The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.
Yesterday when driving my spouse to a medical appointment in the south suburbs…
I noticed that there are miles of abandoned offices, and businesses that closed years ago and have not been replaced by anything else.
For a 50 mile stretch in the Chicagoland area, things are dead. The city proper apparently even has several empty Sears Tower-equivalents of empty office space.
The other day, Grindr (the gay sex app) made the news for a “not layoff layoff” whereby half the company (over 80 employees) resigned en masse over a “return to the office deadline”.
Some of them said that they wondered how, without their presence in the office, an app where people have been kidnapped and stabbed to death by a stalker, which the app told their location to, will “remain safe”. Yes, I wonder.
Roy Schestowitz commented that this is getting fairly common.
The managers impose deadlines and anyone who doesn’t come back is not technically a layoff and doesn’t qualify for any benefits.
We spoke of Walmart cutting people’s hours and how pressuring them to quit “also isn’t a layoff”.
I told him, Walmart absolutely lays people off and gives them severance, but only when they’re closing the entire store down with three days warning and they stick up a sign that says ‘Dear Shoplifters and Arsonists, valued Chicago customers, the store will close on Friday. Employees who can’t commute three hours to the nearest store will get a little bit of WARN Act Money. It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun. C’ya!’.
(Not what the actual sign says, but it’s the thought that counts.)
Then we discussed the movies. I said, they wheeled Hiyao Miyazaki out (for those who don’t know, he’s been called the Japanese Walt Disney, because everything he touches sells like hotcakes) to make one last movie and the local theater has been hitting my email inbox hard with it because they know if people like me and my spouse go out to see a movie twice this year, one of them will be that one.
It’s just getting harder to justify movies.
It’s not only that barely any of them are worth watching at all, it’s that money is suddenly so tight for many Americans that something that costs $12 for two people on Tuesday isn’t even justifiable on a weekly basis anymore. You look at what’s out and 4-6 months goes by before you even consider watching the movie.
The local Marcus Cinema theater used to do $5 movie tickets on Tuesday, now it’s $6 and you have to use an app, and no Holidays, and some movies (the good ones) are special and are never $6.
So the “$6 Tuesday with an app that has dozens of spyware libraries in it” is a way to make theaters showing bad movies “not empty” so that they might sell a bucket of popcorn.
What I see unfolding in America right now is like the Second Great Depression, but even during the Depression the federal government admitted to everyone what was happening and enacted programs to help them muddle through.
Today, they cut programs. They tell disabled people in their late 50s “Go find work, bum!”, and with the cost of everything spiking, those lucky enough to have any work find themselves with almost all their money going out to rent and food and gasoline.
This last couple of months my electric bill was running 10% higher than it normally does this part of the year. I looked on my bill this month to find that the Democrats added $10 a month to my bill to save us from “the carbon”. Oh no, not carbon!
My extra $10 a month on the electric bill will certainly make the smog in India and China that’s as thick as pea soup better, and save the planet, the trees, the bees, the whales and snails, and the endangered horny toads.
His Excellency J.B. Pritzker, Lord above us in the high castle, is a very Progressive man.
He made $5 billion the old fashioned way, by inheriting a hotel fortune.
He strongly and earnestly believes in redistributing the wealth to people who don’t do anything except make babies.
Not his own wealth, but if I have an extra five bucks in my pocket that week, not for long if Morbidly Obese 400 pound “Health Expert” Lord Farquad (Seven COVID Shots and Counting) has anything to say about it.
This country is basically dying. What’s going on is the Democrats benefit from people who are too illiterate to understand the issues finding their way into a voting booth, so they enact policies where people who litter the place with unemployable children who will shoot at each other, deal drugs, and scare the taxpayers out of the State don’t have to use any of their own money to reproduce.
They then reduce school by getting rid of the arts and literature, and replacing an increasing amount of actual education with propaganda.
Then they make college so expensive that most people can only dream of going there, even though you’ll also be poor if you don’t.
They’re also the Party of Lockdown Fetishists who basically have wet dreams of killing more businesses, which still employ a few people, with taxes and another winter of discontent, because once all the businesses and taxpayers are gone, you can run a corrupt welfare State on nothing but loans from the Central Bank why not?
It’ll be paradise. Just wait and see!
The Democrat answer to the criminals shooting up the place is to make it difficult for law abiding citizens to arm themselves and shoot back.
The police around these parts are so dumb and corrupt, that the other day, a black man was shot in the head, and the cops ignored the bullet hole in his window, and the bullet in his head, dumped him on the funeral home, and wrote down in the police report that he fell and hit his head and died accidentally.
Yes, they will protect us all from the bad criminal people! You do not need a FOID card, dear friends!
Anyway, there’s hardly even a reason to leave the house anymore.
They’ve ruined just about everything you could possibly want to see. I mean, some people still walk around in the forest preserves because the Democrats only took the trees in open air parks away from people during “COVID Lockdowns” which they want to bring back this winter. But trees are still there. They don’t employ very many people, but the trees are still there.
At least the ones that didn’t get knocked over to make the suburbs, which are now rotting malls and empty offices.
It should be very interesting to see how long anyone keeps reading the KrugmanBot3000 in the New York Times and doesn’t wake up and see with their own eyes what is actually going on in America.
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