(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Is It Good News Or Bad News? It Depends On How You Look At It. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-08

My first conversation with my son this morning went like this: “I need to write a diary for Daily Kos. I don’t have any ideas.” He said, “write some good news”. As I walked away, I said, “I don’t have any good news.” He said, “I can’t hear you”, and because I knew he’d want to argue (he basically disagrees with me on everything just to start a fight) so I just said “never mind”.

If you get your news from mainstream media, you’d think everything here in the US is just great. Unemployment is down and the stock market is up. The housing market as well as the rest of the economy is recovering from the pandemic. But nobody’s asking me, or my neighbors, how things are going.

Well, I’ll tell ya: after over 2 years of extra monthly EBT benefits and real cash (not write-offs at tax time) to low income people with children, the powers that be decided that the pandemic was over (it’s not), so those people don’t really need that extra help (they still do), and they were spending/trading that extra income on drugs anyway (they weren’t). The really ironic part about the situation is that prices jumped sky-high and stayed there. So now all those people who temporarily weren’t quite so poor are suddenly very screwed.

I read or heard somewhere that back in the 70’s, food stamps and other programs almost made it so there weren’t any hungry or poor children in this country. We came seriously close to winning the war on poverty (remember the War On Poverty? Yeah, I’d forgotten about that too).

But along came Reagan, and Reaganomics, and somebody made up a story about Welfare Queens and poor people who bought Cadillacs and drugs with food stamps, and during the subsequent uproar it was decided to drastically reduce everyone’s benefits. We can’t be having people getting stuff they don’t desperately need, thank you very much. And ever since then, the stories about welfare queens and Cadillacs, or stories just like these, have been pulled out every election year so we can be reminded to vote for those candidates who’ll save your tax dollars from the horrible poors and give it to the deserving rich. They’ll save your dollars so well that no one will ever see those dollars again. They’ve embellished the stories to include Social Security benefits that supposedly suck even more dollars from the hands of the wealthy.

So the news from the “other side” is that not many of us are really doing that well. Remember all those jobs that made the unemployment numbers go down? A lot of them are minimum wage or damn close to it. People with 2 jobs can’t afford to rent an apartment, much less buy a whole house; it was getting hard to do either before the pandemic, now it’s close to impossible. Adult children can’t move out and start their adult lives (without a lot of roommates). I know three of my son’s friends who work, but they’re homeless, living in their vehicles or couch surfing.

I don’t have any answers; I’m scraping along with the rest, getting by with a little help from my friends. I guess we’ll have to hang on to the little things that are going right, and pretend the light at the end of the tunnel is a little closer today than it was yesterday. The good news is my dog is now spayed and the car drives straight.

If you like my work you can support me at Paypal dot com, Pamela Becker, wingednag at gmail dot com

You can support our art at: ko-fi.com/pambecker84288

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/8/2186027/-Is-It-Good-News-Or-Bad-News-It-Depends-On-How-You-Look-At-It

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/