Writing for Media - Assignment Example

ually might have lived a little bit nicer, because gas was so much cheaper.” His comments were mirrored by his girlfriend, Marla, who laughed when asked about savings and interest rates, saying “I haven’t made enough to put any money away for years, what do you think? If the interest rate were 0 or 10% it couldn’t make a difference to me.” Though state budgets have been viciously slashed by the recession, neither of these two people seemed to notice the difference: they made too much money to be eligible for Medicaid already, and so did not face rollbacks there, and relied on very few other modes of social support.

Certainly other people who made less or who were more reliant on social welfare may have had a very different experience, but for some, it is clear that being poor meant that the recession did not take a huge bight out of standard of living. The economic situation seemed much more dire to those in the lower middle and middle classes. Younghee Jan, 62, for instance, had worked as a welder and a post office clerk respectively for 35 years before attempting planning to retire around 2010. Planning to retire to a smaller but distinctly nicer house in a nicer neighborhood than he had lived for most of his life, Mr.

Jang decided to buy a house in 2006, having moved here from northern California. His divorced wife tells a similar story. They sank a great deal of their nest-egg into a down payment, negotiating what seemed then like a low fixed interest rate and feeling certain that they could make their payments based on their pensions, especially given how much of the house they had already managed to pay off in a large down payment. As the recession worsened, however, they suddenly found themselves holding the bag on an unsustainable mortgage.

The low interest rate they locked in at was almost twice as high as what one could get for a home loan now, and they find themselves, like many people, with a house that could not clear the mortgage