Well, he only went and did exactly what he said he would, and the results were exactly as was expected, and now everyone’s lost a chunk off their retirement with no prospect of getting it back, and the damage is done. Things don’t just magically go back to the way they were, and the rest of the world is going to spend the rest of the 21st century interpreting America as damage and routing around it. We are officially a pariah state on a par with Russia or Israel or North Korea. And now I don’t know when or whether I’m going to be able to retire, let alone where.
It shouldn’t have been like this. The Jetsons promised us robots doing the work and a twenty hour week tops. We have become more productive, it takes less effort to accomplish more work, people live longer – but the result is that we have to work to sixty-seven now and we’re stuck in offices forty-five hours a week ever since lunch became an unpaid addendum to eight hours work. We don’t need as many people working – which means that a job becomes a privilege and lack of one means you don’t have health care. And instead of cutting down to four days a week or thirty hours a week or otherwise reducing the burden as we did all through the 20th century, now we employ fewer people and use that to suppress wages, because if you need to have a job and there aren’t enough to go round, you’ll take less to ensure you have something.
We need confiscatory taxation of wealth. We need to separate health care from employment. We need to establish universal basic income. And if we do that, we don’t need any of the existing unemployment insurance or welfare assistance, employers don’t have to provide insurance or severance, and instead of billionaires with “send pop stars to space” money to waste on subverting our democracy, we can take jobs that do good without worrying about our cost of living, we can strike out and be entrepreneurial without risking our families’ health, we can live closer to that mythical 1950s of plenty that only became an issue for conservatives once it was extended beyond white people.
They say you’re supposed to grow more conservative as you get older, but that only worked when each generation did better than the next and had something to lose. Generation X, with its pensions turned into stock roulette and its kids paying confiscatory tuition for what was once free in-state public college and the prospect of returning to lifetime benefit caps and pre-existing exclusions, is at the vanguard of the Great Screwing. And if the billionaire and boomer classes are going to continue to bleed us dry, then we have to protect ourselves. Somehow.