Affluenza

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/04/affluenza-history-disease-wealth-privilege-ethan-couch
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The Couch case has touched off extreme outrage over the past few days, with scathing commentary all over the news and on social media, coming at a highly volatile time for the nation on issues of race, justice, wealth and poverty.
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“We are at this time cutting food stamps to millions of kids, who will suffer from this in their lives, at the same time that we are continuing to give new tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires,” John de Graaf, co-producer of a 1997 PBS program about the phenomenon, said in an interview. “That’s affluenza in a nutshell.”

De Graaf was also a co-author of Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us – and How to Fight Back, first published in 2001 and updated for a third edition in 2014. That book defines the term as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more”.

As de Graaf sees it, the modern age of affluenza began in the US with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and the ensuing tax cuts for the rich and the erosion of America’s safety net for the poor that followed. If the billionaire real-estate mogul Donald Trump were to be elected president, he said, “then America would become the empire of affluenza”. On the other hand, the leftwing populist candidate Bernie Sanders is “the affluenza vaccine”, he said.