Yuppie armageddon

I’ve been focusing on other things the past few days but I couldn’t let this story go by without comment.

Don’t know whether this was reported with tongue in cheek, but the first thing that struck me was how really unsympathetic the Robbins family are as exemplars of people hard hit by the recession.

They’re pulling in $130K a year, but within a week of him being laid off they’re on Medicaid and food stamps? What’s up with that?

“That three-month emergency fund—we should have done it, but we didn’t,” Kim Robbins rued. Three months? Evidently they didn’t have seven days. How does that make them victims?

In fact, on $130K per annum “it was hard enough to keep up with living expenses…Plus, they had credit-card debt.”

So, there they were, spending everything they earned and more, evidently in the expectation that reality was never going to catch up with them.

But I love their response to the crisis: her mother brings them toilet paper and paper towels; they eat pasta; they stop the kids’ sports leagues and music lessons.

And Mrs. Robbins moans, “It’s all gone. Everything you had is all gone….Everything you were connected to—it’s gone.”

Well, except for the health club membership and Catholic schools.

Plus, their “agony” doesn’t even last two months—so that’s a lot of melodrama for a family that restored its income in six weeks.

I don’t know—I’m beginning to sound like my parents, who went through the Great Depression and made only two classes of purchases “on the cuff”, as my father referred to it: houses and cars. So I really don’t get the sort of mind set that lets you run up expenditures like you’re the federal government or GM with never any expectation that you’re going to have to, you know, pay for them.

Evidently no one’s read Mr. Micawber’s precept:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Including that reporter.