confessions

I’m not even American but I literally can’t sleep for the anxiety. If the U.S. economy crashes, so will ours, and my life savings will disappear and I have no time left to rebuild them. 

Obviously I’m not the only one worried about such things, and many MANY people will fare far worse. I just needed to get it off my chest. It’s not Thanksgiving here (we already had ours), but I guess it would be a good time to count my blessings. Maybe it will help me sleep.

Software engineer, creative coder, aspiring generative artist, fridgebuzz.tez/.eth

It is scary, yes. 

The US and the dollar are in a tenuous place.

If Cheeto does what he said he will and puts 20% tariffs on all imports, that will cause an incredible increase in the price of nearly everything here since even things that are made in the USA use imported materials. That will crash the economy as the middle and lower classes can't afford basic necessities.

If he also takes over the Fed like he said he wants to do and starts messing with the interest rates for his own (short term) benefit, he will wreck the stock market, treasury bonds that fund the government and banking system. The dollar will lose viability. It will be bad not just for the US but the world. And that's on top of the tariff fiasco.

I know he is surrounding himself with only yes-men, but I hope that someone pushes back on these things. It's terrifying to let someone like him, a multi-bankruptcied, failed business owner and fraud convict, pull the strings on the world economy.

GenX girl who learned the hard way 🔹 lifelong artist 🔹 software engineer 🔹 curator of conversations 🔹 made /blend-o-rama 🔹 thinks you're cool

Then there’s also the plan to put approximately 2 million federal employees out of work. High unemployment sucks for the economy as well because people don’t buy things when they have no income! It’s just insane, I can’t imagine how scary it must be to actually live there and be at that monster’s mercy. It’s bad enough watching it from a few miles away. Our economy is sooo tightly tied to the U.S. that it would be a catastrophe here as well. (We should have diversified our economy long ago, but politics.)

I'm in a weird place with all this.

This is what I've been afraid of for 9 years... COVID basically kept him from having the immediate second term that would have let things continue from his first term and end up with all this before now. And having such high hopes that we could avoid it with 4 years of a Dem in the White House and maybe, toward the end, an actual woman winning the presidency... All that misplaced hope was keeping me from just settling in to the fact that it's NOT avoidable. Now that the probability collapse has happened to the downside, at least I can just move on from hope and anxiety of the future and focus on survival instead.

I'm actually in less despair/depression than I was this time of year in 2016.

Still mad as hell, though.

Because, dammit, I'm not going to let that effer and his horrible cohort ruin the rest of my life or the life of the people I love. It's time to give up on anyone saving us (especially the political system or government) and figure out how to save ourselves.

Fuuuuck. I’m never going to sleep again. 😔

Yeah, there's that, plus the whole deporting of 20 million immigrants who are doing all the jobs that Americans won't do and that frankly our economy (and food supply) can't do without.

The cost of that kind of deportation alone will be a huge problem for the deficit as will the loss of the money they provide to Social Security and other entitlements that they will never be able to claim and so has been a prop to support those. 

But taking those people out of the jobs they do will cause all kinds of issues with supply chains and cripple the service industries. 

Not to mention the humanitarian crisis it's going to create.