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You are here: Home / Archives for Economics / Fuck The Middle-Class

Fuck The Middle-Class

Something To Watch Out For- Yellow Bankruptcy

by John Cole|  July 22, 20233:51 pm| 105 Comments

This post is in: Economics, Fuck The Middle-Class

Longtime readers will know that one of my long held fears is an AI takeover of trucking and automated trucking. Not because I fear the technology (although if the AI is as bad as Tesla, it scares the hell out of me), but because I grew up in the Ohio Valley in the 70’s and 80’s and have seen what happens when there is massive disruption in workforces. WV and this region STILL have not recovered from the job losses associated with the deindustrialization of the region- the massive losses from the steel mill, mining, petrochemical, glass factories, etc., rocked this area, and while Pittsburgh and Cleveland proper are having a touch of a renaissance, the rest of us are still mired in poverty at a third world status. Entire counties have nothing but ghost towns where steel and mining towns once thrived.

Now don’t think I am pining for the days of unbreathable air and having acid runoff of iron, copper and mercury pour out of mines into waters and have mills and petrochemicals dumping arsenic, cadmium and a whole host of shit into the ground and water. I’m not supportive of any of that and quite frankly am glad it is gone. It’s one of the reasons why I am so against fracking- I know what happens to the people and land and water around these kinds of activities, and it is never the fucking rosy scenario presented when say people want to build a cracker plant near you.

However, just as bad in the short term is the social upheaval. Were trucking jobs to be automated and those workers displaced, we are talking about HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of jobs. And the impact will be catastrophic, and most people simply have no idea how much of the work force is involved in trucking. Here’s a little map:

Something To Watch Out For- Yellow Bankruptcy

That map is ten years old, but you get the point.

***

The point of all this is that large and rapid changes in the trucking industry scare the fuck out of me because they will almost always be bad. This is an industry in which the workers are regularly used to being fucked, whether it be by the deregulation act in the 1980‘s which was a catastrophe for drivers, fuel shocks, etc. And right now, we are on the Eve of the biggest bankruptcy in trucking ever, dwarfing even the CF bankruptcy in 2002. With the CF bankruptcy, over 8000 drivers lost their jobs. When Yellow ceases operations on Monday, we’re talking three times that number:

From the Great Recession to 2020, Yellow nearly went bankrupt four times. In each episode, the trucking giant was saved — thanks to concessions from lenders, the Teamsters union, the federal government or often all three.

As a result, some of Yellow’s 30,000 employees weren’t too scared when the company began warning this summer that the end times were coming again. “It’s like crying wolf at this point,” Yellow mechanic Brian Atchely told FreightWaves earlier this month.

Now — as a strike looms, customers begin to pull freight and the Teamsters union refuses to meet — industry watchers are on alert that the trucking fleet may finally shutter. Ahead of a federal court hearing on Friday, Yellow said a work stoppage could force the company into a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy proceeding.

Truck drivers are grappling with the idea that they could lose their jobs. Some 22,000 Teamsters members work at Yellow.

Paul Duquette, who works at the company’s Youngstown, Ohio, terminal, joined Yellow 11 years ago after his previous union trucking employer closed. He told FreightWaves on Friday morning that he and his colleagues are clearing the docks of freight now.

“I don’t see things happening in a good light right now,” Duquette said. “It’s sad.”

It’s been a mess for a while:

A beleaguered trucking business that received a $700 million pandemic-era loan from the federal government may be forced to file for bankruptcy protection this summer amid a dispute with its union, a development that could leave American taxpayers stuck with a failed company.

The financial woes at the business, Yellow, which previously went by the name YRC Worldwide, have been building for years. The company lost more than $100 million in 2019 and has more than $1.5 billion in outstanding debt, including the government loan. In 2022, YRC, which ships meal kits, protective equipment and other supplies to military bases, agreed to pay $6.85 million to settle a federal lawsuit that accused it of defrauding the Defense Department.

In 2020, the Trump administration, which had ties to the company and its executives, agreed to give the firm a pandemic relief loan in exchange for the federal government assuming a 30 percent equity stake in the company.

