Older working class people saw where this was going from the very start. After all, many of us have been through it 3 times in our careers now. The story and rationalization changes, but the outcome has been the same every time. The very rich get much richer, and the working class gets poorer and shackled into servitude to the rich by more and more debt.
1. Create or seize an opportunity to “stimulate” the economy. This is code for rapid devaluation of wage’s purchasing power, and a rapid devaluation of lifetimes of savings, quite often trapped by threat of large taxes and penalties in 401Ks and pensions. This time around, they devalued our dollars, our wages, and entire lifetimes of savings by more than 30%.
2. As bankers and corporate executives have been granting themselves shares of their own companies, and selling those shares to your 401K managers, who buy them with your money, those at the top are already well insulated. They literally mint their own form of currency, and it’s been lucrative, enriching themselves by the billions. Maybe it works out for the working class over decades, and so many argue that it does, yet all the metrics tell us, it does not. Instead we have a nation now, a tsunami of aging workforce who have little to nothing built up for retirement, and despite the bullshit, it isn’t from lack of working, stupidity, or even failure to serve up money to the fund managers. It’s simply that the way the game is rigged, that purchasing power, all that matters is diminished and shunted to those at the top. It can be bamboozling, but I think by now most people understand how thinly spread they are now, how unaffordable life has become. Now imagine that happening 3 to 4 times in your career and erasing purchasing power on a lifetime of savings.
3. But that isn’t all. As those at the top insulate themselves in actual assets, ownership of the businesses where we serve them, rental properties and more, even receiving near to zero rate loans of “free money”, to acquire more assets, to acquire housing that they turn into rentals, the central bankers begin the next phase of the attack. Like every time before. Market wipe down time! Blah blah this and blah blah that, correction here, fluctuations there, dip to the dip to the dip. You watch your 401K balance plummet. Mind you this time around they wiped your balance down 30 to 40%, especially if you were recently rebalanced into safe banking funds (for many were completely wiped out over a single weekend). And don’t forget, for that wipe down on your balance, you already had over 30% of purchasing power per dollar stolen, devalued by a tamperable over inflated currency.
4. What next. Well, we’re hopefully near the end of the massive layoff phase. They did the usual, talked about the great job market (while reality showed us something very different). Lots of family supporting jobs just gone, thousands by the thousands, and in their place, offshoring, temp, contract, and gig jobs, where if you hustle through 2 or 3 or 4, none with benefits like healthcare or retirement savings, you still can’t support your family. But at least there is a LOT of those jobs to justify what was clearly stated, “we need to weaken the working class even more to get inflation under control”. Let’s hope that is coming to an end because the next phase is well underway now.
5. [https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/economy/americans-401k-plans-bill-payments/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/economy/americans-401k-plans-bill-payments/index.html) This is when people so desperate to keep their family sheltered and fed, to keep the lights on, to take care of their children, begin to sell what little they were able to save over a lifetime of serving it up. They sell it for a HUGE discount to the already very rich, and those running government budgets are applauding it. Why? Because right now, they get about 30% of what the working class is selling, right off the top, in “income taxes”. You’re doing what you can to survive, but you gotta give up 30% for that early withdrawal right now. No hope at all left for a retirement when your aged out, pushed out. But, that’s not all, there’s more. Unless you’re dying, you’re going to give those government friends an additional 10%, for a total of 40% of your past earnings, which already were devalued by 30%, and which you’re selling already for a huge discount that will later turn to a huge gain for the already uber wealthy.
Now typically, that’s about all of the carefully managed, well executed steps of these heists. Most of us older working class have been through this, every one of these, in that order, at least 3 times now. THAT is the real reason almost none have enough in retirement savings. Put your idealistic projections and calculations and spreadsheets aside. This is our reality. It was a heist every time before, and it was a heist this time as well. Different story, same tactics, same outcome. Hell the richest nearly doubled their net worth, their acquisitions of real wealth this time, while we all lost. And the reason I say I think this is the last time they can pull it off in this fashion is because they took too much. The next generation of workers has lost hope, because it’s easy to see, they can’t be deluded. Excluding the generationally wealthy, they can’t even buy houses this time around because the wealthy found that to be the one remaining asset they hadn’t acquired in past heists.
So here we are. Hopefully near the end of this one, but things are going to be interesting. In the past, they touted about the “recovery” after they’d taken all their gains. There was no recovery, we all simply worked more than ever to rebuild our lives. But if you look around this time, the youngest generation doesn’t have that opportunity, and they saw it happen to their parents and grand parents, and they’re just saying fuck this shit. fuck it all.
by agreeablederivative