It would be lovely to give you insightful analysis about what's going to happen to the economy next, but after the way this cold kicked me around yesterday, I don't have any. I barely made it home from work, and crawled into bed as soon as I could change into a nightgown.
And after fifty-some years of working for wages, mostly hourly, I'm about that optimistic about the economy. Every time I have gotten a little bit ahead, either the politicians stagger into a war or they and/or their big-business friends get to tinkering, pull the wrong cord, and whatever gains I have made get mostly wiped out. In 1980, I had a decent job and I was buying an older house in a kind of artsy neighborhood. In 2025, I'm in the same position -- only the 1980 house was a duplex, and I could usually rent out one side of it for what I needed to make the house payments.
Oh, time marches on; the big anchor stores a couple blocks away from that first house -- a local grocery chain (Ross), a pharmacy (maybe a Rexall?) and an oversized five-and-dime (Zayre) -- closed not long after the city took out the bridge that had connected that neighborhood to a nearby college, and spent multiple years replacing it. I had long since moved away, and a good thing, too: the area hit the skids and has never recovered.
Meanwhile, the fat-cats and pols who were in charge through wars and recessions, gas-price crunches and downturns are still there, or their kids are. They'll be all right. You and me? It remains to be seen.
One interesting thing will be the inevitable clash between the Billionaires (Musk, et al) vs the Populist Theocrats* (Vance, ect).
ReplyDeleteThe current tariff kerfuffle is already exposing some cracks between the two factions. Now, they may paper over these this time, but time will tell.
It's very possible that Trump will crash the normal economy in the next couple of months, and turn the popular will against the admin, which will trigger a fair few of his current billionaire buddies to jump ship.
We shall see.
*the people with some really sus relationships to a particular Russian tyrant
At this point, we're all fleas on the back of big dogs -- which I don't really think was the point of the American experiment. But here we are.
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