Time published an article last week about how great life is in the United States. “We’re living longer, breathing cleaner air, drinking cleaner water. Crime is in a free fall . . . and the downtowns we once gave up for dead are bristling with coffee bars, green markets, life.” Maybe you remember life in the U.S.A. as being pretty good in the ’80s, too? No way, says Time.
Some might have thought that the blame-it-on-Reagan ethic that once pervaded establishment journalism had run its course, but it still thrives in the Time-Life building. Time’s Eric Pooley asserts that “in the ’80s, morning in America sounded good but proved to be a false dawn. The expansion was fueled by ‘high-yield’ junk bonds and government debt, and when interest rates soared and the market crashed, the junk dealers on Wall Street started to look like perfect mirror images of the crack entrepreneurs in the slums.”
Come again? Junk-bond dealers as crack dealers? This analysis is sufficiently misguided that it doesn’t merit a serious rebuttal, except to point out that it was “junk bonds” that financed (among many other useful things) the rise of the Turner Broadcasting System, which last time we checked had merged with Pooley’s employers, making him, we suppose, the ” perfect mirror image” of a low-level dealer.
