My grandmother grew up during the great depression. When I was a kid she used to tell me stories about how bad it was. Her family was so poor, they would steal vegetables from the neighbor's farm just to survive.
Personally I was hit very hard by the 2008 recession. By 2009 I had exhausted all my savings, lost my house, lost my business. Thankfully I never had to resort to stealing food, but it was close. I had no family to fall back on. I ended up living on a couch in an office for a while, and despite working long hours I still couldn't make enough to live on. There were many occasions where I'd look in my wallet and see maybe $10, and have to decide how much of that to spend on food and how much to spend on gas for my car, because that $10 was all the money I had in the world.
I think its hard to understand that feeling -- spending the last dollar you possess, not knowing when you would have any money again -- unless you've lived through it. Still, my experience because of the 2008 recession was not as bad as those who lived through the great depression. I never faced starvation, cold winters without heat, or living on the street. It could have been worse. I only share my story to give some context to my perspective. I'm a conservative, which according to our mainstream media, apparently means I'm supposed to be evil and heartless, but in truth I'm very sympathetic to the cause of people who work hard and yet struggle to survive.
In my grandparents' generation, after WWII you could live a middle-class life on a single income. For example, my grandfather was a construction worker, and he made enough by himself to support his wife and 2 daughters and to buy a house in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Try doing that in 2021! It's totally impossible. Unless you're a doctor or a highly-skilled tech worker, realistically it takes a minimum of 2 incomes now to live at the same level, and even then you might still not make it.
Clearly, the economy has deteriorated a lot from the 1950's to now, from the perspective of low- and middle-class workers. (The elites, on the other hand, seem to be richer than ever.) This is not a sustainable situation. Will the economy crash in 2021? 2022? 2030? I have no idea. I am only certain that that's the road we are on, and unless something dramatic changes, it's going to end badly for us.
Unfortunately, the goverment is doing everything it can to speed up the decline. Ignore everything they *say*, because you never know if politicians are sincere or not (I tend to assume they are not, unless proven otherwise). Just look at what the government actually *does*, and you will find the answer. Maybe they have good intentions and are just ignorant of how economics works, or maybe they deliberately want us to be poor, I don't know. Either way, the fact is, their policies are actively making us poorer. (By "us" I mean the low- and middle-classes, not the elites who continue to get richer.) A lot of the problem is inflation.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has been printing money like there's no tomorrow. Only a tiny % of this has made it into the pockets of people who actually need it. Where did all the other billions and billions of dollars go? Probably to big corporations who didn't need it, but got it because they are politically well connected. Probably a lot went to numerous politicians' "pet projects". (Example: a town in rural Nevada got $8000 in Covid relief money to
paint a mural on the outside of a community center. That's nice and all, but what does that have to do with recovering from Covid? Aside from the artist who got a big paycheck, how does that benefit anybody?)
Recently the U.S. even floated the idea of
minting a $1 trillion dollar coin. So far they haven't actually done it, but that they would even consider it is evidence of the situation we are in. Can't print money fast enough? Let's just make trillion dollar coins!
It reminds me of this:
That's a 1 billion Reichsmark note. Maybe you could by a loaf of bread with it in 1925.
You see, we already know that when you recklessly pump money into an economy it causes inflation. Weimar Germany in the 1920-30's is the textbook example of this, but it's happened the same way in various places and at various times. Nevertheless, our elected leaders seem blissfully ignorant of history as they set off to do exactly the same thing all over again.
Inflation is already showing up, and it's bad. The prices of everything are going up. The elites don't care because they have plenty of money, so it doesn't effect them. Inflation hurts most the people who are least able to deal with it. And then the government says "no problem, we'll just raise the minimum wage" -- as if companies will just pay the extra money out of the goodness of their hearts and not pass it along to customers in the form of even higher prices! It's a vicious cycle, and once you get it started it's incredibly difficult to stop.
So yes, I am very concerned that we are right now living through times eerily similar to the 1920-30's.
I'm fascinated by the history of WWII, and the events leading up to it, because it shows us how quickly societies can fall. Weimar Germany was a vibrant democracy, but their horrible economic conditions directly contributed to the rise of nazism. In the space of 10 years they went from liberal democracy to the Third Reich and the holocaust. How can an entire nation of people abandon their beliefs and turn to evil in such a short time? And, more importantly, what's to stop it from happening again somewhere else?
I'm shocked by how much the United States has changed in the last 10 years. This time the danger is not from nazism or fascism, but rather communism. Either way though, the end result is certain ruin. As a nation we have lurched hard to the left, and ever since the pandemic this process is accelerating very quickly. Racial tensions, which had been steadily improving since the 1960's, are now getting worse daily. Economic conditions are the worst I've seen since 2008 -- despite the high stock market, cryptos, and real estate -- it feels like we're on the verge of another bubble. Crime is the worst it's been in decades. Homelessness is out of control. As I look around, by almost every measure our country is falling apart. I hope I'm wrong, but it's hard to deny the obvious.
The big crash hasn't come yet, but like I said, the course we're on is not sustainable. It could be months, it could be years, but it's only a matter of time. When it happens, there's no telling what horrors it may lead to, because apparently we have all forgotten the lessons of 100 years ago.
/end novel