My Blog Week: June 21 to June 27

A Word on the Week

The Granny Economy

It’s worth considering that this time last year—in fact, a few months ago this year—however hot-buttoned the GOP fringers were, they hadn’t thought of getting mad about masks. Whatever their minds were instructed to be troubled by, it was none of that. While we’re on Propaganda Watch, let’s take a minute to appreciate how quickly unbearable victimization can be ginned up in the receptive vehicle.

The most egregious storyline the Greed Puppets have been disseminating is of the Old, who ought to sacrifice themselves so the young can thrive in some future economy of abundance. As we’ve discussed, deciding that some lives have more value than others is evil…not in the sense that the word evil describes it, but that such thinking equates to evil. But such thinking slips in…

The Republican party, courting rural and southern voters as they must to win anything, discounts the Granny economy. Party leadership may not even comprehend its existence. They like to demonize socialism, yet the percentage of middle-class people in small towns and thinly populated counties that depends for its status on public sector jobs is substantial: this includes police, firefighters, emergency services, teachers, city service workers, county health and mental health employees, employees of subsidized or tax-relieved nonprofits and farms. People in the below $40,000 annual income range who have public sector jobs, have good health care and retirement benefits far more often than those at profit-oriented companies. Those golden pensions are diminishing, partly due to the conservatives’ vision of capitalism, partly to technology, demographics (decline in birth rate, shrinking rural populations and tax revenues, shrinking number of children to attend schools).

The Grannies’ ability to take public-sector largess and redistribute it to the needy within their families would have faded in any case. But no one should underestimate the value of old people to the present-day well-being of the younger and the young. Many of younger generations have driven pass-along cars all their lives, one more uncounted economic prop provided by the Grannies. Help with bills, the affordable room to live in, daycare services, often the elder-care services of grandparents in their sixties and seventies who themselves have a living parent…

The cosigning of loans, the down-payments on loans…

The first apartment furnishings and dishes…

[Read this: “Medicaid’s Dark Secret”, The Atlantic, October 2019, to learn something useful about bad policy that began with Bill Clinton, to be fair, but may be very material to the future of many Americans.]

Why it would add up to fresh conservative votes if the old people just died for the economy, isn’t clear. But that a foundation keeping struggling middle-classers from falling into insecurity may be knocked loose, and its loss have far-reaching effects, should prey a little on the office-seeker’s mind.