Like most Americans, I have been pummeled in this week’s Wall Street meltdown. My retirement account is hemorrhaging cash on a daily basis. I’m not employed at the moment, and the stock options I had been granted by my former company will expire in two weeks. The options are currently worthless, many dollars under water, and I have no reason to think they will surface enough for me to cash in even the smallest gain.
World famous and revered names in finance are falling in domino fashion. Few people doubt that there is more pain to come in the markets. Even for “experts,” there is really no telling when the bleeding will stop. Of course, the “experts” never saw this disaster coming. Or so they say.
I remember my late husband predicting, in 2004, that the financial market would crash. “This whole setup is going to implode,” he told me. He drew that conclusion from easy money funding the housing frenzy. Pete had worked outdoors for most of his career, in construction. He never took a business management course in college. But he had plenty of common sense, and he knew that the runaway mortgage free lunch could not continue without severe consequences.
So here we are. Bank failures, government bailouts, wildly erratic stock market, plunging retirement accounts, total uncertainty about the next shoe to drop. To me, it seems like a bad time to be talking about increasing taxes on anyone. Even those “patriotic” $250K-makers can’t afford it right now.
