Higher taxes, higher prices, higher rates. How will it all end?

A year ago, after making executives richer than ever, the mass layoffs finally caught up with me and my family. In prior years, the already rising cost of living had erased our parent's lifetimes of savings, and we watched extended family suffer the same. Everyone is struggling now just to stay afloat, and resorting to using credit cards just to buy essentials. So "afloat" is really just an illusion, we're drowning.

In over 30 years, I've never seen it this bad, and so entering the holiday season this year, with family traditions shattered. No family gathering, no sharing of gifts, and everyone just hunkering down in place, praying that next year our jobs will come back and the youngest of us can begin rebuilding, yet again.

Like our parents, we're now older. We're facing the new reality, that employers do not hire us. Agism has been normalized, and it took less than a year to crush our hope despite trying to maintain a positive attitude and push through it as we had done in the past.

We simply do not have time to rebuild even if the jobs return. Our future is bleaker than ever. Retirement savings that took a lifetime to build are just gone. And then the rate hikes, holy fuck the rate hikes. We were on pins and needles watching the Fed bankers tell us in each meeting that they needed to put us in our place, to bring pain to the working class, in order to reign in the price hikes on insurance, property taxes, utilities, groceries and more. All things, which we have no control or influence over. Boy oh boy did they. As we desperately bled retirement savings to keep our family fed and sheltered, racked up credit card debt to finance food, the rate hikes assured one thing. Not that prices would come down, but that we would be shackled for the foreseeable future, paying interest on food, to wealthy bankers. And so that is the cliff notes version of where so many working class people are now, and we are no exception. Never in 30+ years have we seen it this bad. Yet, the top people, the wealthiest, at the top of companies AND government have their heads in the clouds, so stratospherically wealthier now, that they are clueless and careless about what has happened at the foundation of this economy.

And all that has me wondering, when I read articles like this https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/01/business/why-trumps-tariffs-could-raise-interest-rates/index.html

It has me wondering… how the fuck? How the fuck can anything they do at this point lead to higher prices, higher rates? We literally have nothing left. We can't pay more, we're about to hit our credit card limits, and this is not a fucking joke or exaggeration, but when they bumped rates just a few points, the credit card bankers jacked interest on our financed food credit cards to 34%. 34%! And we had nearly perfect credit scores before this mess. So if I had a dime to bet, I'd bet that many are paying far higher rates now. Are they suggesting that people are going to be paying 50% interest on essentials, 75%. We're already at break-your-fucking-legs-loan-shark rates.

Even if jobs return, even if pay were to be 50% more on new jobs, the math simply doesn't work anymore. We'll never rebuild our retirement savings, and we'll be paying those bankers for the remainder of our lives. So… how the fuck can they make it worse? What is the god damned end game here?