The Way We Live Now: pulling the Irish out of the gutter. Not that we aren't used to it, ho ho ho! Stop mocking the Irish? Next you'll tell us to assist the homeless, or to raise taxes voluntarily. Banana-ness!

You and I may have escaped the motherland, but our Irish brethren have spent up all their money, as usual, and now the rest of Europe has to come to their aid with billions of dollars, because frankly we are sick and tired of bailing out the cousins again and again, only to see the carousing go on and on.

Why don't they just move to Boston so Ben Affleck can make a gritty movie about them? Huh?

This is macrocredit, people. Microcredit is dunzo. The whole amazing world-saving Indian microcredit industry is facing collapse thanks to defaults, so put that in your Nobel Prize and smoke it and then sell that smoke in order to buy goats for your family. Who wants to default on such a tiny ass loan? When we first-worlders default, we default big time, and that's what has gotten us into the financial position we're in today.

Champions.

Sure, you'll see economists here and there try to fuck up our flow, try to wreck our swagger with suggestions like, oh, we should go ahead and demand that taxes be raised of our own free accord, because we recognize that the current tax rate is too low to be sustainable and it's slowly but surely destroying the economic future of our children and their children, which is at best irresponsible and at worst downright craven and greedy.

This assumes that Americans live in a magical fantasy land where money grows on trees and we understand math and everyone drives a Ferrari for free and we aren't craven. Not so. Americans live in America, where we worry about our Irish relatives asking us for money and where we'll be able to store our bedroom set once we're homeless (the homelessness we take for granted).

A lot to worry about. But cheer up. It'll never be so bad that Ireland would actually raise taxes on corporations. The Irish Dream—"The lowest corporate tax rate and highest crippling debt levels you find in the E.U."—is still alive.

[Pic of Duddy the Derry Destroyer: AP]