I make it 61 and I’m also confused by this.
Sorry @Tamsin_Bailey i owe you a nice cup of tea (and biscuits).
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Tip and taxes, I assume. If that includes taxes, though, he’s a shitty tipper. If it doesn’t include taxes then that’s a pretty standard tip.
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There’s tips and taxes, or the complete item price could be made clear and serving staff could be paid a livable wage!!
Anyway… 
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Oh, you Europeans with your radical left-wing ideas…
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I used to be a European, I don’t know what we are now
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Well, geographically speaking…
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Still part of the family as far as I am concerned.
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You don’t buy a 50dollar glass of whiskey without knowing the price or being too rich to care. He knew what he was doing.
You could hardly expect to get a burger at an airport for much less that 17dollars.
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My understanding is that airports are generally self-funding. Of course most of the money comes from the airlines who have to pay fees, but they also get a stream of funding from, yes, the airport concessions. Stuff is expensive there. Alcohol is a money-maker everywhere, so no surprise it costs a lot.
I seem to remember paying $9 for a muffin at some airport. Yeah… that’s $3 for the muffin, plus $6 in airport fees basically.
Pro tip: get the right credit card that comes with airport lounge access, like Priority Pass, and you get to relax in a nicer place that usually has free refreshments. Some of the lounge refreshments are very good.
How on earth is this guy using airport prices of anything, especially an alcoholic drink, to make a point about anything other than how expensive airport food is?
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The fact some people don’t even blink at spending $50US on a single glass of whiskey says something else entirely about the US economic system (not necessarily “the economy”).
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Maybe they charged $11 to put ice in it. 
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Anybody putting more than one cube of ice in their whisky deserves to get charged over $50…
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I’m going to make an assumption about how Brooks treats service workers and guess that wasn’t ice…
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…And then tried to frame it as if his “screw up” was that he downplayed that things were actually much worse than he was implying, and those $60 whiskeys were a disaster for the working man.
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But it was cold… 
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What perpetually surprises me(not in the surprised surprised sense anymore; I’m not entirely without empirical instincts) is how having opinions badly so rarely seems to be an issue for people whose job is literally to have opinions loudly.
It takes an alarming amount of some combination of laziness, dishonesty, and incompetence to turn the story of a $50 drinks bill and a slightly overpriced airport hamburger into a thesis about economic carnage in Biden’s America; and I’m hard pressed to think of a real job where doing it that poorly wouldn’t be at least ‘performance improvement plan’ territory.
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Are you expecting a noted Reich Wing opinion writer to tell the truth?
I have a NFT of a Bridge to sell you.
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Maybe after $50 of whiskey his inner right-wing asshole came out and unleashed something that allowed him to write about some spectacularly stupid platform talking points.
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Shorter David Brooks: “my premise was completely faulty, but can you imagine if it wasn’t? You can imagine, therefore it wasn’t.“
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