Woman Argues U.S. Is Already in the Worst Depression ever

[RE]

Yuo can file this under Boiled Frogs, which 90% of Amerikans are.  You need to be making 6 figures to be in the Top 10% of Amerikan Wage Earners, and by the analysis of this TikTokker, it takes a 6 figure income to be above the condition of the average Amerikan during the Great Depression.  Her analysis is dead on, and basically we have arrived here by a deterioration of wages against the cost of the primary Amerikan family asset of Home Ownership.  It doesn't seem so bad because Food has remained affordable (Bread) and Media Entertainment (Circuses) comes cheap.

https://www.distractify.com/p/us-in-depression-not-recession

Woman Argues U.S. Isn't Entering a Recession, but Is Already in the Worst Depression Ever

"25 percent of Americans were unemployed and those that were able to retain their jobs had to take a pay deduction of nearly half," she explained.

Now here's where things get horrifyingly relatable. OP further explains that at the time, Americans who were able to keep their jobs made an average of $4,200 a year during the low point of the worst U.S. economic disaster. Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to $95,000 as of 2023.

She lays out the ugly truth, plain and simple, stating, "If you are not currently making six figures, you are doing worse than someone in the Great Depression."

RE

[K-Dog]

I tried to post the TikTok, but to see the video requires logging into TikTok.
The lesson I learned from family that went through the 1930s is to own your home.  One less thing to pay for and you can't get evicted.  Good I listened because getting one now is impossible.  Feudal lords are returning.



The homeownership rate in the United States during 1933 was around 43.6%.

* The other thing I learned from family was to stay out of debt.

[RE]

I tried to post the TikTok, but to see the video requires logging into TikTok.

True, but there is some way of dropping on code that produces a graphic link to the TikTok page, where you can then sign in using your Google ID.  There is no paywall.  The article has this sort of link embedded, so you probably could do it here if you can figure out the code.  Not my specialty, but I would think it's right up your alley.

The lesson I learned from family that went through the 1930s is to own your home.  One less thing to pay for and you can't get evicted.  Good I listened because getting one now is impossible.  Feudal lords are returning.

Plenty of folks who owned homes got evicted during the Great Depression for owing back taxes.  That of course was the fate of Tom Joad's family of Okies and many other poor farmers.  You have been fortunate enough to first get a job with Paul Allen that allowed you to finish paying off your McMansion, and now you have both Social Security (nonexistent until after the GD) and a pension, plus your current Slave Wage job to cover your tax bill.  I remember how close you came to falling off the cliff before you landed that miracle job with Paul that allowed you to weather the storm.  Had you not landed that job, the outcome likely would have been quite different today.

* The other thing I learned from family was to stay out of debt.

Also a major reason for the Okie farmers losing family farms which had been paid for generations earlier.  In order to compete, they had been forced to take on debt to buy the new steaam, diesel and gasoline Tractors to till the soil and pull the Combines to reap the crops.  A team of quarter horses no longer were enough.  The farms were collateral for these machines, and when food prices collapsed the banks picked up the farms at tax auctions for pennies on the dollar.  Said land was purchased by Agribizness Corporations financed by Wall Street money, the farmhouses were razed and now one tractor driver could farm land that formerly supported 10 families.  Of course, that land was never good for farming to begin with, it was grazing land for buffalo.  Only irrigation made farming possible long term which required still more investment in FF powered pumps to drain water collected over millenia in the Ogalala Aquifer.  In the years since the GD, the aquifer has been drained nearly dry and the topsoil is barely thick enough to hold the roots.  Soon enough, not even tractors and pumps will grow corn and soybeans on that land and the agribiznesses will abandon it also.

Perhaps in 10,000 years when most of us are gone from the neighborhood, herds of migratory buffalo will graze those grasslands again and a few hardy members of the species Homo Survivorus Collapsentience will follow these herds for a while until the lava currently percolating and pressurizing beneath La Garita Caldera* blows once again, since it is already overdue in its regular cycle of Supervolcanic eruptions.  So it goes.

