By John Aloysius Farrell
It may be bad form to interrupt a blogging partner who is having as hot a hand as Rob Schlesinger.
The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, The Daily Show…can Larry King be far behind?
But I’ve had a chance to see an advance copy of Peter Gosselin’s new book – High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families – and felt the need to rave.
Gosselin, the Los Angeles Times economic correspondent in Washington, has got something special going in the pages of High Wire. He has answered – analytically and lyrically – a question that clogs debate on economic matters in the nation’s capital: Why do Americans feel so anxious, even when the U.S. economy, on the whole, is performing quite ably?
The answer, Gosselin has discovered, is volatility.
It’s true that cyclical events like the current economic slump affect consumer confidence, as do the consequences of disastrous foreign policy choices ($4-a-gallon gasoline). And it is undeniable that the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush era has left a huge gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us, leaving the have-nots more worried than the haves. Gosselin is too honest a journalist not to nod to these factors: this isn’t one of those half-baked books that twists the facts to fit a theory.
But through old-fashioned legwork and some computer-assisted, ground-breaking (and in High Wire, this adjective is justified) statistical analysis, Gosselin has identified a fearsome factor in our lives. For too many families, financial security is like a pile of pick-up-sticks: the loss of one key prop can send the whole painstakingly-assembled structure crashing to the ground. And it is happening, with greater severity, more often.
We’ve tapped out credit cards, sent moms to work, borrowed against our homes; we’ve sat by as business and government leaders waged war on unions, eviscerated pension plans, filled our insurance policies with exemptions and unraveled government social insurance programs. All we need, Gosselin has discovered, is one sudden, unforseen event – an injury at work, a layoff, a serious illness, a Gulf Coast hurricane or California wildfire -to send us plunging off the high wire.
Gosselin’s analysis is impressive; as convincing, and moving, are the testaments he has collected, from every corner of the United States, from families who experienced catastrophic, life-shattering reversals. He gets corporate officers, steelworkers, insurance executives, service employees and every other kind of American to open up their family balance sheets, and their hearts, to him.
Indeed, High Wire raises yet again the troubling question about our democracy in this era of media buyouts and layoffs. Who, in Internet journalism, will have the resources and ambition to finance costly computer runs and send a reporter like Gosselin criss-crossing the country as, to its great credit, the Los Angeles Times did?
On the parched terrain of a presidential campaign where nutty preachers and nuttier economic proposals (cut the gas tax to increase consumption of foreign oil?) dominate the Democratic Party debate, and the Republican candidate repeatedly – at times proudly – demonstrates his ignorance of the most basic economic challenges facing Americans (memo to the McCain staff, please tell the senator how a 401k works), High Wire arrives like a cool drink of water.
Fine work, Gosselin.
Attaboy.
