To respond to Timber, I doubt you live in a working class neighborhood if half of your neighbors are driving Escalades and the like. (People are going into debt to pay for essentials: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/ManageDebt/TheWorstKindOfDebtChargingTheGroceries.aspx AND http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/credit/2008-02-28-credit-cards_N.htm)

This does raise an important point: what about working class people who get over their heads in debt, aren’t they to blame at least in part? No. The reality is that every Escalade, every house, every good or service in the world was made by the working class, which creates all of the wealth. The reason so much of this wealth ends up in the pockets of an idle, parasitic ruling class is because of exploitation, of workers being robbed of the value they create. Then the capitalists have the nerve to lend the wealth they steal back to the workers they stole it from! And they can charge predatory interest rates, because the workers, especially those who also face racism, are “risky” borrowers. They are “risky” BECAUSE of exploitation and racism, because their wages are constantly being pushed down (replaced by borrowing) and their jobs are not secure (a result of capitalism’s tendency towards crisis).

If you take a step back and look at the big picture, workers are not living beyond their means in any absolute sense. Our means are artificially restricted by the fact that we’re exploited by a small group of people who use the wealth we create to send us to war to kill and be killed, waste it on their luxury goods, advertising, making 40 different types of toilet paper and toothpaste, and other nonsense, and produce without regard to the environment or workers’ safety. Let’s keep the focus on who is really to blame.

This is an issue of both class and race. That shouldn’t be ignored in the comments. It is not just about the “poor”. The ruling class is engage in their default scapegoating of African American in their attempt to align themselves with working class whites. Let’s recall that it was the “Reagan Democrats” (working class whites) that consistently voted against their interest that gave the U.S. 30 years of reactionary economics policies.

That’s not exactly true. The rich don’t so much “blame the poor” as want to establish in their own minds the degradation of the poor. It’s part of the ongoing abusive relationship between the rich and the poor – kind of like when an abusive spouse tells his/her mate – “You’re pathetic. You’re nothing”.

“How ironic. The poor always blame the rich. Think about it.”

The rich are the ones in control – therefore they deserve the blame when they abuse the world (almost always) and the credit when the help the world (almost never).

Estimation based on the measured stellar density
One way to calculate the mass of the visible matter which makes up the observable universe is to assume a mean solar mass and to multiply that by an estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe. The estimate of the number of stars in the universe is derived from the volume of the observable universe
and a stellar density calculated from observations by the Hubble Space Telescope

yielding an estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe of 9 × 1021 stars (9 billion trillion stars).

Lazy sometimes but not stupid.

By the same token, I live in a poor/working-class neighborhood myself; are half of my neighbors driving Escalades, Tahoes, Yukons, Expeditions and other pricey gas-guzzlers because they were “tricked” by some slick sales pitch, or because they judge themselves by the same criteria that the middle class and wealthy do–possessions and status symbols?