*La Garita Caldera at Fish Canyon Tuff in Colorado is the site of the 2nd most energetic event to occur on earth since an Asteroid impact wiped out the Dinosaurs 66M years ago  Its size is exceeded only by the eruption at Wah Wah Tuff in Utah, and both exceed the size of the eruptions at Yellowstone.  Big as these events were they were exceeded 420X by the asteroid impact, and probably would not be global extinction events, just local to the western half of the NA continent..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENT_hnyO-o

RE

[K-Dog]

Plenty of folks who owned homes got evicted during the Great Depression for owing back taxes.  That of course was the fate of Tom Joad's family of Okies and many other poor farmers.  You have been fortunate enough to first get a job with Paul Allen that allowed you to finish paying off your McMansion, and now you have both Social Security (nonexistent until after the GD) and a pension, plus your current Slave Wage job to cover your tax bill.  I remember how close you came to falling off the cliff before you landed that miracle job with Paul that allowed you to weather the storm.  Had you not landed that job, the outcome likely would have been quite different today.

I was fortunate to get the job but lets be clear.  That job did not 'save' me.  I was able to get the job because I had the training (masters degree) and experience 20+ years to do it.  I was not in debt when I took the job and had savings.  I passed a credit check to get the job. 

I would have found something else had I not found the job restoring old computers for Paul, and I would have saved money.  But less for sure.  I was fortunate.  I was making the kind of money that TV sitcoms pretend everyone makes.  It was good.  It was good that Paul made sure his people were paid a little bit better than what Bill was paying in Redmond.  We had better medical and I saved every extra dime. 

Taxes on the house are a fraction of what a mortgage payment would be.  SS can cover it were I broke, and I won't even have to eat dog food in the near future.  Good we have SS which the great depression did not have.  With my social security I can live like a king on a McJob, and you live a hundred times better than you would on the streets of Anchorage.  It is sad we have had to endure fear mongers talking about the end of social security for 50 years.  When SS is actually taken away, it will truly be game over. But anybody who takes it away before game over will be dead.

Take it away before game over, and the pitchforks come out.



I really don't consider the house to be a McMansion.  There are plenty of them in our neighborhood, but a McMansion to me has beaucoup wasted space.  But you have been here, and you call it a McMansion.  So it must be.  But to me McMansions have an element of pretension about them that this house does not have.

[RE]

Good we have SS which the great depression did not have.  Sad that I have had to endure fear mongers talking about the end of social security for 50 years.  When SS is actually taken away, it will truly be game over.

Game over indeed.

SS and the associated Medicare & Medicaid programs are driving a huge and ever growing sector of the economy, the Med Sick Care Industry.

My SS and Med bennies are going directly to pay the salaries of the more than 150 full time personnel of this Rehab facility, from the supervising Doctor thru the Nurses & CNAs, the  Social Workers and Food Service workers, Housekeeping & Maintenance staff and Administrative personnel.  Then betond these wall there are paper pushers at medicare andd insurance compahies whose jobsae paid for by facilities like this.  More people work here than there are  residents, there are only 102 of us MAX, though usually a couple of beds are empty on any given night.  More than 150 people work here full time though to keep the place going.

Beyond this, SS is not only paying the bills of the direct recipient, but also many of the bills of their children and grandchildren who either still live with them or have moved back in to live with them.

If SS collapsed, the whole damn Amerikan economy would collapse with it.  The more old Boomers there are who are collecting it, the more the whole economy depends on it.  These days, rather than being reduced in size, if anything SS needs to be INCREASED and handed out to more people.

RE

[RE]

I really don't consider the house to be a McMansion.  There are plenty of them in our neighborhood, but a McMansion to me has beaucoup wasted space.  But you have been here, and you call it a McMansion.  So it must be.  But to me McMansions have an element of pretension about them that this house does not have.

