Just over four years ago, when any real opportunity to improve the New York City schools was de-funded by the pension deal to allow New York City teachers to retire years earlier, it was for me both a last straw and an epiphany of sorts, as reflected in this post. Our common future has been sold, and the increasingly frantic efforts by the beneficiaries to delay the reckoning and shift the blame only amount to selling the future even more. What is best and fair for everyone, now and in the future, was never really up for discussion among those in the room making deals in their own interest, I now understand. The result could be, and perhaps should be, institutional collapse.

Realistically, I concluded, “perhaps all the time, energy and money directed toward trying to reform or improve our social institutions, particularly our government institutions, would be better spent preparing to do without them.” Or try to replace them. But rather than writing about such preparations, I’ve spent most of the last four years tallying the damage and venting. Over the next few posts, however, I’ll try to review what the household economic situation is now, and what it is likely to become, for each of the most important goods and services each household needs to obtain and pay for – housing, transportation, food, health care, education, and income in retirement. I’ll review the reasoning behind my personal choices, choices people make mostly in young adulthood, and describe the options that will remain in the environment Generation Greed will leave to those who. I’ll describe how federal, state and local policies enacted by Generation Greed politicians have affected those choices. This post provides some background, while those following, written as I have time, will go through each of the major categories of household expenditures in turn.