Regardless of what one thinks or not about COVID, it is a direct fact that COVID has set or been used to set in motion serious economic trends that will cause long-term change, mostly for the worse, in the country and for the people. This is for the same reasons that I have said before, which is a toxic cycle of debt, decline, and financialization that can destroy any society because when there is not enough work or work that one does not need done, people do not get paid, they can’t pay their bills, and that affects the whole economic supply chain.
Right now a lot of people can’t pay their basic bills because they have no job or limited incomes because of the pandemic. Some are living on borrowed money. In any case, a lot of people can’t pay their house mortgages or monthly rent and, as Business Insider reports, millions are facing eviction when federal government eviction bans expire.
Millions of Americans expect to face eviction by the end of this year, adding to the suffering inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic raging across the U.S.
About 5.8 million adults say they are somewhat to very likely to face eviction or foreclosure in the next two months, according to a survey completed Nov. 9 by the U.S. Census Bureau. That accounts for a third of the 17.8 million adults in households that are behind on rent or mortgage payments.
The CARES Act, signed into law last March, allows homeowners to pause mortgage payments for up to a year if they experience hardship as a result of the pandemic. Borrowers who signed up at the start of the program could face foreclosure by March.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s nationwide temporary suspension on evictions — aimed at stemming the spread of coronavirus — is slated to end Dec. 31. The timing is far from ideal given millions of people are also set to lose their unemployment benefits at year-end without an extension from Congress.
Roughly half of households not current on their rent or mortgage payments in Arkansas, Florida and Nevada think there’s a “strong chance” of eviction by early January. This equates to more than 750,000 homes where an eviction is the biggest worry, according to the survey.
By metro area, the threat of eviction is most pressing in New York City, Houston and Atlanta. (source)
Being homeless anywhere is terrible, especially in the US. You need money to “play” in society, and if you don’t have it, you are locked out of access to many things. However, if you are poor or do not have a home, it is hard to get a job, which means it is hard to get money. It is a vicious cycle that is very hard to break out of. This speaks nothing at all to the psychological effects, which are devastating and can completely destroy a man, complicating the above problems many times over due to the shock of being forced from “normalcy” into misery.
Hopefully, this will not happen to millions. But how then to get them a job? This will not happen because of the debt and economy issues as I have noted many times. The government can print money, but that further devalues the currency and does not solve the fundamental issues of economic decline, which is related to the debt.
Business Insider does not say this, but as I have noted, and I must continue to note because this is going to be a major trend that defines the escalation and radicalization of the 2020s, is that there are only really three options:
-Print money in mass for people and push the value of the currency down more
-Let millions be evicted from their homes, causing political instability
-Let them stay, but as a result jeopardize the property owners’ mortgages and bill payments, and thus put them in jeopardy and cause political instability
There is NO good way to solve this problem, and it is not for a lack of desire, but that the tools to solve it in an orderly way passed decades ago in the name of political expediency. Now, there are only painful ways out.
This, however, works well for the Republicans, because while Trump may scream and cry as he is forced to leave the White House, Biden coming in now becomes, willing or not, the new source of all the national problems, and it could not come at a worse time with these economic problems.
Remember the lesson of Herbert Hoover. He did not cause the Great Depression, but he was blamed for it. With no real way to solve the current problems, the historical trends suggest that Biden is at a great risk of being “Hoovered” and with him the entire Democrat party, thus giving the Republicans a chance to rebuild themselves, repair their image, and emerge as a new ‘force’ with a fresh face onto the political scene.
As I have noted before, Trump may have lost, but the Republicans won, and while Biden won, it was the Democrat party who lost in the long term. However, while both political parties play political games, the real loser is the citizen, who in an attempt to be a “good” or “normal” American allowed himself to be placed into a vulnerable position that is being exploited by factions vying for power while he is still trying to figure out how to pay his bills and keep his family together as his hopes dwindle all the more, drowned out by the bickering of politicians who fundamentally care about nothing other than which restaurant their next $300 a plate steak dinner will be at with their financial backers coming disproportionately from the urban and metro areas of New York and Los Angeles.