Mona Charen warns us of the folly of saving our money just because we have less of it. Thanks, Mona!
As agreeable as it was not to have to fight Christmas crowds, it was creepy and unsettling at the same time. It has been the same with getting restaurant reservations. Places that were once impossible to get into unless you reserved a week in advance are now available. They’re offering discounts on massages at the salon where I get my hair cut. Revenue from such luxuries as facials, waxes, and whatever else they do to pamper the ladies is down 25 percent.
This is not hardship; this is fear of hardship. Yes, there have been 1.9 million jobs lost since the start of the recession last year. And that’s not good. But that still leaves 93.3 percent of us employed. Close to 10 percent of homeowners have either missed a house payment or are in foreclosure, according to the Los Angeles Times. That’s bad obviously. But 90 percent of us are not in danger of losing our homes. And yet we are wary.
People fear hardship for many reasons, most of them good. Of all the Puritan ethics that we’ve unwisely kept over the centuries, we seem the furthest from the wisest - frugality. A good American has sex like it’s 1692, but you’re a shitheaded loser if you stop going to Red Lobster for a few weeks to keep your checkbook balanced. It seems barely worth it to comment on her figures (93.3 percent of a shrinking labor market is employed; the housing market is suffering not just from foreclosure but from the fact that many homes are just unsellable), because the assumption behind the assertion is so terrible - you aren’t poor, so stop acting like it. This, of course, works better if we also assume that economic hardship comes from some sort of celestial lottery where we do just enough to piss off God to be smote with collection notices, but not enough to be stricken with actual disease or suffering like non-Americans or gay people or minorities or women are.