Remember, this is from the CBC’s senior business correspondent for The National and co-host of the Lang & O’Leary Exchange:

I broke the rules to spend beyond my means

…
I was posted to New York at the age of 28 as a business journalist, and intended to live within the somewhat modest means of a newspaper correspondent. And I stuck to my guns, for at least six months. Then I abandoned my guns, hopped over the wall into no man’s land, went AWOL. And in retrospect I’m glad I did, because the investment in my career and the experiences were worth more than the thousands of dollars I figure it cost me…
My new friends liked to dine out (most people I knew in New York used their oven as additional storage space) and pretty soon we were traveling too. Italy, Spain, Italy, the Hamptons, Italy. We travelled together, and an Italian villa back then was a steal — I was practically saving money by going.
Within a few years, I was rich in experience, a billionaire in sights and sounds, a queen of couture. And tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. The lowest moment, financially speaking, was when I cashed in my RRSP — paid a huge chunk of tax on it, lost the compounding potential, and used the money to pay off a credit card. Or most of it…
Was it a mistake? On a straight math basis yes. It was foolish. But would I do the same thing over again? In a New York minute…

Entitled to her…

A brilliant follow-up to yesterday’s well discussed posting here on SDA was just published by Kelly McParland in the National Post. He so beautifully destroys the entitlement mentality, selfishness, totalitarian mindset, and hypocrisy that seems ever present in Radical Leftists these days.
Here’s a sampling of what should be a Must Read column for all Canadians who don’t fully understand the concept of democracy:

Ms. DePape is a recent graduate of the University of Ottawa, that bastion of free speech, where they shout down speakers who hold views they don’t like. She took classes in “international development and globalization,” where they teach you about the West’s cruel failure to adequately support less fortunate nations while plotting ways to exploit their labour. Fair trade coffee is free at the door.
They must not have reached the part of the course where they learn about democracy. Or perhaps Ms DePape missed that day, skipping classes to strap herself to the stack of a coal-fired power plant. Democracy is a system in which people get together and vote on who they wish to elect as a government. The party with the most votes wins. Recently, Canada had an election, in which almost 15 million votes were cast for 19 parties, some of which even held views similar to Ms. De Pape’s. The Conservative party won by quite a wide margin. The NDP, a party which considers itself “progressive,” also did quite well.

This afternoon Roy Green spoke with McParland about his column. You can listen to it here.