America: More Blahnik than Brainiac

I've been spending hours today online -- and it didn't even involve surfing gay porn!

Anyway, I came across this article at AdAge (requires registration) and started playing with some of the numbers that anyone can access at U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What I find very curious is that even though only 23% of Americans are smoking, we smokers spend more on cigarettes than the entire country does on reading (as a country, we're also reading less -- but that's another issue).

We're spending more on footware (Ryan suggests Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome), less on apparel (Old Navy?) and Dubya has indeed come through -- dollars spent on taxes have gone down 20% in the past decade. But it looks to me that those savings are going right to prescription drugs and healthcare. On the plus side, we're buying less flooring -- I guess to offset the 30 plus-percent more that we're spending on health insurance, booze and telephone service.

So here's to booze, cigarettes and fast food (food away from home is up almost 25%!). We champions of unhealthy living clearly do more for the GNP than all them book-readin' liberal hippies!

Sigh - I think porn would have been more fun that these numbers: