this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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Discount retailer says low-income households feel more ‘financially constrained’ than six months ago

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/SLMtR

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 months ago (6 children)

the depletion of savings built up during the pandemic

Built up savings? Is this a thing?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Don't you remember? They gave us all like $2500 or something one time. That's enough to live on for at least a decade for the poors.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I got "unemployed" during Covid and saw everyone bragging about how awesome it was that the federal government was providing extra money and it was like working a good job...

My state let me know they had run out of unemployment insurance several decades ago and I would get just the federal money, reduced down to the state amount, minus the state and federal tax from each check.

Yeah I got so fucked over it's still a shock that people say they legitimately came out better with more money.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

bragging about how awesome it was that the federal government was providing extra money and it was like working a good job…

Revolt hush money. I'm sure this was ran through a simulation at some prior time, "how can we pacify a domestic population that might reject what we're about to do to them?" Money, of course.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yup

Edit: well with big blue cities that pride themselves on how helpful they are despite being also bullshit panderong that don't even show up to vote in local elections.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

You should have seen my fucking face when I was on unemployment and I found out that I had to pay income tax on my unemployment checks. Like... what the fuck? Why didn't you just give me less money to begin with?!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

No and most didn't build up savings during the pandemic...we all went into debt or spent savings just to scrape by.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, the pandemic was definitely not a "savings time" for me or anyone I know...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Much like 2008, the pandemic never actually ended. When schools reopened, every classroom in the nation was full of children on their 4th, 5th, 6th infection in a month. Thousands of people still drop dead from it every month and the US is, to this day, still experiencing 30% more per capita deaths than pre-pandemic.

Long COVID is proven to cause permanent organ damage, including brain function. We won’t know what it does to child development until decades from now but it’s already proven to increase risk-taking and reduce higher level function in adults.

The accumulation of capital continues.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

This might be some confirmation bias, but it feels like everything has gotten a bit dumber since the pandemic and I wonder if covid effects on the brain are a part of it. Like I feel "normal" now, but I don't think this current "normal" is the same as what "normal" used to be for me. And for like 6 months after my first infection, it literally felt like my brain wasn't working as clearly as it normally did.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I did but that’s because I’d already been saving aggressively, had just lost my job, and the little entertainment budget I had left was no longer able to be used, then suddenly my unemployment benefits went up and I got stimulus money. It turned a guaranteed financial disaster into a little extra time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

No Jim... I believe that's bullshit.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

A lot of people used pandemic relief funds to invest, notably in real estate. As the market returns to reality, those people are finding they're massively overextended.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

A lot of people used pandemic relief funds to invest, notably in real estate.

$1400 to invest in real estate?!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

People making less than $35k a year were doing this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Disclosure: I'm Canadian, I didn't catch that this was a US story. In Canada a lot of people who received our equivalent of COVID relief used that money to invest, which made our housing crisis that much worse.