“Back to broke”

“Back to broke”

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

So . . . are people flush with cash from 2020 stimmy checks and doin’ great or nah?

https://www.yahoo.com/now/back-broke-americans-racking-debt-100000378.html

Oh. I guess we get a twofer there: a) people are broke (which we already knew) and b) the “coming” recession is all the fault of the peons. 😣

“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that people will begin to work once they run out of savings.

‘You’ve got a whole lot of people sitting on the sidelines because, frankly, they’re flush for the moment,’ he said at an event in his home state of Kentucky. ‘What we’ve got to hope is once they run out of money, they’ll start concluding it’s better to work than not to work.’

It’s not the first time he’s made that argument. McConnell criticized the COVID stimulus package in a March 2021 interview with Fox News, and said Americans may decide not to return to work as a result of the $1,400 stimulus check. ‘There is a concern about making it more advantageous to stay home rather than going back to work,’ he said.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/07/06/mcconnell-flush-labor-shortage-stimulus/7820022001/

Yeah, that $1400 is just like winning the lottery and suddenly finding yourself worth millions. (she said, sarcastically)

How we are expected to believe that people multiplied $1400 across the last 3 years like the miracle of the loaves & fishes is beyond me.

Ya know, that statement about hoping that people run out of money so they’ll go back to work reminds me of something else . . . hmm . . . what was it . . .

https://theintercept.com/2022/07/29/bank-of-america-worker-conditions-worse/

Oh yeah! Now I remember.

Gosh, it’s almost like we have Crony Capitalism in this country and the state and the corporations collude together to make sure the serfs don’t get too uppity. My goodness me!

A few observations here in freeform:

If Corpo America makes a blanket announcement that you’re goin’ back to the cube farm, you’re goin’ back. It’s sexy and fun to imagine a giant, nationwide walkout, but how TF are people going to afford that when most folks live paycheck-to-paycheck and they are, indeed, not flush with cash? Credit card and personal debt have jumped to $1 trillion but somehow, people will sit at home and have a WFH revolution? I don’t friggin’ think so.

It’s been said many times before, but it’s still true: hope is not a strategy. Yes, hope is important but it has to be coupled with some sort of practical, tactical work. Blowing hot air and hopium is not gonna help anyone. Let’s have Exhibits A and B, if it pleases the court.

Ignore the noise. Stay positive. Keep working at it. Good things will happen. And for that, you get more than 2K likes and claps. Then you have me, LOL:

Shadowbanned with crickets and tumbleweeds. 😂

Although the fat cats may talk about hoping that you run out of money and hoping the balance of power goes back to Corpo America, rest assured they are doing more than hoping for it. If you still think boom/bust cycles occur as random accidents, I have some oceanfront property here in the landlocked Midwest I’d love to sell ya for top dollar.

There are plenty of people who have tried like hell to find a new job after a layoff and I don’t think telling them to just stay positive is the most practical solution. But hey – as Dennis Miller always says – that’s just my opinion and I could be wrong.

Somehow, some way, regardless of how much it defies logic, this economic downturn is going to be YOUR fault. The power brokers who actually did engineer this mess will not blame themselves. Oh no! It’s the fault of John & Jane Q. Public.

In today’s episode, I want to talk about the complete insanity that we see on some of these news stories. To me, it seems that any and all problems or issues with the job market will be blamed on average working class citizens. The power brokers and the fat cats and the huge corporations will not take any blame. The Fed will not, the politicians will not. Somehow no matter how absurd and nonsensical the argument may be, they will absolutely twist themselves into a pretzel trying to convince the readers, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, this mess is the fault of the average working class American.’ They will also blame entire generations, they will blame entire genders. And it’s like, one part of me wants to laugh and part of me wants to cry. It is so headache-inducing and dystopian. Yet, that’s where we find ourselves. I saw an article the other day on ABC News and I will admit, just looking at the headline, without clicking on it I thought, ‘Okay, maybe we’re getting somewhere. Maybe I have a sense of hope.’ You remember that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly says something like, ‘I had hope. Oh, my God, I live on it.’ That’s kind of where we’re at. I saw this article on ABC News and I’m like, “Okay, good. Maybe we’re getting somewhere.’ The title of it is How Millions of Missing Workers Are Making Do Without a Job. As I’ve said before, I’ve heard some pretty out there theories, including people who seem to think that all of these supposedly missing workers are victims of like a Thanos style finger snap. Like they just blipped. They’ve been abducted by aliens or they’ve been taken somewhere and they just don’t exist on this planet anymore. That’s one of my favorites just because it is so like not just tinfoil hat, but extreme tinfoil hat. Do I think that that Thanos snapped his fingers and these supposedly missing workers are now on another planet? Are they just disintegrated? No, indeed, I do not. I also don’t think that they’re all living in grandma’s basement off their 2020 stimulus money. I don’t think that they are all men who are young to middle aged and they are living on a girlfriend’s couch or they are couch surfing through all of their friends. They’re all drug dealers or drug users… all of these different theories that have been posited to us. No, I think they’re taking very small, thin slices of the population and trying to say, ‘Oh, it’s their fault.’ Like the meme of the SpiderMans all pointing at each other. So when I see this article, I’m thinking, ‘Well, good. Maybe we’re going to get something that’s common sense. We’re gonna get something beyond the Thanos finger snap. All of these people are laid out on drugs. All of them are in Nana’s basement.’ Yeah, so when I clicked on it, and I got to the byline, I knew my hopes were dashed. So the title is ‘How millions of missing workers are making do without a job’ but the byline reads ‘the lack of workers risks worsening inflation which could trigger a recession,’ so here we are again. Here we are again. We’re in same same poop, different day.

-“The Power Brokers Wanna Be Clear: It’s All YOUR Fault!” published on December 15, 2022 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125110/11839673

 

As I’ve said before: I think this downturn will separate who paid attention from who didn’t. Who used good critical thinking skills and who didn’t. You can try to live on hope and hopium and trite puff pieces if you want to OR you can try to prepare as best as possible for what’s on the horizon. Do you have a job loss survival plan? Do you have an RTO survival plan? Ya know, just in case hope and toxic positivity don’t cut it?

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