Every time I see an ad on my DirecTV, they always managed to slip in how much everything costs. It doesn’t matter if it’s an ad for furniture, or clothing, or any other consumer item, here’s some comment about how ‘much’ things cost, or how difficult it is to ‘save’ with all those sky-high prices.
You would think from those ads that the ‘ruinous’ inflation, which Donald Trump keeps mentioning in his MAGA-rally speeches, was still rampant, even though last year’s price spikes seem to have disappeared.
Now, I happen to know two women who would have faced serious financial hardship during the Pandemic if Joe and the Democrats hadn’t pumped $6 trillion into the economy to aid families ands businesses, a pile of money which then – surprise, surprise – unleashed an inflationary spiral which now seems to have come to an end.
One of these women is a single mother with two tots who was laid off from her job as a waitress in a local truck stop when the trucks stopped showing up. If it hadn’t been for the extra unemployment compensation she received, she and her kids would have ended up in the street or at best in one of those stinky, smelly homeless shelters where there’s at least one fight every night.
The other woman did telephone customer service for one of the big banks, and this was a perfect job because she could work from home and keep her eye on a teen-age son who had a funny habit of not wanting to go to school. The bank laid her off, she desperately searched for another job without success and was facing financial Armageddon when the additional Covid response money came through.
I also have to assume that some of the local businesses around me which stayed open during the Pandemic would otherwise have closed down, furloughed all their staff, and went into debt to a landlord or a bank because everyone else was in the same situation as they were, or worse.
Every fucking time that Trump or any of those other GOP Presidential wannabees opened their goddamn mouths last year, they knew ‘for a fact’ that the government stimulus packages would wreck the economy and create a future deficit that could never be overcome.
It used to be that Republicans warned that ‘our children’ would be harmed by budget deficits unless, of course, the deficit was caused by a tax cut passed by the GOP. Now, the fact that together the total deficit under Reagan and Bush I and Bush II increased the deficit to $1.75 trillion whereas Clinton had no deficit and Obama dropped the Bush II deficit from $1.2 trillion to $600 million, why bother with such insignificant details?
After all, everyone knows that liberals exist to tax and spend, conservatives exist to keep the financial reins tight.
The bottom line is that the way the two political parties justify their existence and criticize the other side may or may not have anything to do with reality at all. Democrats are the spenders; Republicans are the savers and that’s the way it’s always been.
But if my friends in the Democrat(ic) Party are going to take it in the ass for printing and spending all that dough, the least they could do would be to create some messaging which captures what the government’s largesse during the Pandemic meant to my two female friends. Because if I know two people who have worked all their adult lives but wouldn’t have pulled through the last couple of years without that extra money from TÍo Sam, everyone else must know a couple of people who shared the same boat.
But maybe the Democrats like it that way because somewhere around 60 million Americans receive some kind of financial assistance from the feds, of whom at least 40 million are old enough to vote. And most of this population doesn’t pay taxes anyway because what’s to pay?
Know what? Forty million votes are half the votes that Joe received in 2020. Maybe the Democrats should keep taxing and spending, at least until the end of this year.
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