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Or maybe this is a perennial feature of a skewed economy: 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-economy-workers-paycheck-robert-reich

• vba616 3y ago
  These articles are always implicitly claiming it's pathological to live the way everybody under 50 lives, by the fake standards of a 90 year old scarred by the Great Depression. The actual Silent Generation members who lived through the Great Depression, many of them, eventually got credit cards, and cell phones, and now they're mostly gone, but their caricatures live on. Being able to borrow money in a crisis, or being able to get disability benefits from the government in a non-temporary bad situation are both good and reasons why people don't live the same today as a century ago. You must have an emergency fund, like the person who got a scholarship and a high paying job that took them out of poverty circa 1955. But is cash safe? Are banks safe? Maybe it's a crisis that people don't own enough gold bars. Maybe you need to be able to live off the land. Be prepared! You can raise rabbits for food to avoid starvation. Is the number of Americans who instead buy hamburger at the supermarket cause for alarm? Or is it a good thing that the US isn't North Korea (yet)?