They company, of course, is trying to pin this on the Teamsters, which is nonsense on stilts, because their dispute with the Teamsters is THEM NOT PAYING WHAT THEY ALREADY OWE.

The video, believed to be from earlier this week, shows furious workers in a depot after hearing that the company has failed to make a $50 million payment for employee benefits.

Pension accruals and employee healthcare is also set to be suspended on July 23.

In the footage the employee shouts and paces back and forth, yelling: ‘Nobody tell me about why am I getting emotional.’

He continues: ‘I’ve been here thirty years. Nobody tell me to calm down. Analyze that s****.’

Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement: ‘Yellow has failed its workers once again and continues to neglect its responsibilities.

At any rate, keep your eye on this one, and hopefully there are some folks who can offer up more in the comments, especially some discussion of LTL and how even though volume is down, profitability is up, etc.

Something To Watch Out For- Yellow BankruptcyPost + Comments (105)

Everything Was, In Fact, Not Fine

by John Cole|  February 12, 20232:54 pm| 153 Comments

This post is in: Environmental Rights, Fuck The Middle-Class

I’m not sure if you all are aware of the little Bhopal disaster we have going on here in my neck of the woods up in East Palestine, Ohio, but if you are not, you can hardly be blamed. The media is barely covering it and it’s actually fucking flabbergasting. Most of the information I have seen has come from twitter and tiktok.

At any rate, about fifty miles from mere as the crow flies, up in East Palestine, Ohio, a Norfolk Souther train derailed last week. Here’s a handy map showing where I live and where the accident occurred:

Everything Was, In Fact, Not Fine

The trains were carrying a load of toxic chemicals that are dangerous in their own right, but when on fire, are basically the gas used in WW1 in trench warfare. Don’t take my word on it, here are a bunch of nerds at Chemical and Engineering News breaking it down for you:

An evacuation order issued following the derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying vinyl chloride in Ohio was lifted Feb. 8 after state and federal authorities determined that air and water quality were safe for residents to return to their homes. But questions remain about the safety of transporting the hazardous chemical.

People living near the accident, which occurred Feb. 3 in East Palestine, Ohio, a town of about 4,700 residents on the Pennsylvania border, began leaving immediately as a column of black smoke rose over town. In an effort to avoid an explosion, railroad and state authorities began a controlled release and burn of the vinyl chloride Feb. 6. Earlier that day, the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania ordered an immediate evacuation of a 1- by 2-mile area that crossed the state line.

In all, about 50 cars—20 of which were carrying hazardous materials—left the tracks in the accident. Of most concern were the 5 carrying vinyl chloride. In a statement announcing the evacuation order, Ohio governor Mike DeWine warned that people closest to the derailment faced “grave danger of death.”

While vinyl chloride itself is a carcinogen, the burning of the chemical, which releases hydrogen chloride and phosgene, can be immediately lethal. Phosgene, a highly toxic, colorless gas with a strong odor, was notoriously used as a weapon during World War I.

It’s bad. There were evacuations, but they were too little too late, Norfolk Southern and Gov. DeWine are assuring people it is safe now and the water is fine, but it’s not. And to prove their transparency, they arrested the only national reporter covering the press conference:

A NewsNation correspondent was arrested on Wednesday after he began reporting live during a news conference held by Ohio authorities regarding a train derailment – an incident police said involved a confrontation between him and a National Guard official after he was told to stop speaking during the governor’s remarks.

Law enforcement officers interrupted NewsNation correspondent Evan Lambert as he broadcast from the event, where authorities announced they were lifting a multiday evacuation order near the site of a fiery weekend derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

An argument then broke out between Lambert and Harris, who pushed the reporter away from him as Lambert was approaching Harris “in an aggressive manner,” police said.

After Harris reported the interaction to law enforcement, officers told Lambert he needed to leave the building because the situation had “evolved into a physical confrontation and required law enforcement intervention,” police said. After Lambert refused, the officers tried to de-escalate by asking him to step outside to talk, but Lambert did not, police said.

