Retirement Packages
Social Security was invented to get workers to accept capitalism again
A 15 - 45% price increase on all imported goods, and ancillary increases on all domestically-produced goods that require imported inputs will be noticed by consumers, regardless of government reports.
The People are the data, so they will experience market changes before the data is collected. For example, I know the prices of Massachusetts-grown, licensed cannabis products have begun to increase. With recently-added costs to production and processing equipment, and packaging (all of which is imported), it was expected.
The economic response to blanket tariffs was predictable, because the variable introduced was monolithic and brutish. Every economist, outside of Ron Vara (alias of Trump advisor Peter Navarro) knew that tariffs would cause inflation, and to try to keep it under control, the Fed would possibly raise interest rates.
As of August, there was no change to the Prime Rate, despite Trump’s attempts to pressure Jerome Powell to lower it. First, by pretending not to have named him Chair of the Federal Reserve, and then unsuccessfully trying to make him look the fool when together on July 24.
Donald Trump: So we’re taking a look, and it looks like it's about 3.1 billion [Jerome Powell shakes his head]. It went up a little bit or a lot. Uh so, the 2.7 is now 3.1.
Jerome Powell: I'm not aware of that, Mr. President.
Trump: Yeah, it just came out [removes a folded piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket].
Powell: Yeah, I haven't heard that from anybody at the Fed.
Trump: Yeah, it just came out.
Senator Tim Scott: [Unintelligible] about 3.1 as well. 3.1, 3.2.
Powell: [Putting on reading glasses] This came from us?
Trump: Yes. I don't know who does that.
Powell: You're including the Martin renovation. You just added our entire capital. Yeah, you just had you just added in a third building is what that is. That's a third building.
Trump: I know, but it’s, it's a building that's being built.
Powell: No, it's been, it was built five years ago. We finished Martin five years ago.
Trump: It's part of the overall work.
Powell: It's not new.
Trump: So, uh, so we're going to take a look.
I cannot deduce whether Trump understood the economic drag that his tariff policies were going to provoke and did so to intentionally bring the world’s wealthiest nation into default and practical bankruptcy (remember, a strong dollar meant the world would keep buying U.S. debt; a weak dollar means calling in those debts), or if he actually thought a national sales tax on imported goods would stimulate the economy, and it’s just another in his lifelong series of wrong choices.
The transition to corporate transnationalism that we are undergoing is producing some remarkable new societal trends at the national level. Rising fascism was to be anticipated, but with the decline in the general quality of life among the American labor elite and former middle class we are also seeing both more young adults remaining in their parental residences AND more elder adults living alone. In post-COVID America, over 30% of divorce filings are for marriages where both partners are over age 50.
Financial difficulties and divorce are correlatives. Pay close attention to people over 65 who are working. The way Social Security was designed, all of these people are supposed to have an income that will provide them with basic needs. Ask them if it actually does. This has become “retirement” for a growing number of Americans, and the percentage of those who will have to continue working for money for as long as they are physically capable will continue to grow.
Of course there will be a segment of the population that can step away from laboring and live on a pension or returns from tax-deferred investments, but that will move rapidly from a wedge to a sliver. Certainly, the trajectory promised those born in the late 1960s & 1970s will not pan out for them, while they are in their late 60s & 70s. And aside from a direct redistribution of wealth, we are coming to the natural progression of neoliberal policies first enacted before we were schoolchildren: All that value we produced went upward and none of it came back down; not even a trickle.
Boomer retirement is turning out to be a growing lie, and Gen X will work until the day they die, because the minimum wage failed to keep pace with productivity.
Thus the wages that were paid into Social Security were suppressed, relative to economic growth over their lifetime.
The old Cons wanted to privatize Social Security. They were thwarted by generations that had lived the failure of capitalism—the Great Depression, and who had demanded “security” as a condition for not seizing and socializing the means of production in the 1930’s. In democracy, some die twice—the first time when their generation no longer is large enough to exert political influence.
Boomers rely on Social Security, so they will be reluctant to see dramatic changes, but their significance as a voting bloc is waning, and the generation that is next in line to receive Social Security is much smaller than the Millennials.
This is part of what I meant when I said Generation X would always be labeled “young,” until the time we suddenly become “old.” This transition is happening right now.
Social Security will be privatized, but if we play it the right way, this can just be the seizure of the means of production that was forestalled by the invention of Social Security. When workers are forced to become owners, the class struggle becomes a matter of proportions. Privatizers need to watch out for what they wish for.