A relative has always played by the rules. I doubt she’s ever paid a bill late in her entire life. But she’s always been anxious about money, and while she certainly has enough, she asked me how she could get over her anxiety.
I said what is not going to make you feel better is clutching tighter and tighter to what you’ve got.
Now that anxiety has something to do with the way she was raised, and is best dealt with with a shrink. Nevertheless, I also reminded her that when a system has fractured, as ours has, people become atomized. They can’t look at what’s going on structurally, so consumed are they by panic, whether overt or latent. They’re not able to stand back, not able to take collective, concerted, analytic action. And all that, of course, works to the benefit of the people who have wrecked our financial security.
Anyway, her money’s not safe, no matter how carefully she negotiates, until there is real reform of our financial institutions. I mean, isn’t another financial crisis being predicted for 2016?
It’s incredible how badly informed even people who make some efforts to be informed are. She had no idea that effective tax rates on this country’s highest earners were ever higher than 39%–which they were in this country’s greatest period of economic expansion.
The “mainstream” media almost never mentions this fact.