> But if you mean "our" culture, you include the United States as a whole, you've got a *lot* of people who are not able to meet their needs very easily if at all.

Are you quite sure about that? I'm willing to wager there's a tiny tiny number of people genuinely incapable of meeting their own basic needs followed by a large number of people who choose not to. There are certainly a lot of people out there who simply don't have their priorities in order and choose to allocate what resources they have improperly, but as for those who simply *cannot* meet their own basic needs, I'm not buying it. Needs are very easy and cheap to meet in this country.

By the way, I'm entertained that you lump me in the "middle class suburbia" category. No. No I am not. Five years ago I was living at the poverty line. I lived in a relatively tiny apartment in an economically depressed area and worked a minimum wage job to try to pay my way out from under a mountain of debts. And you know what? Through hard work and with sensible financial priorities, I've worked my way up to the level where kids on the internet are mistaking me for "middle class suburbia." If that's not the American dream, I don't know what is.

> Look at the homeless, look at people who are working two, three full-time jobs, look at people who have big medical bills insurance doesn't cover, etc, etc.

Okay, I'm looking. What am I supposed to see? I see a lot of people who are making bad decisions. I see a lot of people who made bad decisions earlier and are dealing with the repercussions. Is there something else you're trying to draw my attention to? I'm not getting it.

> And you don't have to go very far outside our borders to find poverty that's even worse; there's over a billion people in the world living on less than a dollar a day.

Which has nothing at all to do with what I said, since they're definitely not part of our culture.

> I don't mean to write this to try to guilt trip you or anything like that, just to question if it's ok to throw out your 23 inch tv to make room for a 25 inch when there's people dying for lack of very basic necessities.

As gremlinn said, yes it sure is. Why on earth wouldn't it be? That argument makes no sense. If I kept the old TV instead of throwing it out, would people in Somalia have more to eat?

I think your main problem is abject lack of understanding on the subject of economics. The world does not have one big stockpile of wealth that pricks like me are callously hogging with our new TVs. The simple fact of the matter is that consumerism *creates* wealth, it doesn't deplete it. If everybody stopped buying new TVs and SUVs and computers and rolexes and all the other luxuries we enjoy, the end result sure would NOT be lots of other people suddenly have plenty to eat. The end result would be a big fat awful depression.

You familiar with the Great Depression? One of the major causes of this was that suddenly (for reasons I'll not go into here) there was a giant oversupply of agricultural products in the United States and no demand for it. People were, in effect, hording their wealth instead of spending it. And with money not circulating properly, links started dropping out of the chain - to make a simplistic diagram of it, the farmers weren't taking any money in, so had nothing to spend. This in turn meant that the farm equipment manufacturers suddenly had no money in, and then the people they buy from lost a bunch of business, and so on. The net result was what is known as a "depression of plenty" - a depression caused not by lack of resources but by lack of demand for them.

I simplified that quite a lot, of course; the reality was considerably more complex. But it does as an illustration. The long and short of it is, TV manufacturers employ real people who rely for their economic well-being on other people who buy TVs. If nobody bought TVs, all those people would suddenly not be making any money. It's not like we're throwing money into a big bottomless pit somewhere and it'll never be seen again - we're circulating it through the economy, which is what creates wealth in the first place.

Anyhow, I'll assume that's what you were talking about, since the alternative - you critisizing us for having luxuries instead of giving all we have to help the poor - is far too banal and hypocritical to consider. It is, in fact, even beneath flaming.