So who were the real winners of America’s longest economic expansion? It probably wasn’t you, lol. It sure as hell wasn’t the average ‘gig’ worker, server, or fulfillment center worker, lol. But bring on the tax cut? lololol
Hey job creators: either create some fucking jobs or get used to the site of this!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/politics/food-banks-supplies-groceries-coronavirus/index.html
You sure are gleeful about this major tragedy.
Hey job creators: either create some fucking jobs or get used to the site of this! {…}“We have no objection to others cleaning up the messes we’ve made and thank for advocating for our next tax cut”
Your Friend, The Job Creators"
CMC fnord!
And what are you doing/did you do? I mean, other than wait to get invited to chair tribunals where you get to execute all you do not approve of.
What are you doing about it other than thread shitting? What are you doing? Impress me, and I just might put a star or a scratch-n-sniff sticker on your refrigerator!
Nah, not at all. My investments are down by 30% - fortunately I’m not at the age where I have to depend on them.
But I’m basically pointing out what I tried to point out in econ threads over the last few months before the crisis, which is that America’s “growth” was a sham.
The mindless automatons we have in the media have been mindlessly reporting about the “growth” of our economy, about the “record” jobs growth, and even about wage “growth.” (Oh boy, a dollar per hour raise! What shall I do with all this extra cash?).
Here’s the real lesson, kiddies: the economic data have been lying to you. Economic growth was not only not as advertised, I’ll do one better: our “growth” has actually made economic conditions for the bottom ‘survivors’ in this economy even worse. As I was saying before this even began: a shit ton of people in this economy are “employed” but they’re living from paycheck to paycheck and this great illusion, this great lie that they’ve been “employed” and that their wages or “growing” is actually a great lie; in reality, they’re falling further and further behind. Their welfare depends more and more not on a growing economy; it depends on how plutocrats spend their money.
And I’ve got news for those of you who think you’re safely insulated from this: you’re not - not at all. Because you see, in 2007-9, what happened to the working poor at that time? Sure, some regained their footing if they were young enough, and some retired if they still had savings. But many of the working poor simply “disappeared.” Nobody knows what really happened to them, but we can imagine: they ended up under a bridge, or moving from shelter to shelter. What happened to the people on the rungs directly above? They became the new working poor. They became the hustlers, touted as the next great “innovation” in the American economy: Uber drivers, Lyft drivers, Amazon drop shippers. They hustled. They got by. They forgot that they were moving just ahead of the rent. And then this happened. And here we are. And so the cycle continues: Bezos sucks on his cigar while desperate employees fight for scraps.
America in 2020 is looking more and more like America in 1895. But at least ye got Netflix - until you lose your apartment and get your phone and internet cut off.
How can one shit that which is already shit?
The fundamental truth of post #6 can’t be denied unless one ignores all pertinent data. I wish post #1 had contained that argument, but it’s forgiveable; I understood the point. A strong stock market is not a reliable indicator for a “good” or “bad” economy; however it’s an excellent follower of economic activity. Once something like a pandemic temporarily suppresses that activity (which doesn’t just include consumer spending, but also includes business spending), a “good” economy would be sustainable in the short and mid terms to support the crisis. That’s not what we’re seeing.
When was this? In the threads I remember, you were warning that we would be a dictatorship and the NeoNazis would have death camps up and running by now.
And calling for extermination of Republicans.
Maybe the OP is tactless at times and has a history of posting hysterical threads but he isn’t wrong here. The performance of the stock market is essentially meaningless when all the earnings for years go away in an instant. Fake financial reports acting like our economy is in good shape when over half of companies have no net worth.
Misleading job reports when a lot of people have dropped out of the labor force but they act like unemployment is at an all time low. Real wages going down, cost of living and inflation going up. Things are getting harder and harder out there for the average worker and that ain’t no jive son!
So we should call it “thread coprophagy”. Or maybe call it “rabbiting” after a species which engages in it, analogous to “seagulling”.
“Rabbiting”: verb., threadshitting a shit thread.
