Hitting Home

Sorry for the late post this week, I was crammed yesterday. Onward…

Last week, in Nan’s Notebook, she asked a good question about how the current Administration’s actions directly affect us. Not big-picture stuff like the end of the Nation as we know it, but tangible effects felt by real citizens. I was going to answer, but once I thought about it for a second, I realized there was enough for a full post. So, not wishing to carry on so long in someone else’s Comment section, I decided to bring it here.

Yes, there are several important ways TFG is screwing me, right now, aside from his failed (and never actually intended) promise to lower grocery costs.

·      The threat of losing Social Security and Medicare colors everything right now. Republicans have the opportunity to accomplish that for rich benefactors have been yearning for decades, which is killing or curtailing our social safety net. Without these things, personal savings vehicles become paramount.

·      To that end, the new economic uncertainty we see around us cost my 401k over $10,000 in just the last week and a half. I just finished moving the rest of my 401k investments around into safer but lower-yielding options. (And I had them in fairly conservative entities to start.) I had considered such moves before the 2008 Big Bank collapse but never pulled the trigger. Consequently I got my ass handed to me, financially. It took me years to recover from those losses.

·       Tariffs on steel and other construction goods will increase the cost of new cars. My job involves managing a fleet of cars for my company. Driving up the price of a new car will affect the efficiency of the operation. If the cost gets too high, the Powers That Be may end this particular program and fold up the fleet for good, rendering me unemployed.

So, to summarize, I could easily lose my job, Social Security, personal retirement savings, and affordable insurance. How’s that for tangible effects? I used to have a solid retirement plan that would be executed in the next couple of years, but now that plan is on hold—all because the richest men in America want more.

Other more speculative issues include:

·      The end of our democracy, leaving me and everyone else disenfranchised. I think we’ve seen our last clean presidential election, and I’m not even sure about the midterms. I believe that the reason all this chaos has been unleashed, including touching Social Security, the famed “Third Rail of Politics, is because they don’t plan on allowing the rest of us to weigh in again with our measly “voting rights” again. They paid a lot of money to get things the way they’re going now and they won’t let “the people” anywhere near the levers of power again. GOP Congressmen are condemning their own angry supporters at town halls as paid actors or just running away. They don’t seem to have any fear of reprisals. They’d rather rely on their faith that the newly rigged system will keep their place at the trough so that they don’t have to justify their behavior to the unwashed masses out of the need to con them into giving him their votes again.

·       This international belligerence may prod some wingnut, foreign or domestic, to set off a nuke in Washington DC. Living nearby in Baltimore, I’m in the danger zone, depending on the device involved.

·       I have to worry about wearing my new Ohio State/College Football Championship hat because it’s red and might get mistaken for a MAGA hat. That could get me shot while I’m sitting in the car at a red light.

And there’s more, there’s always more because we don’t know what atrocities this asshole is going to unleash next. It certainly won’t be anything that can quantifiably make our lives better. And we don’t even have to wait for the next shoe to drop; he’s got a big speech on TV tonight where I’m sure the next outrage will be revealed.

It’s not like I’ll be tuning in, though. I’d rather watch a monkey pleasure himself than listen to that guy give a speech, despite the conceptual similarities between the two. I’ll get the gist of it in tomorrow’s news and blogs.