The reporter was then advised he was under arrest and escorted out of the building, at which time he tried to pull away, according to police.

This is, of course, bullshit coverage. An argument didn’t break out. A fucking cop and a meathead in the National Guard came and told him he was not allowed to do his job and then they arrested him.

At any rate, a direct line can be traced from this disaster to the policies of Norfolk Southern, which, conveniently, is majority owned by hedge funds (Vanguard, Blackrock, JP Morgan, etc), who have slashed maintenance, slashed crews, and done all the usual shit to maximize profits. This is exactly what rail workers were protesting last summer that… got shut down by congress.

@nipplebottomjeans #stitch with @pearlmania500 #fyp #news #environment #pa #trains #ohio ♬ original sound – Thoms

So, yeah.

Everything Was, In Fact, Not FinePost + Comments (153)

Well Imagine That

by John Cole|  June 10, 20215:54 pm| 210 Comments

This post is in: Economics, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

It appears that despite there being an MBA program in every college in the nation, ostensibly teaching the administration of business, it appears that some knowledge has eluded business owners. Like the many scrolls lost in the burning of Alexandria, many arcane business practices have been lost, but all is not lost, as some new ideas have been rediscovered:

The owners of Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor had hit a wall.

For months, the 98-year-old confectionary in Pittsburgh couldn’t find applicants for the open positions it needed to fill ahead of warmer weather and, hopefully, sunnier times for the business after a rough year.

The job posting for scoopers — $7.25 an hour plus tips — did not produce a single application between January and March.

So owner Jacob Hanchar decided to more than double the starting wage to $15 an hour, plus tips, “just to see what would happen.”

The shop was suddenly flooded with applications. More than 1,000 piled in over the course of a week.

“It was like a dam broke,” Hanchar said. Media coverage that followed his decision soon pushed other candidates his way.

We’re the stupidest fucking country in the world that “giving people more money to get them to work for you” is apparently a relevatory piece of information. I mean jesus christ. Fast Freddie Herzberg just died in 2000, how the hell did everyone forget this shit.

Well Imagine ThatPost + Comments (210)

The Labor Freakout

by John Cole|  May 8, 20217:00 pm| 274 Comments

This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

Unless you live underneath a rock, the last couple of days you have witnessed a genuine freakout from the chattering classes about the jobs report. To save you some time, I will summarize:

“OMG 300 DOLLARS MORE A WEEK IS MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO FORCE THE POORS TO CLEAN THE GREASE TRAPS AT MY FAST FOOD FRANCHISE FOR A WAGE TOO LOW FOR THEM TO PAY THE RENT!”

And really, I am not exaggerating. Shitty, low paying jobs are not being filled, and it is FREAKING out the MBA class. We are at a point where several generations of businesses and business owners have never actually experience a tight labor market, and they literally have no idea what to do. Since the Reagan era, they have been in the driver’s seat, neutering labor unions, having MBA’s nickle and dime employees to death with suppressed wages, cutting away at medical and retirement benefits, shifting them to 401k’s while not providing commensurate pay increases, and so forth. They’ve spent four decades masturbating about being job creators while siphoning all the profit upward, treating employees like indentured servants eager to work 35 hours a week for 8 bucks an hour with no stable schedule, so with employees not willing to literally die during a pandemic to smell like french fries and walmart working the two jobs they need to survive, these shitlords finally find themselves without enough workers.

The one thing they can not find themselves willing to try to do is to try to pay them more. You’ll hear anecdotal stories about McDonald’s owners paying a whole 12 dollars an hour for an “entry level job,” sneering while saying it because everyone knows an entry level position shouldn’t pay enough for the serf to pay rent AND eat. So fuck them.

My suggestion to the government is to not do ANYTHING except push for a 15$ minimum wage, and these assholes will either figure it out on their own and start paying people what thy are worth, start picking the tampons out of their own Burger King bathroom toilets themselves, or go out of business. All of these are fine by me.

These guys can go McFuck themselves.

