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Feb. 8th, 2020 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: poverty, venting]
You know what's terrifyingly bizarre?
People saying that the economy is too good to be true and we're due for a crash any time now.
Like, I look around me and all I see is household after household of people struggling to survive, after a decade or more of near-continuous financial decline. People prepping fast-food ingredients with one hand and refreshing freelance-delivery apps with the other, hoping to find a "shift"† that someone else had to abandon; people waking up in the middle of the night to check for abandoned shifts because there's less competition for them then. I had a net loss of seven grand last year and I'm the *least* homeless person I know. If this is what a *good* economy looks like, WTF does a *bad* economy look like??
...no, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Or at least, I don't want to find out the hard way.
---
(Oh, sure, I suppose the three hundred bucks I scraped together for a retirement account last year are up 10%. Thirty bucks of money I'm legally discouraged from touching before the age of 71, yip-de-fucking-doo.)
---
†Which do *not*, I would like to be clear, pay by the hour. Some delivery companies restrict what times you're allowed to be open to accepting gigs: this is nice when you get in, in that the driver market is not oversaturated and so you're unlikely to end up spending $25 on car operating costs†† for $20 of revenue, but you do have to get in first. And if--as often happens--they don't assign you enough at the start of the week...
††The 2019 repair costs on my dad's car were only about $700 less than its purchase price. We're almost to Car of Theseus status: we'd be there already if we'd actually bought the $800 replacement air-conditioner instead of going without and rolling the windows down in the summer.
You know what's terrifyingly bizarre?
People saying that the economy is too good to be true and we're due for a crash any time now.
Like, I look around me and all I see is household after household of people struggling to survive, after a decade or more of near-continuous financial decline. People prepping fast-food ingredients with one hand and refreshing freelance-delivery apps with the other, hoping to find a "shift"† that someone else had to abandon; people waking up in the middle of the night to check for abandoned shifts because there's less competition for them then. I had a net loss of seven grand last year and I'm the *least* homeless person I know. If this is what a *good* economy looks like, WTF does a *bad* economy look like??
...no, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Or at least, I don't want to find out the hard way.
---
(Oh, sure, I suppose the three hundred bucks I scraped together for a retirement account last year are up 10%. Thirty bucks of money I'm legally discouraged from touching before the age of 71, yip-de-fucking-doo.)
---
†Which do *not*, I would like to be clear, pay by the hour. Some delivery companies restrict what times you're allowed to be open to accepting gigs: this is nice when you get in, in that the driver market is not oversaturated and so you're unlikely to end up spending $25 on car operating costs†† for $20 of revenue, but you do have to get in first. And if--as often happens--they don't assign you enough at the start of the week...
††The 2019 repair costs on my dad's car were only about $700 less than its purchase price. We're almost to Car of Theseus status: we'd be there already if we'd actually bought the $800 replacement air-conditioner instead of going without and rolling the windows down in the summer.
