A very long sentence about money

Hopefully a final comment on the subject of pobreza for a while: one of my favourite quotes of the moment is from another of my new heroes – along with Buckminster Fuller and Mr Potatohead, natch – George Monbiot, the campaigning journalist (and how quaint that phrase has been made to sound, particularly in the country of George Orwell), who wrote recently that ‘”If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by”, o sea if in one year you manage to earn that much money, with all the sacrifices and compromises that that entails, you will be under a huge amount of pressure to earn the same sum the following year, which also implies that an ability to hold on to your earnings, your savings and any putative future income in the face of that relentless and omnipresent pressure to spend money on things you in no sense need, a pressure which has come to dominate virtually every single aspect of our public lives and has gradually been allowed to subsume more and more of what used to be public space, has to constitute some sort of holy grail for present and future generations of working people.