Boy, everyone is in such a bad mood lately. Is it Tuesday’s looming election with its portent of blind doom? Or is it the effects of the financial meltdown? It seems that when I talk to people these days, the possibility of a Barack Obama victory and what it will mean to our nation’s future is subordinated to the loss of purchasing power of their life savings.

Many of my acquaintances are either retired or planning to retire. They had managed to accumulate some assets they were counting on to maintain their standard of living in retirement. Lately, they’ve had their accumulated savings melt down as much as 50 percent, clearly insufficient to serve as they had intended.

A 401(k) plan seemed like a good idea when they were putting money into it. But now, that is just one of the pension plans the feds are looking at acquisitively. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has proposed taking all those pension funds — they aren’t worth enough to keep anymore anyway — and “investing” them in the Social Security Trust Fund (guffaw), as if there really were one. That way they will guarantee you a comfortable 3 percent earnings on your funds.

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That almost sounds like the patter that was used to get you to contribute to the Social Security Fund in the first place — and you know what a spectacular failure that is becoming.

Of course, Social Security is headed for early bankruptcy. But your pension funds may postpone the day of reckoning perhaps until the Congress that set it on that course is safely retired on legislative pensions, which will be ever so much more generous than your own. And their pensions will survive the crackup of Social Security.

Yesterday, I came upon a list of the people who predicted the financial meltdown we are now experiencing. There were a few who seemed credible, but most of them were deficient in one way or another. I dismissed those who had been predicting it since 1952 or thereabouts. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

For similar temporal reasons, I ignored those who only started predicting it after it became manifest. It’s easy to predict what is happening now. Even the weatherman can most often predict today’s weather but gets increasingly askew as he progresses.

I dismissed those who based their thinking on astrological  or numerological studies. I think it’s useful to remain rational if at all possible. I regarded with suspicion those who say they predicted it but made no public rendering of their insight. Hindsight yields excellent prescience.

I was left with only a few I could not debunk, and I attributed those to deficiencies in my debunking skills. My conclusion is that no one credibly anticipated this situation and for good reason. There was a considerable amount of skullduggery involved. The government’s response was capricious and unlikely. Many of the facts needed to anticipate it were carefully concealed and actual efforts at misdirection were undertaken as events unraveled the frayed fabric of our economy.

Having said all that, I urge you to keep a good thought. Not to sound like Pollyanna, but there is nothing to be gained by compounding your financial misery with morose thoughts.

We must keep our sense of humor. Probably I have the advantage of you there, having been dead already, I figure what more can happen to me? But if your next death will be your first one, you may be taking this reversal of fortunes much too seriously. Really.

The sun will come up tomorrow, especially here in the desert. It will work out. I won’t predict how or when, but it will work out. After all, we are Americans, except for our possible new leader who comes to us from Kenya with intermediate stops in Indonesia, Hawaii and Chicago. But that just provides him a broader worldview.

 Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.waxmanmedia.com. Lionel Waxman’s Flashpoint commentaries are published in The Daily Territorial.