I was sitting here peacefully, weeping, when I received the strangest email from Tyrone:

Tyler, cheer up! The decline in housing prices is a godsend. Isn’t it a standard line — from both left and right — that we are spending too much on the elderly and not enough on the young? Isn’t lack of upward mobility, for the generation on its way into the world, the new problem? Aren’t the American poor to expect an even greater squeeze in the future? There’s a simple remedy for all of these problems at once — lower housing prices! Lower stock prices too! You don’t even have to get a bill passed through Congress, or overcome AARP, and we all know how hard that is these days. The housing stock is still there, the relatively established homeowners are a bit poorer, and those poor strugglers on the way up can now buy their dreams at lower prices. Even better, lots of the laid-off construction workers are Mexican immigrants, who for years have been keeping wages down for low-skilled American workers. This is an economic nationalist’s wish list, no?