It gets better.
Yesterday, in comes a report from reader Roguewrld that, contrary to Funny’s report, students at Emory University did NOT fall into a terrified faint at the mere glimpse pro-Trump graffiti scribbled on sidewalks and stair risers. Hilariously, Roguewrld found confirmation of this claim at Snopes.com, the bottomless well of de-hoaxification.
Pretty amazing: that tale was found in the good gray pages of the Washington Post, a national publication of record whose seriousness verges on the staid.
Nice catch, Roguewrld!
Traveling deeper into Monty Python territory, we explore the current state of Snopes.com. As it develops, Alabama legislators have NOT proposed to bar people who own cars from receiving public assistance. FALSE. But that one actually was floated, with a straight face, in my august state.
The image of the four Trump-loving women displaying T-shirts that spelled out, a word at a time, MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN turns out to have been Photoshopped. Drat! It was so believable!
Walnuts are not drugs. Even the FDA has not declared walnuts to be drugs.
Mason Wells, the young Mormon missionary injured in the recent Brussels attacks, is not a “survivor” of two prior attacks. He was among 500,000 other people present at the Boston Marathon, nowhere near the bombings, and was two hours out of Paris at the time of the Bataclan attacks.
Even in Mississippi, you can’t drown in a carwash.
Nutella, with sugar its lead ingredient, is probably not very good for you. On the other hand, it’s not immediately toxic.
Cadbury has not, in a superfluity of political correctness, banned the word “Easter” from its packaging for chocolate eggs.
Well, darn. You just can’t have any fun anymore…
What amazes me is that the “talking heads” now have declared that Trump is very popular with the “middle class” (what ever the word middle means) because they have taken the biggest hit from the economy. And that this middle class has watched as the “poor” get everything free from the government and the rich get all the tax breaks from the government….leaving them to pay more and more. Might be some truth to this…as I ran into an old friend I used to sell RE with back in the day. He shared he is/was on hard times…divorce, job loss and a litany of health problems. He then shared that he applied for and received healthcare thru Obamacare and it cost him nothing. AND his meds were now “free” as well…AND because of this turn of events he was able to now afford a lifelong dream….a brand new Harley….about $35K…It made me wonder….what the !?&$…Maybe Mr. Trump is right the country has gone to hell in a hand basket… Sorry….I could never vote for Hilary….The thought of “Bill” back in the White House makes me sick. And these are our only choices from a nation of 300M + people?….Our best days MAY be behind us….
The prospect of 8 more years of Billary makes me cringe…but the prospect of any number of days, weeks, months or years of Donald Trump and his ilk in the White House makes me want to hide under a table. Or get a visa and work permit to live in Canada. I see Clinton as the lesser of two evils.
The thing is, what you and I think of as “the middle class” comprised the larger part of the working class.
Today my father, who didn’t even have a high-school diploma but who still earned a good living, having worked his way up to ship commander in the Merchant Marine, couldn’t even BEGIN to earn anything like what he made in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. He made a great living in Arabia, and after we came back to the US, he made a good, solid middle-class living here. He made enough that he could pay for everything — including cars — in cash, and when he retired he paid for their house in cash. After the Depression ended, my mother never _had_ to work again…she did off and on, but that was mostly for pin money or, imho, just to get out of the house.
But since our august leaders decided we should “globalize,” crush unions, let major corporations send jobs (and tax revenues) overseas, and gwt rid of trade barriers, jobs that pay a living wage for blue-collar workers hardly exist anymore. For that matter, a lot of white-collar jobs barely pay a living wage.
It’s quite reasonable for formerly middle-class workers — especially those who are not well educated and don’t understand how this all came about or who is responsible for it — to be mad as hell. Unfortunately, BECAUSE most Americans are poorly educated (the deliberate result of dumbing down the school systems?), they’re angry at the wrong target.
