[I'm still getting links to this one over a year later. One can only speculate why it hit such a nerve. Double shot, sir? Cinnamon? -- lambert]

[Welcome, Sadly No and Balloon Juice readers. Vanilla shot with your ramen? Cinnamon? I, for one, welcome our new "creative class" overlords; we welcome your hatred, if any. Because every time the OFB use the word "desperate," a kitten dies...]

As alert reader gqmartinez points out, $30 is a month's worth of food, if you need to live on ramen noodles. And as alert reader BDBlue points out, it's 15 weeks worth of school lunches for one of your kids.

I've done that math, because after the dot com bubble burst, that was the situation I was faced with, and I was lucky, because my situation only lasted for months. Except I can top gqmartinez: My survival formula was dollar store spaghetti sauce. You can get two days out of a jar, and even with spaghetti, I could still get change back from my thirty! That was before things got really bad, and I went to the cans of generic pork and beans, 4 for a dollar. Plus, since by that time the gas and the electricity were off, I could heat the beans with the hotplate after stringing an extension cord out into the hall and plugging it into a socket I'd screwed into the light for the purpose. Too risky to boil water that way, I felt. What if I heard someone on the stairs and had to cut the power when the spaghetti was only half boiled?

$0.25 a day.

Now, to Stoller, $30 is what? Seven vente lattes and a croissant? I'd say. Though maybe he goes for the pumps of vanilla syrup instead of the croissant. I really wouldn't know.

So, keeping the math in mind, let's look at Matt Stoller's latest attempt to unify the party over at Cheetopia: