I could end up paying a lot for the corona virus and a lot of what I pay will go to people who have enough to game disasters for big profits. Against my will, almost, my retirement funds are invested in the stock market because that is the only place where I could have possibly “earned” enough on my retirement money to pay my way in the world until I die. My retirement counselor told me that if I pulled my money out of stocks–ones the retirement management company for which he works told him were the “relatively safe” ones–I would pay a substantial amount in capital gains taxes, that chunk of my nest egg gone for ever, less money in the account to ear on making more unlikely the possibility of my making it to the end solvent. My mother, to keep herself going, sold a house in Los Angeles, put the money in the high return accounts then available, and lived for a good part of her later years off of the interest she was able to earn on the house funds.
She, in the last few years of her life, almost drained those savings as interest rates that had floated her for many years dropped so low that her savings were just about sunk when she passed.
Certificates of deposits–high interest long term bank accounts–and other financial devices that payed people for the use of their money with low risk, disappeared just as the stock market grew bigger and ever bigger, in some part because people like me had nowhere else to go with pensions and retirement funds that needed to grow in value if they were to last the lifetime.
Once my money was invested by the company my employee had decided I had to trust, I had little choice to keep it where they told me they wanted it to be. They did have a fund that was stockless and drew a little interest but that amount would not have been enough to carry me through and I had no desire at all to end up so broke as to have to depend my children to float me until I ceased to be. When the market began to fluctuate somewhat wildly, I asked my retirement helper to move my money into that safe account, something he was most reluctant to do. He said it could not and should not be done, first because I was not allowed by the rules of the company’s game, to move money into the secure account and, secondly, because I would immediately have to pay 20% in capital gains taxes on what I moved if I could have moved.
This attempt at transacting occurred almost a year ago and, nice for me, the market, though breaking the back of the average working stiff, kept going up and up and up. And now, it is crashing back down and it just might take me down with it.
Bernie Sanders campaign was about something different than what Hilliary Clinton understood to be the goal of the sensible political campaign that would lead to a sensible presidency that would keep things sensible. The problem with her and with Biden and the rest of the democratic party, bolstered by black voters, for some unjustifiable reason, is that the good sense it promotes is absolute nonsense because it is predicated on the idea that AMERICA IS ALREADY GREAT when, America, the reality, is not even good and, for a good many, has been absolutely rotten ever since democracy was traded in for capitalism, the latter a virus that makes the decent chumps and the rotten cultural heroes.
Capitalism has been grinding up people and whole nations for over a century, the byproduct, absurd amounts of wealth for the absurdly wealthy, so much that, with their capital, they are able to own the rest, buy the law of the land free people enslaved to do their bidding. This terribly inhumane and rotten to the core system owns people from a young age, the schools always forced by those with power to teach in their favor a curriculum that translates the bad and inhumane into the good and necessary and polite. Consider singing songs of praise for bombs bursting in air–it would be wholly economically unsound to do so without killing several–and pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth that symbolizes a nation indivisible that is clearly divided into those with power and those without, those who have the freedom to control the lives of others and those who will be controlled by them.
What has happened in this farce of an election already is that capitalism has fought the fierce battle it can afford to fight–its advocates own every major media channel and both of the only viable political parties in existence–and is determined to win playing, of course, by rules it has created to serve its purposes, by the laws it has purchased so that justice is hardly that at all but, rather, a way to punish those who do not agree to be fucked over and fleeced.
It is really hard to buy into the Biden is better bullshit because he is only better because he is not as bad as the worst. Hope? Hardly if one is thoughtfully sane.
One reply on “Trump is worse but Biden is still bad”
I wrote a lengthy comment but it got accidentally erased. But my main point was: keep your money in a balanced account that will carry you through good times and bad, and don’t sell off stocks when they’re low. A zillion people made that mistake in 2008. And I hope this is a retirement account rather than just a brokerage account. Hang in there.