Endless American Whining
October 28, 2017
by William P. Meyers

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"To utter a peevish, high-pitched, somewhat nasal sound, as in complaint, distress, or fear."

I can pick out no defining moment in the history of American whining. Whining is part of human nature. Native Americans probably whined from time to time, as did the colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth. A great deal of whining was heard during the Great Depression. When the American economy boomed after World War II, when we were left with most of the world's intact factories, whining was minimized for a while.

Starting with the recessions of the mid-1970s, American whining started on an upward swing. It cumulated in the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016. That man strikes me as the greatest whiner in the history of the world. He remains popular because his whining gives permission to all the other Americans who prefer whining to getting off their asses.

Donald Trump was born rich, but did not rest on his laurels. He whined for this dad and his corrupt political friends to give him the tax breaks and financial backing to start his own real estate empire. Though he has been a media hound since his coke-fueled Studio 54 days, he whines endlessly about unfair media coverage. Though he is a expert tax dodger, always willing to let the little guys pay for things, he whines about taxes. Though he dodged military service, he whines about the military not making enough sacrifices to make him look great.

But Donald Trump is just the crowned king of the American Way of Whining. Whining has become a way of life from top to bottom, from CEO down through the middle class to homeless dopers.

What do American's whine about? CEOs and other business leaders whine about foreign competition, taxes, lack of infrastructure, government regulations, and lack of pre-trained workers. Of course, one of the reasons the government has no money for infrastructure or better school systems is because both the corporations and the CEOs themselves pay so little in taxes. If you want to go back to a lack of foreign competition, like there was from 1945 to 1965, all you have to do is declare war on every other country in the world and bomb their factories? Wouldn't that be great?

Professionals like doctors, lawyers, and accountants whine about their unfair tax burden. After all, they worked hard in school to get their licenses. Why should they pay such high taxes? Why pay taxes to support public schools, when their kids go to private? And the prices of private schools, and fancy cars, and high end housing! And where is the gratitude?

Home owners complain about high real estate taxes and high maintenance costs.

Renters complain that their paychecks just go straight to the landlord. They can't accumulate wealth, and there is hardly any money left for having any real fun. And taxes are too high, and there are not enough good jobs, and further schooling costs too much, and infrastructure is bad, and medical care and insurance cost too much.

College educated workers wonder if they should have just started working out of high school. Taxes are high, even when they owe money on student loans! Rents are too high and saving up for a down on a house is impossible! Infrastructure sucks.

Seniors whine that they were not able to save enough and don't get enough in Social Security. The subsidized rentals and homes they get placed in suck. Medicare could be better, sometimes it really sucks. They were young when America was great, 1945 to 1965, and so they did not foresee a need to save or invest. And taxes! We paid so much in taxes back when . . .

Younger welfare and disability recipients whine constantly about the shabby treatment taxpayers hand them, the less-than-luxurious apartments, stingy Food Stamps, not ready-to-eat commodities handouts, and generally not enough cash handouts to do much that is fun.

Homeless people whine about how noisy shelters are. A bum will whine "where is the paper money" if you hand him a quarter. Addicts will complain about the weakness of the heroin they buy, until they complain it was too strong and how shitty the hospital is that they recover in at taxpayer expense.

People whine about immigrants taking jobs and undercutting wages, and they whine when immigrants aren't available to clean their homes and baby sit and mow their laws for cheap.

Of course, not all people whine all the time. Work does get done. Some people get educations. Some bridges get repaired, and some new medicines are invented. Some new houses and apartments get built by those evil landlords who are willing to risk their hard-earned capital on such things.

A fundamental change is that Republicans have really gotten to be whiners. The Republicans of my youth (the 1960s) worked hard and were thrifty. If thing went wrong, if they got knocked over, they got back up as quickly as possible and blamed themselves for not having the intelligence to see the hard knock coming, and avoid it.

Today's Republicans don't work as hard (some more or less than others), they expect more, and they are quick to blame others for any problem that arises. Blaming immigrants and people on welfare, and whining about taxes and how things have changed since the good old days, have been substituted for clear thinking about personal economics and business opportunities, and hard work.

People even whine about inheriting vast amounts of money. This whine has been heard up in the heavens, so the Estate Tax is about to be ended. Why should a coke-addicted playboy trust fund son or daughter be deprived of those billions of never-taxed capital gains by Crooked Hillary's government of whining takers whose parents never had the sense to generate billions in value for the American people?

Well, enough. I would continue my meta-whining, my whining about the whining, but next I was going to go after environmentalist whining, which might irritate my vast crowds of regular readers.