Parents Are Bankrupting Themselves to Look Adequate

Why can so few people seem to save any money? The number of people scraping along from paycheck to paycheck is astonishing; surveys routinely find that somewhere between a third and half of all Americans don’t have the savings to fund ordinary emergencies -- a moderately large repair, a month with no income. These are not the kind of astonishing runs of bad luck that no one could realistically expect to cover, like a $100,000 medical bill, or a multi-year illness that makes it impossible to work. They’re just the normal vicissitudes of regular life, and somehow, Americans are unprepared.

These are the questions that Neal Gabler tackles in an article for the Atlantic. The answer he arrives at boils down to: we need to keep up with the Joneses, only our incomes aren’t growing, or even stable in the face of inflation, and meanwhile, access to credit enables us to live, for a while, as if that last part weren't true. The result is a recipe for disaster. Or at least, for Neal Gabler’s disaster.