Economic Traps

[ysabetwordsmith]

This article explains the vicious circle that kicks in when high prices force middle- and lower-class people to make not enough money stretch as far as possible. It's not that people are spending their money frivolously, or that they don't know how to make and keep a budget. It's that the jobs most people can get are not paying enough to support the kind of expenses that come up in an ordinary life -- let alone catastrophic expenses for getting sick, caring for aged parents, or dealing with weather emergencies. There's just no room in the system for fault tolerance.

And we are all paying the price for that, one way or another. Or several.