I tend to have the same thoughts, but then I think, we bailed out the richest, most despicable criminals that may have ever existed and then sent them off to further bonuses. We then allowed the Federal Reserve to initiate a policy of wealth redistribution to these same people and other people who have reaped the vast majority of gains since the 80’s.
I think a lot of these RV people are just retirees. They may have seemed to reap the benefits of the last 30+ years, but, in time, that got redistributed too.
All that said, I will never be in a position to own an RV. It makes me think just how much money was created and shipped off to the ultra rich in the last decade and how a lot more of us, RV people included. could have used that largess to make real improvements in our lives rather than just adding zero’s to inflated balance sheets.
So why do you think that is? I’m not being snarky, I really want to know.
I have a guess, maybe close to correct, maybe not; Obama, a Democrat, took office at the most frightening part of the 2008 collapse. The entirety-plus of the recovery for the first four years or so went to the speculator class. The rest of his time in office sprinkled the gains in GDP to the same and some in the top 10%. None of the working class, or the middle class saw any gain and most saw losses in this period. I think a lot of people who had voted Democrat previously didn’t want to double down on another similar Democrat administration in the White House. They got the joker in the deck, but maybe they thought…sometimes the joker completes a winning hand.
And no, I didn’t vote for Trump, nor am I a Trump supporter.
Most of the people I know who voted for Trump were simply terrified of Hillary. The exceptions were some team players who’d vote for Charles Manson if he was the official Republican candidate, and a local man who’s being impoverished by (Anglo) competitors who use undocumented Mexican labor to avoid paying taxes and legal minimum wages.
During the 80s, when greed was good and deregulation and trickle down were the rules for the government and the wealthy, many of the current RV people were middle class, working in white collar, pink collar, and skilled blue collar jobs, secure in the knowledge that their union and/or employer had a great pension scheme waiting for them. Many were blindsided in the mid-2000s when that all exploded (imploded?).
Some hadn’t been paying into Social Security because they believed in their private pensions taking care of them. These people have been stunned over and over for the past decade as their retirement dreams came crashing down around them, one by one. Pension? Reduced to pennies on the dollar. Health care? Well, Obamacare made them buy expensive policies, if they hadn’t already. Utility and gasoline prices have doubled since the 90s when they made their plans, and they didn’t expect the rest of the cost of living up to the standards they set would cost so much. They’re stuck down with the poor people now, something they didn’t think could happen to them.
Thank goodness they bought that RV back when the family was still at home! Now it could be the ideal cheap way to live, AND they could see the country? But there’s still costs, and if they want to be comfortable, they’ve got to keep working. All of a sudden, they’ve become the working poor.
And about voting for Trump?
These same people would vote for anything that they thought would bring them back to the 70s and 80s, when life was good. (Of course they look through a lens of nostalgia; remembering the good times precludes seeing the bad times surrounding them.) Someone like Trump says MAGA and they love it, and it’s catchy and makes a great pound sign thingy to put in their FB posts.
Plus they hate Hillary as a symbol of the bad times of the 80s and 90s. She doesn’t trigger the good kind of nostalgia older people treasure.
The policy was QE. Using it to provide massive liquidity to insolvent institutions, mainly by allowing them to buy and sell government bonds at near zero and then allowing them to park that same money at the Federal reserve for a 100% safe interest rate above the cost of the issues. It was a guaranteed profit for the largest financial institutions. In turn, it drove down all other interest rates (the cost of money) to almost zero. This affected anyone saving, even pittances, by making it impossible to earn any interest except by going out and buying risky assets and bonds that were overpriced due to the policy of interest rate subsidies. The other huge effect of QE was that by driving down interest rates to near zero, corporations could replace investment, research and development, and training costs with near zero debt borrowing to speculate in their own stocks. QE policy or ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) had a massive redistributional effect by disincentivizing normal pro-growth behaviour with abnormal stagnating speculative behaviour.
Incidentally, Australia also pumped a fair bit of cash into the economy in order to counter the GFC.
But instead of giving it to the banks, they sent a lump of money to every person in the country. Fortunately for us, we’d elected a democratic socialist government just before it hit.
My portion went towards buying a motorcycle from a mate, because I needed a new bike to get to work. In turn, he spent the money on feeding his kids.
It worked. The GFC was basically a non-event in Australia.
Ok, I’m on board with all of this. I don’t understand the blaming though (or am I assuming blame?). The pensions were considered deferred compensation and a sacrosanct contract when the promises were issued. The promises were broken, by both lobbied legislation allowing for pension malfeasance and a culture of rabid destructive pillory by the speculator class. I don’t know why this is the fault of working people who had listened to the unending and loud declarations, echoed in all media, that this would work out for the best. It was total bullshit, but I think the fault lies with the bullshitters, not the bullshittees.
I don’t know how this works? If you are a regular employee, not a contract employee, it isn’t possible to avoid Social Security. Perhaps you meant something else. I don’t know what that is though.
The rest of what you wrote seems to be pretty much in agreement with what I posted. I don’t know if you’re agreeing with me or arguing against me.
I’m not in an argument with you though, just to clarify.
There are also those of us who’ve luckily been successful enough to get beyond paycheck-to-paycheck, but then every single medical event or bit of unemployment eats through their entire savings - repeatedly. Despite budgeting, saving, investing, and maxing the 401k, I’ve never been able to get near ‘on-track for retirement’. Especially with the cost of health care, what would probably be a week’s pay (or less) anywhere else in the civilized world costs an entire life savings here. The game is rigged so that by the time we get to retirement age, none of us will have any money even if we’ve saved assiduously throughout our entire lives.
To what degree do we blame people for not saving when we all know that they’re almost guaranteed to lose their savings if they do?
I can. They were born and raised and told their entire lives that “If you do this, you’ll get that.” and they did this, but then the that was yanked away from them. The cake is a lie.
Pensions are like mythical beings these days, but was this ever really an option? I’ve never heard of someone being able to opt out of paying Social Security. Other than by being unemployed, in which case they’d be retiring from unemployment. How did unemployed people get private pensions?
Superficially, it would seem like some small progress. But it can be argued that being assimilated into an oppressive system does not fundamentally change very much. Fighting only to be included is still fighting for the status quo, it is conceding to a dominant cultural narrative. A big deal would be dismantling that system, and/or implementing a different one. Changing a person from a game piece to one of the players still does not change the rules/fundamental assumptions of the game itself. It sets a precedent which can be net disempowering in the long term.
Hard to write interesting dystopic cyberpunk when we’re living in it. Takes all the fun out of the genre and makes it hard to distinguish from ‘true crime’ ‘thriller’ ‘romance’ etc.
I was a civil servant and paid nothing into Social Security. Since the 80s, you have to pay into Medicare, but not Social Security. Teachers don’t pay into SS. It used to be that if you had a government job, you had a pension and you didn’t pay into SS. Same for small privately owned businesses and the self-employed.
I know a lot of that has changed since the 80s. But these RVers were in their 30s to 50s back then, and not planning for their golden years to be played out in a dystopian cyberpunk future.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I am familiar with QE, but wasn’t initially sure that was the policy you were referring to until your last reply.
Sincerely not trying to argue but I’m still not clear on the connection between QE and the redistributional effect of wealth to which you refer. Is it that main street lost wealth in the great recession whilst wall street was bailed out (i.e., main street defaulting on mortgages while wall street has the same mortgage assets bought off their books by the Fed through QE)?