More than that, a good economy would be one in which the average consumer isn’t like a hamster running on a wheel. It would be one in which rent costs, medical debt, student debt, and other costs didn’t take nearly every fucking dollar someone earns. It’s great to have income, but what matters is having savings, and Americans don’t even earn enough to save. I’m sure that some people could be more financial responsibility, but you can’t credibly tell me that this is true of, what 30-50% of the country? One out of two people are that financially irresponsible? Well who’s lending them the fucking money then? Why is that not irresponsible?
This country’s economic “growth,” the economy is sustained by spending and by opening lines of credit. It’s not sustained by anything of value. We’re not even really 2 weeks into this crisis, and it’s basically the 2020 version of Great Depression bread lines. It’s just that a lot of people - and yes even a lot of “progressives” here who argue with me and wish I would lighten up - don’t want to believe what they’re seeing. Things really are as bad as what you see (and what you don’t see) and they’re about to get a lot fucking worse. And I’ve got some bad news: some of us - that means some of you - are going to be in for a rude surprise, because it’ll affect you after all.
Take a look at the stock market now - take a good look at it. The 30% decline you just saw? That’s just pricing in the last 2-5 years of “value” that was actually nothing more than stock buybacks by executives trying to pump up their pay, and screwing employees in the process. And to remove that ice pack from your crushed balls, they used their political power to rig the economy more and give themselves an even bigger raise with a tax cut in 2018.
The markets haven’t priced in the total shutdown of the economy. That’s coming, and it’s going to be hell. You haven’t seen jack shit yet.
You’re preaching to the choir I agree with you.
I kinda sorta agree with you that we have granted larger than life status to rich people. But the economy has in fact grown. Our national payroll is far higher today than it was in 2007, we know this because payroll taxes (social security medicare) collected are much higher today than 2007.
It’s almost impossible to have the sort of stimulus that we had with all the tax cuts without having growth in the economy. The really wealthy may have gotten a bigger and bigger piece of an ever growing pie but the pie has been growing and the average joes have been getting more.
We have always had poor people, it should not really be surprising that we still have them. We have more insured people now than we have ever had. Most of the people I knew growing up did not have health insurance.
Our standard of living is improving. I don’t know what you are complaining about other than the fact that the rich seem to be getting an outsized portion of the pie.
Yeah this didn’t happen.
There are fewer homeless now than there have been in our history. Many of them are doing those gigs you are talking about.
This has been going on for my entire lifetime. Before Amazon it was WalMart, before that it was McDonalds jobs, etc. There has always been a ton of low wage jobs in this country. What we no longer have are reasonably high paying manufacturing jobs that provided good paying jobs to high school drop outs with no skills.
This coronavirus aside, America was in fact on a fairly good economic trajectory. There was plenty of economic inequity but the economy as a whole was pretty good and the poverty rate, the homeless rate, the uninsured rate, the unemployment rate, etc. were all improving and at relative high points.
Wait. What!?!?
All that “economic activity” is what we call the FUCKING economy.
What economy is sustainable through a shutdown like this?
Seriously, wtf are you even talking about?
Stock markets reflect the current value of all future earnings by that company. It’s sort of of axiomatic. Present value gets increased as interest rates drop and that affects stock prices but we have been at or near 0% for a while now. If the market gets over-inflated, people can make money by betting against it.
Right now, I think the market is likely still overpriced. You can’t restart an economy after shutting it down like you’re flipping on a switch. The market dropped by 50% in 2008. We’ve only dropped about 30% or so. It’s like the market is acting like we are going to have a vaccine by August and we can start ramping up again.
We are going to get a couple of months off in the summer but there’s a good chance that this happens all over again in the fall.
I think xenophon’s point was that we often focus too much on one part of the overall economy - the financial market - and forget about the rest of the economy.
Where are you getting your statistics?
30-50% of the country is living hand to mouth? Do you have a cite?
Median net worth dropped in half during the great recession and never really recovered. This is a problem, especially considering our aging population. Between the 2008 recession and this, the boomers are not going to have the sort of retirement they thought they would.
This pandemic is an extraordinary event and shutting down an economy has severe effects on ANY economy.