The Labor FreakoutPost + Comments (274)

Tax These Motherfuckers

by John Cole|  March 22, 20213:46 pm| 82 Comments

This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor

Spending a couple billion on the IRS seems like it would be as pretty smart investment:

More than 20% of the wealthiest Americans’ income isn’t being reported to the Internal Revenue Service, according to a new study that calculates U.S. tax evasion is far higher than previously estimated.

Random audits of the rich can detect some tax evasion, but the study’s authors found that the IRS easily misses income hidden in sophisticated ways, including in private businesses and offshore structures. Collecting all unpaid income tax from the top 1% would boost revenue to the U.S. Treasury by $175 billion a year.

The wealthy have made so much in gains the past few decades while the rest have just been screwed, and they cheat because they can. It’s to the point they don’t even know what to do with the money, they have so much of it:

I have just taken a picture of my chair. I am not going to go through the trouble of doing any of this, but I have it on good authority that I can now host an auction for that digital photo, and sell the unique “ownership” of it to the highest bidder. That winner can then display the photo online, and while anyone could simply download it and own a lossless copy of it themselves, a record on the blockchain will confer the true owner the knowledge that they have the original.

They get nothing else, really, except that knowledge. Anyone in the world can look at or even acquire the same JPEG file from the internet. This is ownership as a feeling. And it’s the biggest innovation in the art world. One of these JPEGs just sold for $69.3 million (not a typo). And it’s further confirmation that decades of inequality have left the idle rich with entirely so much money that they do entirely ridiculous things. And where money goes, scams are sure to follow.

There is a point to crypto art, though you have to squint to see it. Artists put out limited-edition prints all the time, which aren’t entirely discernible from a printed copy, aside from the artist’s signature and the knowledge that there aren’t many in the world. By auctioning a non-fungible token (NFT) that confers ownership, artists can also deliver a scarce object to fans, and get direct compensation for it. This could prove useful in businesses with a lot of direct intermediation between artists and fans, like music. Kings of Leon selling an NFT that can unlock concert tickets and digital art gives big Kings of Leon fans a way to support the band’s work, rather than funnel their funds to a record label or streaming company.

FFS.

Tax These MotherfuckersPost + Comments (82)

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

by Tom Levenson|  November 5, 20205:43 pm| 53 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Open Threads

While we’re waiting for…oh, I dunno, something or other, an article I chanced upon today about wine and income inequality triggered a thought about what we are really up against in the ongoing fight for our country.

Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine critic, published this about a week ago:

Among the many ways the rich are different from you and me: Only they can afford grand cru Burgundy.

That wasn’t always the case. In the 1990s, middle-class wine lovers could still afford to experience that rite of passage — drinking a truly great wine, not simply to enjoy it, but to understand what qualities made it exceptional in the eyes of history.

It might have been a splurge, perhaps requiring a few sacrifices. But it was feasible, just as it was possible to buy first-growth Bordeaux, or the top wines of Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino or Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, to name a few other standard-bearers.

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on Society

Not any more. The TL:DR is that prices for top wines–not just Burgandies, but all the iconic names/regions–have diverged from most other bottles:

In 1980, the price of a first-growth Bordeaux was roughly four times the price of a fifth-growth Bordeaux, he said in a phone interview, referring to an 1855 classification that ranked top Médoc producers in five tiers, or growths. Nowadays, he said, as prices have risen for all these top wines, the ratio between first- and fifth-growth price is more like 10 to 1.

The driver: demand from the top 1 percent, or one tenth of 1 percent:

In another example from Bordeaux, Professor Ashenfelter, along with two researchers from the University of Bordeaux, presented a paper in 2018 showing that as income inequality has increased since 1980, the price of first-growth Bordeaux has paralleled the rise in top incomes.

Asimov, no raving radical he, is nonetheless perfectly able to connect the dots:

Though the problem matters to wine lovers, the rising inaccessibility of fancy wines is just a microscopic example of how income inequality and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands have affected daily life.

The macroscopic story, as I see it, is the rich-to-ultrarich war on the idea  and the real life of society. They lead lives that are carefully demarcated in both experiences and physical spaces that are theirs, and very much not ours. They drink stuff we don’t–can’t, anymore, even as special treats, because they’ve bought it all. When they fall ill, they enjoy boutique health care, and have thus less and less stake (they think) in public health. And so on.