I spent most of the latter portion of my life living in 1 or 2 bedroom apartments of about 600 square feet.  To me, any single family homes larger than that are McMansions.  In most of the world, people live with one room for the parents, one for kids and one for everybody else who crashes there. That's what the shanty houses in the favelas are like.



RE

[K-Dog]

If SS collapsed, the whole damn Amerikan economy would collapse with it.

True that.  And those who have McJobs at least have SS for some savings.  Not much but some.  Take SS away, and a minimum wage stinks even more than it already does.  Everything falls apart.

[K-Dog]

Highlights from a long article about eviction riots.

* History the superstructure does not want you to know about.

The 1920s were a decade of incredible wealth for the U.S. ruling class. National income rose from $60 billion in 1922 to $87 billion in 1929. The index of industrial production reached a record high in June of 1929.

Despite the strong economy, it was clear that U.S. capitalism was not designed to benefit the workers on whom it depended. The increase in profit and productivity did not prompt businesses to expand their workforce. Depressed farm prices pushed millions of farmers into the cities to look for work. Unprecedented prosperity and high unemployment existed side by side throughout the decade.

The fact that such little wealth had trickled down to the workers who actually produced it did not deter economists and journalists from trumpeting the 1920s economy as proof that capitalism had overcome the cyclical crises and depressions that had besieged it over the last century.

Yet in 1929, on Oct. 24 the stock market crashed on infamous "Black Thursday." Unemployment immediately shot up. The number of workers laid off or fired rose to 2.5 million within two weeks. Official estimates on the number of unemployed show an increase from 429,000 in 1929 to 4,065,000 in January 1930. The number reached 12 million by 1932.

A wave of evictions hit the country as millions of jobless workers were forced into the streets by landlords who had happily profited off their rent payments before the stock market crash.

More than 200,000 evictions occurred in 1930 in New York City alone. Millions more would occur throughout the country over the next decade.

In the Bronx evictions were met with strong resistance when police and marshals attempted to force tenants from the buildings. Hundreds of protestors fought the police hand-to-hand and with sticks and stones when the officers would attempt to remove furniture from the buildings.

The outnumbered police barely held their line while waiting for reinforcements as the crowds battled them under the direction of Communist Party organizers. Reports from the New York Times indicate the women, who outnumbered the men, were the most militant, were more likely to battle the police and took the most arrests. In each case, huge numbers of foot and mounted police, marshals and moving men had to be dispatched. The capitalist court system assisted the landlords in attempting to break the strike by approving mass evictions and ordering injunctions against picketing.

By David Hoskins

[K-Dog]

As the world nears the midpoint of what should have been a transformative decade for development, the global economy is set for the weakest half-decade performance in 30 years. Find out more in the World Bank's latest Global Economic Prospects report.

The World Bank predicted on Tuesday that the global economy will slow for a third straight year in 2024.

Struggling with high global interest rates, inflation and a struggling Chinese economy, the World Bank forecasts the global economy will grow by just 2.4 percent this year. That would be down from 2.6 percent growth in 2023, 3 percent in 2022 and 6.2 percent in 2021, though that year was bolstered by COVID pandemic recovery.

The World Bank projected slower growth for the U.S. as well, reducing from 2.5 percent in 2023 to 1.6 percent in 2024.

"Near-term growth will remain weak, leaving many developing countries — especially the poorest — stuck in a trap: with paralyzing levels of debt and tenuous access to food for nearly one out of every three people," World Bank chief economist Indermit Gill said in a statement.

Citing rising global tensions, especially with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the World Bank predicted slow growth and instability.

"As the world nears the midpoint of what was intended to be a transformative decade for development, the global economy is set to rack up a sorry record by the end of 2024 — the slowest half-decade of GDP growth in 30 years," the organization said in a statement.

