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Same here; I know few people who aren’t in the same boat. The only ones better off are government workers (those that survivied the layoffs) - they are the only ones left with salaries that kept pace with the unreported inflation, enjoying benefits that disappeared for the American workers that pay them decades ago. Here in NJ the economy has collapsed because there just aren’t enough public school teachers, cops and such to keep open all of the restaurants and other places where Americans used to spend their discretionary dollars.

The northeast will be the last part of the country to recover (if it ever does).

I am watching my entire life’s work slowly melt before me.

My paycheck doesn’t go half as far as it did before this idiot was elected. My investments have a higher numerical value, but in an “inflated” world, the true value of such instruments is nearly impossible to calulate.

If the stock market crashes, and it will sometime soon, then all of that DJIA at 17K is meaningless.

The only real assets are guns and ammunition.

This is a recovery?

Of what? 1938 redux?

Most people do not realize it, or had never learned, that the “Great Depression” was, at its beginning, no worse than the recession of the early 1920’s. There was a severe downturn then, but in either a greater wisdom, or by inaction, most of the effects of that recession were over by 1924, about the time Coolidge assumed office. Coolidge was renown for his efforts to STAY uninvolved in the “business of business”, and consequently, the country was going through an unprecedented boom, as the nation was rapidly put on wheels, industrial growth expanded exponentially, and there seemed to be a genuine prosperity at hand, if you weren’t getting rich this week, why, just put your money in the stock market, or into bank stock on a new start-up bank in your local town, and just watch the money come rolling in.

But inexorable and inflexible rules of finance reared up, and what had been a bubble expanding away to infinity - burst. Banks large and small found themselves undercapitalized and overextended. The stock market, always a barometer of confidence (or lack of it), nosedived, apparently taking a lot of capital out of existence.

In come the “fixers”. First an attempt to raise revenue by imposing new and punitive levels of tariffs on imported goods, the scheme backfired in a most resounding way, setting up a chain reaction all over international trade and foreign bourses, and one after another, the great banking houses retrenched, some folding up completely.

But why the demand for greater revenues? Something called “Keynesian economics” a theory that government action could step in and “rescue” the commercial and businesses from themselves, by injecting great amounts of money into the economy, took over, and suddenly the governments everywhere NEEDED much greater revenue, to pay for these schemes to get people collecting a stipend of some kind, so the wheels of commerce could begin to roll again.

So what was a bad situation in 1932, was temporarily relieved by 1936, just in time for FDR to be re-elected. But then a much WORSE economic stall came. 1938 should always be remembered as the very worst of the Depression years, a really blue funk this nation did not recover from until the factories were turned over to all-out war production, and the excess number of young unemployed men were sent off to fight and die on the other side of the world.

We are in Great Depression II, and nobody will face up and call it what it is.

But like the Unsinkable Molly Brown, we ain’t done yet.