A Liberal Dose
Troy D. Smith
“Will You Be Living on
the Scraps?”
If there’s one thing I hate talking about, it’s economics.
First, because I don’t like math and numbers, and second, because I don’t like
discussing money (coming as I do from a family with practically no experience
with it). But as a historian, it has been my sad experience that you can’t talk
about history without addressing economics. Unless it’s one of my classes abut
indigenous culture, then there is no money discussion until the Europeans show
up, and then -like everywhere else -it becomes all about the cash.
Maybe you’re the same way. Maybe economics is like a made-up
language other people are speaking, that makes your head spin so you skip over
that part. This is most likely to be true if you are working class, because in
that world the only economics you know is how much your paycheck falls short of
paying all the bills, so you don’t want to think about it. To quote an old
Everclear song, “you have never been poor, you have never known the joy of a
welfare Christmas.” It becomes even more depressing when there are people all
around you saying that if you were really a good person God would bless you
with wealth, so that people who have been more fortunate carry around an open
sense of moral superiority over you.
There are some people who count on you feeling that way. They
tell you that you don’t have to worry about it- they’re going to fix
everything, just trust them. Oddly enough, they are usually people who already
have a lot of money -and by the time they’re finished helping you, they have even
more and you have even less. If you happen to notice that, and point it out,
they accuse you of being envious and trying to stir up class warfare. If you
say things should be done more fairly, they will probably accuse you of
socialism.
Let’s take a look at the efforts of Elon Musk, and his
assistant Donald Trump, to slash the federal budget. I’ve heard many Trump
supporters in White County say things like “I can’t believe these liberals are
whining so much! How can you be upset by somebody cutting waste?” Well, because
they’re not cutting waste. They are cutting all the things they are ideologically
opposed to, most of which revolve around fairness and/or providing necessary
services to the public. Any service designed to help people (unless they are
robber barons) is automatically evil, because in their worldview helping people
is stupid -it should be every man (always a man) for himself. What will be the
long-term (and maybe not a distant long-term) result of these actions? Well, the
immediate result is that they can give massive tax cuts to the super-wealthy
yet still be able to say they are trying to “balance the budget” (bear in mind
that Trump added more to the deficit than any other president in history in his
first four years). What about beyond that?
All these hundreds of thousands of jobs that are being lost
already have a huge downside, in that airplanes are running into each other in
the sky, no one is working on curing or containing diseases, parks are closing
down, veterans are losing access to healthcare, and so on. But let’s think in a
wider circle. Since those people are being fired “for cause” (with no actual
cause), they won’t be able to collect unemployment. So they’ll have NO money.
Unemployment numbers are going to shoot up. Unemployed people who have no money
-and I know this might sound crazy -DON’T SPEND MONEY. Their families won’t be
buying new clothes and other items, or going out to eat. Manufacturers and
restaurants will start losing money, and will close down or lay off part of
their workforce -and then THOSE people won’t be spending money. The economy
will bog down. Inflation will go up even more. This will all be greatly
exacerbated by Trump’s insane tariffs, which will have two results- the price
of goods will go up even more, and our trade partners will just start buying
their goods from some other country (which Canada has already started doing).
Farmers are going to be hit especially hard by all this.
What I have just described is how economics works. It’s how
we can understand the depressions and recessions of the past. When the people
at the top have too high a percentage of the overall wealth, the people in the
middle and at the bottom stop spending money and the whole operation grinds to
a halt. And it is coming, to all of us.
When it is all over, Trump, Musk, and a handful of their buddies will have
everything, and you will have nothing -and these would-be barons will expect
you to be their grateful peasants, and beg them for scraps.
Look around, folks. It’s already starting.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee
Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