While the U.S. economy remains strong and inflation domestically continues to slow, many global economies are in a weaker position. Slowing global trade is projected to hamper growth in much of the world.

That also translates to developing countries, where high interest rates make borrowing funds difficult, therefore slowing investment and growth, the World Bank said. Developing countries are projected to grow by just 3.9 percent, a full percentage point below the 2010s decade average.

"By the end of 2024, people in about one out of every four developing countries and about 40% of low-income countries will still be poorer than they were on the eve of the COVID pandemic in 2019," the World Bank said.

"Without a major course correction, the 2020s will go down as a decade of wasted opportunity," Gill continued.

There is good news, however, with the U.S. economy lifting up poor performance from other nations. Effective Federal Reserve inflation management has driven down the domestic inflation rate to near its 2 percent target, and the global inflation rate is projected to fall from 2023's 5.9 percent to 3.7 percent in 2024 and 3.4 percent in 2025.


The effect of the finite planet seems to be kicking in.

[K-Dog]

Or how is the average Joe doing?  In America class traitors abound, more common here than apple pie, so how can we know?

Jump to 18 minutes in and the facts start coming out.  Then you might want to start at the beginning. You will learn that 75% of new homeless are first timers in Orlando.  Housing costs have apparently crossed a two Mac-Job limit there.

Or people don't want to work hard enough?

We live in bubbles, oblivious to the misery of others.

If people are working and they are homeless the system is not working.

Last month, the U.S. government released its annual point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past winter. The latest figures confirm the tragedy we all see in communities across the country: 650,000 people sleeping on the streets or in shelters, the highest figure since the count started in 2007. The government also released data showing that last year, almost 900,000 people fell into homelessness for the first time, a 25 percent increase from the previous year and by far the largest increase ever recorded.

42 mines in comes this analogy:

The appeal of Trump is the appeal of a pole dancer at a strip club.

A partner can nag and nag and nag.  Then a man escapes to a strip club.  The stripper lies and tells him she loves him.  He knows she is lying.  But this is better than the nagging.

Democrats are saying things are great when they are not.  Work harder and get a job.  That amounts to nagging.

Better to be lied to.  At least the stripper will lie to you.  Thus Trump wins again.

[RE]

Housing costs have apparently crossed a two Mac-Job limit there.

He should get a 3rd job.  Then he won't need a home.

RE

[K-Dog]

Housing costs have apparently crossed a two Mac-Job limit there.

He should get a 3rd job.  Then he won't need a home.

RE

Yes, I realized that when I made the post.  With three jobs there is no time to be at home.  But pooping in a plastic bucket and not being able to take a shower has a downside.  Sleeping in a bucket seat sucks, and cars get cold fast.  So I decided not to advocate for homelessness.

Some kind of home is necessary.  Even rabbits can have holes.

And by the three job logic.  If three jobs are not enough.  Five or six should do.

[RE]

Housing costs have apparently crossed a two Mac-Job limit there.

He should get a 3rd job.  Then he won't need a home.

RE

Yes, I realized that when I made the post.  With three jobs there is no time to be at home.  But pooping in a plastic bucket and not being able to take a shower has a downside.  Sleeping in a bucket seat sucks, and cars get cold fast.  So I decided not to advocate for homelessness.

Some kind of home is necessary.  Even rabbits can have holes.

And by the three job logic.  If three jobs are not enough.  Five or six should do.

The trick is to make the 3rd job one you can sleep at.  Night security guard at a truck dropyard for instance.  Night janitorial jobs in office buildings also good.  Always a couch in some executive's office to sleep on.

Home health care aid great for sleeping.  You just gotta check on the gomer every couple of hours to see if the diaper needs to be changed.   If they wake up, the call button wakes you.

Shower is solved by joining a gym.  Don't need to shit in a bucket, all your workplaces have bathrooms.

4 or 5 jobs not possible full time.  Not enough hours in the day.

RE