ATLANTA, GEORGIA – There’s a new epidemic spreading among the wealthy, and in olden days it might have been called foot-in-mouth disease, but today it was dubbed by the US Centers for Disease Control “Romnitis.”
“We’re seeing the leading edge of what could become a serious pandemic,” said Dr. Emil Moss, the CDC’s leading specialist on emerging communicable diseases. “If there’s a silver lining here, it’s unlikely to spread beyond a very small segment of the population.”
That small segment is the nation’s so-called “one percent,” the top earners in the U.S.
Dr. Moss hypothesized that the disease takes root in the brain’s right hemisphere and frontal lobe, which controls reasoning, problem-solving, and judgment, and impairs the individual’s ability to make logical connections on the topic of personal finances. The primary symptom is the spontaneous utterance of statements lacking in perspective on money matters; a sufferer of Romnitis seems incapable of distinguishing between his own financial status and those of lower-income individuals.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, for whom the ailment has been named, has not been officially diagnosed with Romnitis, but Romney has several times manifested symptoms, most recently during a campaign stop in Detroit, where he commented to a group of supporters that he and his wife Anne own between them four cars, two of them Cadillacs.
Later, when responding to a reporter’s question about his NASCAR-watching habits, he stated that he was not a fan himself, but was friends with several NASCAR team owners.
Last year during a debate, he also made his now-infamous $10,000 challenge to Texas Governor Rick Perry, and later blithely remarked that the $374,327 he collected that year in speaking fees was “not very much.”
Romney’s speaking fee income is roughly eight times the national median income.
Evidence that Romnitis was starting to spread emerged today in a Bloomberg story about Andrew Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., who expressed concern about his ability to make ends meet on his $350,000-a-year salary in the face of a reduced annual bonus.
“Schiff is as close to a textbook example of Romnitis as you can get,” Dr. Moss said. “This is a man who owns a 1,200-square foot duplex in New York City and a a summer home in Connecticut, sends his daughter to a $32,000-a-year private school, and plans to send his son to the same school in the near future, and there he was complaining, ‘I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand’.”
That same story also featured Richard Scheiner, who works for New York-based hedge fund Lane Gate Partners LLC, who spoke of his selling two motorcycles to better afford garaging fees for his two Audis and $17,000 in assorted costs for his two dogs.
“This is a man who griped that his Porsche was ‘the Volkswagen of supercars’ at a time when eight percent of Americans are out of work and wondering if they’ll have money for food and rent next month,” Dr. Moss said. “I’d call that a very severe case of Romnitis.”
Even before Romney manifested symptoms, Dr. Moss said there were early hints of a brewing pandemic, referring to Louisiana Rep. John Fleming, who told media outlets how hard it was feeding his family on $400,000 a year and dismissed critics as inciting “class warfare”; and to the he Parnell family of Tennessee who, in 2009, gained unwelcome notoriety when they were featured in a Wall Street Journal online article in which they discussed the hardships of maintaining their lifestyle — which included a $33,000 Infinity and a Florida summer home — on “only” $250,000 a year.
Dr. Moss was less than optimistic about finding a cure for Romnitis, which he likened to an addiction problem as much as to a communicable disease.
“These are people who grew into their incomes. They could have met their needs for transportation by purchasing a $16,000 Honda Civic but insisted on paying two to three times that for an Audi,” Dr. Moss said. “They’re surrounded by the more affordable opportunities the average American has to take — shopping at Walmart instead of Macy’s — but choose to embrace a luxurious lifestyle, and once they grow accustomed to that, breaking the cycle becomes increasingly difficult.”
“The irony is,” he added, “at their income brackets, they could afford top-notch psychological counseling.”