As for the sick divorced unemployed dude…I don’t begrudge him health care. It would be good if he wouldn’t spend his money foolishly. But we can’t make people exercise common sense. I don’t think that’s either party’s fault. 😉
IMHO….It appears Ross Perot was correct many years ago when he predicted the job losses when NAFTA was first brought to light. It is truly sad that the folks at Carrier, with a straight face, meet with employees and disclose that they are moving the operation to Mexico. Because they really don’t have a choice…competition being what it is. What I find alarming is we can hear the “protectionists” starting to call for higher tariffs on imported goods. Some would say this is what caused Great Depression or at the least intensified it’s realities. It is a mess and it seems if one doesn’t work for the government or in the defense industry there is no hope of making a decent living wage.
Perot…there was a phenomenon. Remember the giant sucking sound of jobs?
“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It’s pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,…have no health care—that’s the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.”
And so it has come to pass…
I almost voted for Perot, because I thought he was right on this issue. But in other respects he seemed to be such a nut case, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Hm. The very fact that we Americans seem increasingly drawn to nut cases vs. mainstream politicians should tell us something. Here’s something of interest from the Font of All Knowledge, Wikipedia:
“A detailed analysis of voting demographics revealed that Perot’s support drew heavily from across the political spectrum, with 20% of his votes coming from self-described liberals, 27% from self-described conservatives, and 53% coming from self-described moderates. Economically, however, the majority of Perot voters (57%) were middle class, earning between $15,000 and $49,000 annually, with the bulk of the remainder drawing from the upper middle class (29% earning more than $50,000 annually).[42] Exit polls also showed that Ross Perot drew 38% of his vote from Bush, and 38% of his vote from Clinton, while the rest of his voters would have stayed home had he not been on the ballot.[43]”
Think of that. If it’s true, is support was pretty evenly drawn from liberals and conservatives, heavily drawn from people who thought of themselves as moderates, and heavily drawn from people Wikipedia’s writer regards as middle class. He took almost 2/5 of the vote away from BOTH Bush and Clinton. Thirty-eight percent is almost 40%, and 40% is beginning to push half.
These things do not bode well. It looks to me as though if we don’t get a third candidate in the race soon, someone who will split the disaffected vote, we WILL get a blustering, bullying clown in the White House.
I don’t know about wages, as a matter of reality: All these young people couldn’t be moving into my neighborhood if they weren’t earning enough to pay a mortgage of around 300 grand. In some of the couples, the wife is a SAHM, which suggests the man is earning enough to support them. Or else their parents are paying the mortgage?? Sally’s house sold for $345,000 to a young couple who just had a baby and who have no intention of sending Mom out to work in the salt mines. And the couple across the street, with four kids, is also a one-earner household: he’s a high school teacher! Admittedly, he teaches adjunct on the side, but from experience we know that’s not enough to put much extra bread on the table.
Rent rates in central Phoenix are going through the stratosphere — in some cases they threaten to approach San Francisco’s. Houses in the suburbs cost upwards of 300 grand, and to that you have to add the substantial cost and misery of commuting. The money to pay for these things has to be coming from somewhere.
Wages are a true challenge….And have no idea as to how folks do it in your area. But in this “neck of the woods” they are in debt up to their eye balls. True we do benefit from being close to DC and the generous government jobs…..but still both folks have to work. AND about a mile from my place they are building , and selling, homes for $650-700K. I know folks in the RE biz and I’m told that all the money from the purchase is coming from the sale of a home or a gift from parents…or both. My thought is this is a “bubble….To purchase a “modest” home in my “hood” for $350K going FHA basically no money down the payments are around $1572 before escrow@3.5%. Take this purchase out to a more traditional rate …say when I bought 30 years ago @8% and the payment is $2568…almost $1K more per month. And one would need to earn at least $3500 more per month ($42K per year) to qualify at the 8% rate…for a MODEST house…the $700K?…it just gets crazier. And the job market looks bleaker and bleaker as the jobs go to Mexico, China, Viet Nam….A mess indeed. Which is where Trump’s appeal comes in….he is saying out loud, what many of us are thinking….