History will judge us. Perhaps, it has already happened. Then again, maybe this next year will play out like one of those cliffhanger serials from the 1930s and 1940s. At the last moment, America will leap from the running board of the Packard before it hurtles over the cliff. The republic will live to fight evil another day.
But that happens at the beginning of the next reel (or the next Congress). Right now, things are not looking promising. Axios outlines the good, the bad, and the depressing.
Americans are paying off their credit cards and lowering overall household debt in the second quarter of 2020. Personal income is up thanks to the combination of stimulus checks and supplemental unemployment checks (that just expired). The stock market is rebounding. That’s good. For somebody.
On the bad and depressing side, unemployment remains “alarmingly high” and demand at food pantries is at record levels. Eviction moratoriums are expiring and debt collectors are showing no mercy despite industry assurances of lenience.
- A massive wave of homelessness is starting to swell. (“Eviction cairns” are cropping up in New Orleans, where piles of people’s belongings are being thrown out on the street.)
- People are even surrendering pets because they can’t afford to take care of them.
Either one has to be emotionally devastating. A reader notes the toll the loss of simple pleasures is having on his family. Everything from seeing grandchildren to splitting wood for the winter to going out to dinner has been taken by the pandemic.
Ed Mierzwinski, senior director of the federal consumer program at U.S. PIRG tells Axios there are “two Americas” (shades of John Edwards).
“There are a lot of people who are just weathering the storm, hunkered down at home,” he says. “And there are a lot of people who are getting paid less than they used to be paid, and they are painfully going through this pandemic economic crisis.”
Households with children, especially. Job loss for them means “a decline in overall income,” says Wilbert van der Klaauw of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For those of you not central bankers, that means less to eat and more dependence on overtaxed food banks.
No surprise, people of color are at greatest risk. Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, warns there is “no indication that consumers expect the recession to end anytime soon.”
“There’s going to be a cliff,” Mierzwinski says. Tune in next year if you survive to see it.
Hopeful signs
“We’ve hit a tipping point in the pandemic,” writes Margaret Talev for Axios. “Half of Americans now know someone who’s tested positive, according to this week’s installment of the Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index.”
“The coronavirus is becoming reality for most people and it will only increase,” predicts Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs. Soon enough, the percentage who know someone who died of the virus will be large enough to show up in polling. Neither will make a difference to the empathy-deficient acting president until voters turn on him on November 3.
But those voters have to turn out to have an impact, as we have discussed before. The future is Democratic and under-45, Simon Rosenberg argued at Medium one year ago, if Democrats will just orient campaigns towards engaging those voters and turning them out. That was before COVID_19 and before Donald Trump decided the only way he could win an election conducted heavily by mail is to fix the election by destroying the U.S. Postal Service and worse. Polls don’t vote. You must find a way to.
Absentee ballots go out in North Carolina on September 4. Kentucky follows 10 days later. Almost half the other states send out absentees days after that. DO NOT WAIT to request one if you plan to vote absentee. DO NOT SIT on your ballot once it arrives. Drop it off in person at your local Board of Elections if you can or at a drop box if your state allows. If you must mail it, do not mail it less than two weeks in advance of November 3.
Be the hand writing on the wall.
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