"One Paycheck Away"

Back in the late 1980s, when homelessness first began to appear on the media’s radar, a cliche amongst leftwing politicians was that “we’re all just one paycheck away” from being homeless ourselves.

Naturally, the media picked up and ran with that idea as far as they could, and any claim to the contrary–that homelessness was often as a result of mental illness, substance abuse, or both–was samizdat.

To read this detailed, link-filled, and nuanced (to borrow from Senator Kerry’s vocabulary for a moment) post on Instapundit is to understand just what a quantum leap the new media is over the old. Click on over already, if you haven’t yet read it yourself.