Saturday, October 31, 2020

Where Your Money Goes


Helium is one of the most popular elements in the whole universe but here on our home planet it's hard to come by. Most of it is buttoned up somewhere under the Great Plains. It was first isolated on Earth in 1895 by Sir William Ramsay, who was actually looking for argon. (Sir Ramsay was the Christopher Columbus of chemistry.) And what with its usefulness in party balloons, and fancy medical devices, and talking funny, and suicide, and blimps that don't blow up, and freezing people's heads, and the like, people have been busy liberating it for about a hundred years.

Problem with that is once you pull it out of the planet, it goes flying into space and you're not getting it back again. You're just not.

So it's like money. In fact it's so much like money, we've got a stash of it Fort Knoxed away in Amarillo, Texas. That helium reserve got underway in 1925 so that we'd have plenty of juice for airships and then later it became important as a coolant during the Cold War, in case you were wondering how we kept it Cold for so long. And it's so much like money that even though it was calculated we would run out of it right around now, the US Congress directed that our reserves be sold off to private parties as quickly as possible, in the hope maybe we can print some more.

Money, of course, is only as meaningful as we can all agree it is. We all have to agree, wink-wink, that our slips of paper, or whatever ethereal magic happens between our phones and our bank accounts, are worth something; that they represent something. For instance, work. You dig me a moat for my castle, I give you money in some nice portable form, so you don't have to be paid in melons and bags of barley. If money does represent work, it does not do so in a logical fashion. If it did, immigrants bent over in the bean fields would be rolling in champagne and caviar, whereas hedge fund managers would be clutching cardboard signs on freeway ramps. One of the problems with it is that the people what have the money write the rules. 'Twas always thus, but it's been a lot starker in the last forty years.

Kids! You might not believe this, but it's true. When I was your age, we could pay for college as we went, with summer jobs and part-time work. We could study philosophy and art history, and then we could tumble into some job somewhere that may or may not have anything to do with our education, but more with how close it was to where our boyfriends lived. We didn't necessarily make much money, but we could at least live comfortably with a roommate or two (in Boston) or have a complete one-bedroom furnished apartment (in Portland) with no first-and-last, no references, no job lined up, and nothing but a credit card to our name. And still have food and beer and go to the movies. Later, maybe, if we saved, we could buy an actual house. Nobody lived in their car or under a tarp on the median strip.

Then Ronald Reagan came around and decided to tap the work reserve. He told us our union brothers and sisters were holding us back, and that we could send our money uphill to the hedge fund managers and instead of everyone making a living wage and exchanging money with each other, we'd have a shot at the big time. There were a lot of taxation rates changed and legislation passed and all of it was real real good for the people who already had money, and our own work was worth less and less, because the wealthy decided to take more of the fruits of our labor for themselves, and they write the rules. Fifty years ago, we could make a living. Now, our money has been diverted to the billionaires, and no matter what they tell you, it's not coming back. It's flying into space.

If we were wise, we'd quit sending all our money into space. We'd treat billionaires like the moral failures they are. And everyone would get a balloon.
 
Vote. Vote like a person who knows how much is enough, and how much is too much.


24 comments:

  1. Glad to hear we have a helium reserve since, unlike with money, Congress can't just print more of it. (As far as i know, the only way humans can create helium is by detonating H-bombs.) Rather than helium being like money, I wish money was like helium, so that the billionaires themselves would fly into space and never come back. Totally worth it.

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    1. Oh! I just got such a grand visual of the bloated suckers floating into space like Macy's Parade balloons!

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    2. That visual just made this day worth living!

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  2. Reagan was a scourge on the working class/middle class. The "Great Communicator" convinced working people to give their money to the wealthy and they would turn it into real money before letting it trickle back down. We know what flows downhill and it ain't money.

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    1. The propaganda machine that the conservative think tanks ginned up has been wildly successful. "Ownership society!"

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  3. When I look back on the election of 2020, will I be able to say I did all I could to elect Biden? Yes. I supported the campaign, I persuaded others to join me, I put up a yard sign, glued a bumper sticker on my car, and I volunteered/got a job working at the early polling center for 3 days. (Turns out they actually pay people to do this.)

    Now for the next, oh, say, 5 days or so, we will learn what happens.

    How to stay sane for 5 days?

    Re-read old Murr posts. Decide to be optimistic. Dust. Vacuum. Rake. Tell my loved ones it's going to be OK. Double up on Happy Hours (if the excess alcohol doesn't make me too weepy and irritated).

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    1. May I say, thank you for your service? I'm laying in alcohol. Either way, I'm going to want it.

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    2. Our local political junkie / teacher / school administrator has been giving weekly poll analyses in Zoom classes. He has advised us to have on hand, come election day, bottles of champagne (if things go well) and bourbon (if they don't). He has a distinctly liberal following.

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    3. I included a bottle of Proseco in my stores.

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  4. Your (lack of) age is showing if you had a credit card when you came out of college, Murr.

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    1. I got out of college in 1974. I think it was another couple years before I got the credit card. They were New!

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    2. Were you married and your husband had an income? Women couldn't get credit cards on their own for a long time, and even then, the cards were on their husbands's accounts. I'm glad things are different now, at least until the Supremes start interfering.

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    3. I remember when I couldn't get a card, but I definitely had one by '76.

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  5. I would like to copy/post this whole on FB. May I, with copious credit and a link? Because I want some young friends to read it, and they are probably too cool to click through.

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  6. If only there was some way to reverse the process and get the money back to the workers that earned it.

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    1. This current state of affairs has been a long time coming--forty years? But a lot of things are going to have to happen in a hurry now. Odds are against us but I have hope.

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  7. Ah, good ol' Ronnie. When he was governor of California he renamed the California State Colleges as California State Universities, then boasted that while in office he had doubled the size of the State University system. Once a con man, always a con man. The very kindest thing I can say for those who voted for him is that many of them just weren't paying attention.

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    1. Oh and poor Jimmy Carter seemed so ineffectual, and Ronnie said it was morning in America. Everything's a con job.

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  8. That is the best explanation of reaganomics I have ever heard. Union truck driver here.

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  9. And the Republicans have the gall to ask Biden where he's going to get the money from to do his ideas. Hey, from the same place they did! Magic money!

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    1. It would be a good start if he could bump that billionaires' tax rate back up to Eisenhower levels.

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  10. You have such a way with Words to make an unsavory History Lesson bearable. Love this Post because it explains so much about why most Americans are so broke no matter how hard and smart they Work. The Billionaire Boys Club is quickly moving towards the Trillionaire Boys Club now that Bezos has found the next Cash Cow to profit from and receive Favor from everyone including the USPS, as if he needs any Breaks. My Hope is that Uncle Joe Taxes the shit out of the filthy Rich Individuals and Mega Corporations and gives back to the Working Man/Woman and Small Business Entrepreneurs, restores some Services for the Marginalized and provides decent Health Care for ALL. I know, I have lofty Visions...

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