Living on Meds, Vitamin C and Ibogaine: American Precarity

Favoring capital over wage earners is the long-established policy of both political parties.

Cribbing a line from a Grateful Dead song ("ain't it a shame") seems appropriate when discussing the prospects of America's burgeoning Precariat Class who are increasingly depending on tips, side hustles, credit cards and buy now, pay later schemes to survive in a stupidly high-cost economy where all the media-hyped "GDP growth" benefits the few at the top, a fact well-documented here courtesy of FRED-Federal Reserve charts.

Living on Meds, Vitamin C and Ibogaine is not a high quality of life, and the only thing that has any real meaning is the quality of life of the majority of the citizenry, particularly the bottom 60% who own the fewest income-producing assets (i.e. capital).

If the quality of life of the majority is tanking, all the glowing economic statistics in the world are nothing but the self-serving bleating of financial toadies, apparatchiks and sycophants who are part of the problem, not the solution, as all the statistics they tout are misdirections.

My focus on the quality of life of America's Precariats is rooted in my own experiences as a Precariat. Construction is notoriously boom and bust, and when work dries up, precarity is the order of the day. In the brutal 1973-74 recession, work dried up and I emptied my boyhood piggy bank to buy a few gallons of gas.

In the brutal recession of 1980-82, I was down to around $100 cash, which in today's money is equivalent to about $25.

Small business owners face a particularly intense level of precarity due to their responsibilities for employees and high fixed costs. When work finally picked up in 1983, cash flow didn't, as banks only release construction loan payments after the work has been done, so my partner and I had to take cash advances on our own credit cards to make payroll for our crews. We couldn't afford to pay ourselves so we lived on fumes until the cash flow increased--often a couple of months.

This is common in the world of small businesses: after paying your crew, there's nothing left for you.

The reality is even outwardly successful small businesses are going broke and the owners are burning out. Expenses are increasing in leaps and bounds, but there's only so much you can charge customers. So small business owners sacrifice themselves to try to make it work--something that is increasingly impossible.

'Doesn't make financial sense': Michelin-starred SF restaurant calls it quits. "Even with the busiest the restaurant's ever been, it just doesn't make financial sense," Stowaway said. "We've done a lot of great things and we're proud, but the financial instability starts to affect everyone, and you have to make big changes."

Free-lance writing has always been poorly paid, and being paid $150 or $250 for an article was typical in the go-go 1990s. I was so far below "poverty level" (generally considered 80% of median income in one's region) in the high-cost, high-income San Francisco Bay Area that to me a "poverty level" income was like a king's ransom.

We hear that high-paying jobs are stressful. Yes, they are, but precarity is stressful without the reward of ample compensation. Most people working for a living are stressed out, and so anti-anxiety / anti-depression meds, pain-killers, etc., are part of the self-medication menu, along with supplements (Vitamin C, etc.). But no med or supplement can fix what's actually broken--our economy and society.

Ibogaine makes the list because it's being studied as a treatment for PTSD / traumatic experiences, addiction and severe depression. These have a high correlation with precarity, for those with these conditions have a difficult time escaping precarity, and precarity is itself a low-level trauma that few economic cheerleaders acknowledge.

Ibogaine Inspires New Treatments for Addiction and Depression: Targeted Molecules Are More Powerful Than SSRI Antidepressants and Avoid Dangerous Side Effects.

What to Know About Ibogaine: Some researchers hope the drug, still illegal in the United States, may be considered as a treatment for addiction, PTSD and brain injuries.

Beneath the endlessly hyped "growth" of the economy, precarity and immiseration are the order of the day for the bottom 60% as wages' share of the national income has continued its 50-year decline.



Where did the trillions of dollars of "growth" go? To those who own capital, not wage earners. That's the only possible outcome of the system in its current configuration. The Winners and Losers in 21st Century America.



The reality of the American economy is people earning $22/hour and $24/hour are living in their cars/vans because rents are unaffordable. In a Snow Paradise, They Live in This Parking Lot: People experiencing homelessness can sleep in their cars in this wealthy ski town in Colorado, but only if they have a job.

So much for trickle-down: the Federal Reserve gooses M3 money supply, and guess who gets the "free money": $1 Trillion of Wealth Was Created for the 19 Richest U.S. Households Last Year The richest of the rich in America control record slice of nation's wealth. (WSJ.com)



Here are the facts: the bottom 50% own a wafer-thin $4 trillion (2.5%) of the nation's $160 trillion in household net worth. The top 10% own $107 trillion and the top 1% own $49.4 trillion--more than ten times the net worth of half the households in America.



The bottom 50%'s share of income-producing assets is signal noise. The real money is made not by owning a depreciating vehicle or a family home, it's made by owning income-producing assets such as stocks, bonds, rental housing, etc., and 90% of income-producing assets are owned by the top 10%.

Since the bottom 60% earn such a modest share of the nation's income, they pay only a sliver of the total federal income tax. So cutting taxes doesn't boost the bottom 60% at all; it simply diverts more of the national income to the 10% who collect the lion's share of both income and capital gains.

Favoring capital over wage earners is the long-established policy of both political parties. This study found that $80 trillion in capital gains has been sheltered from taxation by policies that reward the already-rich. The distribution of capital gains in the United States.

The taboo that can't be acknowledged lest the status quo collapse is that the only way to reduce the precarity of the bottom 60% is to restore the balance between labor and capital by shifting the gains of the economy to wage earners at the expense of the owners of capital.

If we can't manage this restoration, then the status quo will collapse anyway. When people can no longer make enough to pay for essentials, history is rather definitive on the outcome: the status quo is overthrown, and nobody will care whether the nobility is Democrat or Republican.

New podcasts:

Dismantling the Economic Divide (1 hour) (hosts Emerson and Amy)

Retirement Lifestyle Advocates w/ Charles Hugh Smith (host Dennis Tubergen)

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