go up, companies swallowed up by mergers and acquisitions then chopped up and sold off and a huge loss of jobs.

All that was really swell for most of us.

That led to global economics, outsourcing of jobs, the death of our manufacturing base, rise in prices and even more loss of jobs.

I never understood why companies like Nike and Mattel outsourced all their manufacturing to cheap labor countries, yet the prices of their good never came down; in many cases they went up.

Global domination is nothing new in the diamond market either.

While diamonds were never a girl’s best friend regardless of what the song said, they were the best little pals of De Beers Group, which is also feeling the pain of the tanking economy.

I can’t begin to say how much my heart goes out to De Beers, which has artificially controlled the price of diamonds worldwide for years. Diamond-rich Russia has vaults filled with billions of the little gems from the precious to the industrial.

If Russia were to released even a small portion of them, a diamond would have less value than a zircon on the open market, which are their real value anyway.

Although the rich haven’t stopped spending altogether, they’re buying fewer pieces of jewelry, yachts, furs, cars or whatever their little hearts desire.

Don’tcha really feel sorry for the Vanderbucks of the world?

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