First of all, a note. Some of you have e-mailed me wondering whether I am still alive. Well, I am, just hiding somewhere in the Poconos, kayaking and watching the world slowly lose its mind. I have been relaxing. Or maybe, finally, I have run out of things to say.
All I can say is, the next five months will get very, very ugly. If Trump loses the election, expect a repeat of January 6th, along with some random yahoos shooting their neighbors while crying "Civil War!" (over nothing). Eventually it will all settle down, I think, but I hope to be out of the country when that happens.
But getting back to topic.
I read a lot online from younger people (or perhaps merely Russian trolls) that we are in "late stage capitalism" and that capitalism is dead or at least bad or evil. This is an interesting argument, but a lot of it falls along the lines of, "My parents, after working 30 years, have a nice house, cars, and a retirement plan. I'm 25 and have nothing! That's not fair!"
As I noted before, until I was about 30, my net worth was negative. Within a decade, I became a millionaire. And yes, I had to pay back about $38,000 in student loans, which would be the equivalent of $80,000 today.
But I get where they are coming from. They were raised in the suburbs, had a gaming computer and a cool car in high school. They partied in college and lived in "luxury student housing" (something that did not exist during my 14-year tenure in college) and put it all on student loans. Now they graduate and are released from their comfortable bubble and realize, for the first time, that life is a struggle for most of us - and that sucks. But if you apply yourself, in a scant decade or two, you could be fairly well off.
But you do have to apply yourself.
However, there is another angle to this other than spoiled middle-class kids realizing for the first time what the real world is all about. We do have a marked increase in wealth disparity, with wages for average workers being stagnant while the number of Billionaires (which is an obscene amount of money) increases.
In a way, this is nothing new - we've gone through these cycles in the past where a few people managed to accumulate huge amounts of wealth to the point they could control the economy and the government. The "Trusts" of the turn of the Century could make or break Presidents and crash the economy at will. The Great Depression of the 1930s saw this whole model break down. When a few people have all the cash, well, no one can buy anything and the whole economy goes to pot.
So our Democratic government institutes reforms - creating the income tax, for example, or the gifts and estates tax (which rich Republicans want abolished, of course, calling it a "death tax") which put an end to, or at least attenuated, dynastic wealth. The landscape of America is littered with the remnants of white elephant mansions and estates that heirs could no longer keep, much as the "great homes" of Great Britain are either now bed-and-breakfasts or owned by the National Trust or some such.
Mark's Father bought such a mansion, in tony Westchester County after the war, for very little money. He turned the estate into a retirement home and ran it for a couple of decades before selling out when the government got antsy about fire hazards and wanted him to install a sprinkler system in that old wooden firetrap. Today, the estate is home to some rich whiz-kid Wall Street type - the circle of life being completed.
Kennedy lowered marginal tax rates from an astounding 70% in the 1950's and the GOP has successfully hammered the Estate tax - to the point where once again, it is possible to acquire dynastic wealth. And people have. And you know their names - the "tech bros" who were once hailed as geniuses but today, we are realizing that they were just people in the right place at the right time who got incredibly lucky. Bill Gates, for example, wasn't some computer visionary, just a guy sitting in the right chair when IBM made the blunder of the Century and poured a billion dollars into his lap. IBM no longer makes computers as a result. Gary Kildall faded into history as a result as well - he could have been Microsoft, but for one bad decision.
Musk, Bezos, Zuck - the story is the same. Out there somewhere is a guy who had a similar idea or, in fact, the same idea or in fact, came up with the idea, only to have it taken away. We laud the winners as visionaries, but Musk didn't invent the electric car, Zuck didn't invent social networking, and Bezos didn't invent selling cheap shit from China online. Rather, they floated to the top of this septic tank we call capitalism, and some folks, down in the muck, look up to them or even worship them, convinced that if they are beholden enough to the wealthy, they too will someday be Billionaires. It all will trickle down, somehow!
Or, as one wag put, it, your average Trump supporter wants tax cuts for the rich, even though they are poor, or as they like to view it, temporarily disadvantaged billionaires. During the last recession of 2008 (when I started this blog) another wag coined the phrase, "There are idiots, look around you!" And today, it seems like the number of idiots is expanding exponentially. I mean, who else would buy a "Cyber truck"? Even the name is embarrassing - something a Junior High student would think is cool as they scribbled it in their notebook. That and "Giga" - tech terms that the users don't even understand but like to use to sound "with it." It is Goddamn embarrassing is what it is.
But what about the coming recession? Oh yea, that - the one that is being engineered by the Billionaires to turn the election. After Covid, people were finding they could work from home or "name their salary" and we can't have that, now, can we? So one tech company after another announces layoffs to put the fear of God once again into employees. No collusion here, my friend!
At the same time, they put up listings for "ghost jobs" - which may account for as much as half the listings online. An unemployed coder sends out hundreds of resumes and wonders why no one responds. When he finally gets a low-ball offer, he swallows his bile and takes it. Neat trick, eh? Get people to think they are "lucky" to have a job and you can control them for life.
This all dates back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when unemployment peaked at over 10% (during the early years of the Reagan era). It was "Morning in America" and we all got back to work - at lower wages, of course, thanks to union busting and two-tier contracts. I was a Teamster at the time, making $8 an hour and thinking I was lucky to get that. Meanwhile, the old timers, doing the same job (but working less hard) were making $16. And over at Fed Ex, if you were willing to go into debt to buy your own truck, you could be a captive "contractor" and "independent" businessman with only one customer, of course. You can see how the road map was laid out even back then.
It took 40 years - forty years of political parties catering to job paranoia and touting themselves as "job creators" - to get where we are today, where we have been conditioned to beg for crumbs at the tables of Billionaires - the lucky ones getting to work like dogs for a pittance. Or so it seems to many people, anyway.
So maybe the pendulum swings the other way - and people will turn away from the lies and empty promises of the rich. Maybe, finally, people will realize that cutting taxes for the very wealthy just benefits the very wealthy - and that accumulating such wealth stagnates the economy. Maybe they will realize that promises to "protect social security" made by the very people promising to abolish it are actual lies. Maybe, but I doubt it.
Of course, this does not mean a Harris Presidency would usher in an era of Shangra-La. Stronger unions and higher wages will mean higher prices for domestically produced goods. Higher taxes will mean a lower standard of living for the wealthy. But then again, it won't quite be the end of the world or the "End of America" as panicky Fox News hosts posit. The pendulum does swing both ways.
I suspect that, by November of this year, the manufactured recession will kick in, and if Harris wins, she will, like Obama before her, be handed the smoldering ruins of an economy, beaten and bloodied by Wall Street stock manipulators. And like Obama before her, she will have to slowly bring the economy back, one painful step at a time. And meanwhile, Republicans will sit on the sidelines and complain about the "Harris economy" that is so awful, even as it shows slow but traditional levels of growth, consistently, for eight years, much as it did during Obama's tenure.
But that is mere speculation at this point. Between now and January, things are going to get very ugly. And if Trump wins, well, keep in mind that means there is a very good chance that "JD" Vance will be President, as Trump is quite old and in very bad health, both physically and mentally.
The world has lost its mind, it seems.
