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Bootstraps All the Way Down
Losing Hope: Dark Days for America
Many Americans are rapidly losing hope. They are losing hope for the job market, for their finances, for their future and their children’s futures. They have lost hope in the United States government and its ability to lead the country. It will surely take tremendous, intentional efforts to restore this hope.
The bottom 50% of the population in particular, are suffering in myriad ways, stemming mostly from financial insecurity, and know this situation isn’t going to right itself — their individual efforts will simply not be enough. They can’t work themselves out of this without jobs.
The people look out and they don’t see any good jobs with decent pay or stability, let alone both. They see their neighbors struggling as well, and they have no real reason to think that jobs are just over the horizon.
It scarcely matters to the majority of them that we’re in a pandemic; many of them will not have jobs to go back to regardless, and they don’t expect their financial situation to be even as good as when they were receiving the additional government benefits. At least with the benefits, many of them finally had some room to breathe, taking in the equivalent of somewhere between $30–45k for a few brief weeks meant they could actually pay their bills without constantly…
