The XX Factor: What women really think.

Hair-Color Industry: Cockroach of the Economic Apocalypse

Conde Nast Portfolio polled its readers to ask "where they've already cut back or where they plan to in the coming year." The results provide a little bit of an unsettling look at our priorities. The top and bottom results, with a selection from the middle:

Stop eating out: 29.4%

Move in with parents: 8.1%

Stop buying clothes: 7.3%

Sell eggs or sperm: 5.4%

Sell home: 1.8%

Let go of housekeeper: 1.6%

Stop coloring hair: 1.1%

Stopping buying clothes is a more upsetting prospect than moving in with the 'rents? Selling one's entire home is less depressing than laying off the household help? And five times more people insist they would sell their eggs than say they'd stop dyeing their hair?

P.S. Reader MK notes that "the unusual distribution probably has less to do with relative preferences between dissimilar solutions and more to do with how desperate people are," suggesting that it's a different class of people contemplating selling their home than considering stopping coloring their hair. Very true, and related to the point Torie made. Still, this wasn't a random survey; it was a poll of readers of Conde Nast Portfolio, whose financial situations are probably more alike. I'd reckon a majority of women who answered that poll color their hair. The finding struck me, too, because it jibed with a (yes, small and random) anecdote I heard at the place I get my hair cut, which does a big business in "color." The stylists at this salon reported a recent uptick in requests for coloring, not a downturn.

Newsflash: Bush Isn't the Culprit (!!!)

It was REAGAN all along, after all these years!

"The financial crisis is not only a cause of our national malaise," says Good's Jeffrey Sachs, "but also a symptom of the deeper wrong turn that America made decades ago, when Ronald Reagan declared that government had to get out of the way to restore the national economy. After a wild decade of high inflation and soaring energy prices in the 1970s, Reagan made government the enemy. From that point on, the name of the game was to cut taxes, shrink government, and allow the magic of the market to deliver the goods."

Cutting taxes? Shrinking government? Relying on the free market? The horror!

But that's not all, Sachs rails. For those playing at home: Reagan and his "fervid movie-land imagination" (fervid?) ruined the economy; destroyed the community; decivilized capitalism; founded partisanship; sneered at disease, hunger, and poverty; told us all to stop caring about the future; laid waste to the environment; and brought on the shadowy darkness of changing climates. When did the man SLEEP?

Luckily, Sachs proclaims, all is not lost. We've entered the age of Obama (who, incidentally, happens/ed to like Reagan and what he did for our country—at least until he realized he wasn't supposed to), and as soon as we learn to stop worrying and love ... taxes—which are, apparently, "the price we pay for civilization" and the only choice we have, with "the budget pushing toward $1 trillion"—then we'll fix the world, walk on water, community will be restored, and our blasted economy will stand up on weak legs and dance.

So long as we screw Reagan, who didn't, like, pick the country up off the brink of a major recession; create 17 million new jobs; cut black unemployment in half; do a little tax reform; restore the idea that the private individuals/businesses, not the government, were the source of prosperity; and work out a few minor misunderstandings with the Soviet Union ... or anything like that.

Right. Seems to me like Obama realizes what Sachs doesn't: that the economy he's been dealt has strong resemblance to the one Reagan revived, and while he had his failings, the "great communicator" got a few things right. For starters, preaching "the right message at the right time."