If you’re right about people looking at their retirement accounts in answering that question, then remember that more than half of American adults do not have retirement accounts. Two-thirds have less than $10K in their accounts.
The general employment situation isn’t all that great – as I noted previously, although unemployment is low, wages are stagnant. Underemployment is high. I’m not sure underemployed workers are happy workers. There is no doubt that some underemployed workers are happy. In my younger days, I knew a talented artist with an MFA who I thought should have been teaching. He was a park groundskeeper, and he was happy. His job with the County provided a regular income, benefits, and (most important) left him time to paint. He wasn’t dependent on his paintings hanging in galleries selling. His creative time wasn’t sucked up teaching kids how to paint. But I believe Gabe was very much the exception rather than the rule.
Unfortunately we’ve all be forced to watch Mr. Bannon over the last few years. Didn’t want to but there he was…right in our faces. And you know what…there’s not an original thing that comes out of his mouth. Rallying around Trump has been a GOP survival cry for months. I wonder if it ever occurred to him that it was Trump that caused the exodus he’s tritely trying to prevent? And lets not leave out the Bannon’s underlying motive. His, not the GOP’s survival and wish to return to relevancy. The man’s a dud.
I see a man who is trying to keep himself relevant. The world has changed and he is still staying on yesterday’s message. I doubt he gives a real rats about any given issue. He just wants to prove to everyone he is smarter than everyone else. It is a game to him.
I also see a man who one day I expect to see interviewed and the camera suddenly swings away and we hear a sploot as he dissolves into a mass of pus and lymph.
Edit: Or as I read backwards, what richardinjax said.
Bannon proves the notion that what’s inside a person’s soul is outwardly manifest; he looks like something from a zombie movie. He’s the undead. The guy looks as if he’s literally rotting away from the inside out. What a putrid load of excrement.
I have just retired. I am doing okay financially. But I don’t answer that question for just myself. I have neices, nephews, great neices and great nephews that are having serious problems getting started in the fields they studied.
The mortgage banker doing well, the nurse, they are okay. The teacher is working as a teacher’s aide, the rest of them keep getting downsized out of jobs. The new jobs in the same fields pay them less. They are all under 30, but they are having trouble getting a real foothold. One is kind of lazy, but the rest of them are not.
I have never just looked at myself only when deciding how to vote.
I suspect the majority of Americans will be looking at their wallets - and not liking what they see.
Wage growth has fallen behind inflation on average, and conditions are even worse if you are at the bottom of the pay scale because the national minimum wage has not gone up. The only minimum wage employees celebrating an increase in their wages right now are those living in Democratic areas.
And the visible signs of inflation - gasoline and grocery prices - are hard to miss.
Add to this the GOP constantly hyping just how awesome the economy is - and I think we’ll find an increasing number of disgruntled workers asking “What about me?”
This must be more of that supernatural political savvy that Bannon displayed when he and Trump threw a pile of criminal shit into a blender, slipped and fell backwards into the White House due to electoral malfunction.
I can see why Bannon would want to separate signals, like the from beyond -the -grave hate and vileness of goering,
from the noise of the rest of american saying he is a loser and repellent to them. But his russian supporters might want to rethink their investment, because even most of the republicans know the border wall is a waste of money and time.
“He argued that Trump would benefit from shutting down the government over funding for his border wall.”
Yes! By all means, Trump should do this! All he’ll do is remind people what a jackass he is because he promised his mouth-breathing base that Mexico was paying for it, and they haven’t forgotten!
I don’t think most people even have retirement accounts. A minority of Americans (approximately 38%) participate in a 401k, and a smaller percentage own stocks individually.
Everything you say is correct - on fixed incomes my wife and I are encountering continuous sticker shock on everything from medical care to groceries. We are very lucky to have planned fairly well, but we are certainly not immune to something like a repeat of 2008. It would really hurt us. That’s why watching Trump waddle around the economy like a toddler with a loaded gun gives me stomach pains. He and the majority of Republicans are dumb enough to think that defaulting on our debts might be a good way to go - I mean, it has worked for him all of his life, right?
That being said, people generally believe what can get through their mental filters without causing a short, and Trumpers one and all think the economy is vastly improved under Trump - and they felt that way right after the election before he even took office. We are still coasting on Obama’s economy - the only question now is what kind of a landing we are heading for.
Or put another way, Bannon’s “grift” from Britebart has run dry, and he is trying to get back in the graces of the right wing loons who support Trump with a message of “we will loose, better get Trump involved, and if you give me money I can make that happen.”
Steve Bannon has no idea whether this is true or not. Right before the Virginia governor’s election last year, Bannon confidently predicted that Gillespie would win because Gillespie had begun channeling Trump into his campaign. Whether Republicans would lose or not is not his point; he just thinks this is the message that is most likely to result in people giving money to him to keep spouting his hateful racist agenda.