That’s what income inequality does, what it’s supposed to do: bifurcate the world into two, one that a small group enjoys in seemingly secure isolation, and the one everyone else lives in. Worse, the ethos evoked to defend such wealth and such distinctions is an atomized one, of meritocratic, individual success. That’s not a social vision; it denies the value of collective action; it is bloody lonely.

And, of course, it drives our politics. All the signalling–the bigotry, the divide-and-conquer hate, the religious dog whistling and so on–may in fact matter to some in the Republican political class, but the driver is making sure nothing impedes the progress of generational fortunes.

This is all obvious to most here, I think–but it reminds me that progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance duties are existential–not just for them, but for the survival of American democracy, and maybe America itself.

Probably won’t do much to bring down the price of Petrus (lots of Chinese and Russian and whoever gazillionaires to suck up the available supply, even if we got a handle on our gilded class). But that’s what it will take, I think, to get a sustainable politics back, and (when the virus looses its hold) the kind of social and cultural world we might like to inhabit.

Enough such windy stuff.

As I said to Mr. Gorbachev: Open Up This Thread!

(ETA to add the link to the Asimov article.)

Image: Willem Kalf, Wineglass and a Bowl of Fruit, 1663

Billionaires, Republicans, and the Assault on SocietyPost + Comments (53)

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

by Tom Levenson|  March 21, 20206:05 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Economics, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

Coronavirus is changing America hugely in the here and now–just look outside.

It’s also true that it will have a lasting impact on the country (and the world), and while prediction is hard, especially about the future, there is one obvious impact that will harm both millions of individual Americans and the long term economic health of the nation.

That would be what’s waiting for students graduating this June into a job market that for all intents and purposes won’t exist–likely for months/years to come.

TL:DR: it’s bad. Really bad. There are serious losses of income and long term wealth that produce knock-on effects on health and social factors in the lives of those who, by no fault or action of their own, happen to come into adulthood at just the wrong moment.

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

At this moment, we’re diving into what looks like a deep economic disaster that will wreck the dreams of millions of kids just getting started, and we are doing so because the Republican leadership botched both short and long term plans for a predictable event. This is social misery that is about to happen as a direct result of political choices made by Donald Trump and 40 years of decisions by Republican elected officials. We will need to drive that point home, until being a Republican ranks in popular estimation a couple of rungs below refurbished condom retailer.

To our sorrow, there’s a fair amount of research on  the natural experiments we’ve already endured that shwo what starting one’s career in such a moment does to both short term and longer prospects.  In 2006, a paper looking at Canadian college graduates between 1982 and 1999 showed that recessions have a significant impact on new graduates:

Our main results suggest that the average worker graduating college in a recession faces earnings losses that are very persistent but not permanent. On average, a two standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate (roughly comparing the difference between those exiting college in a bust versus boom) leads to an initial wage gap of about 10 percent. This gap declines relatively slowly, and fades to zero after about the eighth year. Controlling for unemployment rate conditions after the first year of labor market entry, we also conclude that virtually all of the wage deficit can be attributed to the unemployment rate variation in the very first year after leaving school.

Graduating at the wrong time affects the shape of careers; timing matters, in that the newest graduates suffer more than those with a toe-hold in the job market; finally, that average 10% loss masks the differential effects by income level. As usual, the poor suffer more (from the non-technical summary):

show full post on front page

 …initial random shocks affect the entire career. Graduating in a recession leads workers to start at smaller and lower paying firms, and they catch-up by switching jobs more frequently than those who graduate in better times. Third, some workers are more affected by luck than others. In particular, earnings losses from temporarily high unemployment rates are minimal for workers with two or more years of work experience and are greatest for labor market entrants. Among graduates, those with the lowest predicted earnings suffer significantly larger and much more persistent earnings losses than those at the top.

