I'm with Lisa here. We are fine, we are young, we have a reasonable mortgage and we can keep putting money away. But my parents are retired and live off of their investments, some small pensions, and payments on the farm they sold -- which the buyer may be about to default on due to the downturn in the housing market. Still, they are well off and will probably be okay. My husband's parents probably can't retire any time soon now, though. My husband's grandparents ... oy. We're worried.

And even though we are fine, nobody is hiring right now; my husband has been out of work for five months and there is no job in sight. Our COBRA runs out in five months and then I don't know what we are going to do for health care. And we are well off. We are fine. There are a whole lot of people who are NOT fine, who are not going to be fine, and I think it would be pretty irresponsible of the media to ignore that situation.