I’ve seen studies on the impact of the 2007-8 events that report similar patterns, but what really caught my eye was this one, published in January, 2020, by Hannes Schwandt of Northewestern and Till M. von Wachter from UCLA. Here’s the abstract, which captures the scope of its miserable findings:

We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early 1980s suffer increases in mortality that appear in their late 30s and further strengthen through age 50. We show these mortality impacts are driven by disease-related causes such as heart disease, lung cancer, and liver disease, as well as drug overdoses. At the same time, unlucky middle-aged labor market entrants earn less and work more while receiving less welfare support. They are also less likely to be married, more likely to be divorced, and experience higher rates of childlessness. Our findings demonstrate that tempo-rary disadvantages in the labor market during young adulthood can have substantial impacts on lifetime outcomes, can affect life and death in middle age, and go beyond the transitory initial career effects typically studied.

Schwandt and von Wachter begin with background capturing how the picture of income and career costs have held up, and in some cases worsened since the earlier research I linked above:

Losses in cumulated lifetime income implied by typical estimates per se could lead to lower wealth accumulation, and there is some evidence of reductions in housing wealth among individuals coming of age in the Great Recession (e.g., Dettling and Hsu, 2014). Several studies have documented lasting changes in occupational choice (Oyer, 2006, 2008; Altonji et al., 2016) and employer characteristics (Oreopoulos et al., 2012), and Kahn (2010) finds that 1982 college graduates may begin to lose ground again around 15 years after job entry.

So yeah: graduating in a recession is not what you want. But here’s the killer, literally:

For cohorts coming of age during the early 1980s recession, a temporarily higher state unemployment rate at the age of labor market entry leads to precisely estimated increases in mortality that appear in the late thirties and increase until age 50. These increases in mortality are driven to an important extent by a rise in both disease-related and “external” causes, including lung cancer, liver disease, and drug poisoning.

Aside from early death, effects of entering the job market in crap times make life suck in many ways:

We also find entering the labor market during a recession has a substantial impact on a broad range of measures of socioeconomic status in middle age, including a decline in marriage rates, a rise in divorce rates, and a decline in family size. We also find that after initial recovery in their mid-thirties, adversely affected entry cohorts suffer a reduction in earnings as they reach their mid-forties.

And there are interesting (if that’s the word) distinctions in outcomes by race that may help explain Trump’s appeal to folks whose interests he assaults:

Finally, while the effects on overall mortality are similar by race, increases in deaths of despair appear to be chiefly concentrated among white, nonHispanic men. White men also tend to experience a decline in earnings in midlife and tend to experience larger reductions in family stability than their non-white counterparts. This is despite the fact that non-whites experience larger short-run effects on earnings and other outcomes…

Kids These Days (Are F**ked) 1

In sum: the Trump recession/depression that is beginning right now will damage the hopes and prospects of a generation for a generation.  It will affect us all, including those of us fortunate enough to start our careers in better times, as millions of Americans will have less of chance to lead the fully productive/creative lives they could–and thus our economy and culture as a whole will lose what could have been.

There are some responses that could mitigate the worst effects, it seems to me, and I’m going to be getting in touch with my legislators to push them. First, the most obvious, is to forgive any tuition debt incurred this year. Second, almost equally obvious, would be to forgive it all, certainly for students currently in college, but better, for everyone, as that would be an instant stimulus/support. If students graduating now or over the next few years didn’t have to pay down a debt that the crappy job market will make yet more intractable, they would have more flexibility, more resilience, and hopefully both a better short term and more healthy and emotionally robust time as the years roll by.

And the other urgency, of course, is to not do what Hoover did, and Trump and McConnell and the rest of the junta are doing now: dither over a response that in its first iterations is clearly inadequate to the task. The best thing to do when facing the prospect of double digit job losses is to throw money at anything that (a) keeps folks alive and (b) offers jobs that pay wages.

It’s really not that complicated: don’t burden the most vulnerable with the hardest road to hoe; give them a leg up in hard times. And drop cash from helicopters.

Over to y’all.

Images: Franz von Felbinger, Poor Children, by 1906.

Edvard Munch, Despair, 1894.

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