Here I was with the news that not just a Stimulus but some hazard pay was coming in, and already the money was burning a hole in my pocket. What to do with a couple extra grand?
There was the need of fluffing up the savings account, especially if I got Covid, which I won’t now on account of being a health care worker first in line for the vaccine, and I am interested in paying off some credit cards. I mean, who doesn’t want to pay off their credit cards? We are so accustomed to credit card debt that we just have to pay a whole bunch of nonsense interest or we won’t feel normal.
The idea of the funds was clearly an expectation of actually stimulating the economy, hence the term STIMULUS.
I agree.
I do give to homeless shelters and food banks. I have been very low and knew that just around the corner was the food bank, the women’s shelter, who knows what. I had my credit cards and was able to live, and had some generous souls who let me kinda sorta sponge, and we all knew it. I was working my butt off, perpetually sober, and doing the best I could. Why not reward America?
But I have a real suspicion about the economy.
It is partly a herd thing. When the stock market crashed in 2008 I said to myself, I should just ride it out, but I didn’t have the courage and sold stock, and lost.
Here we are with the Coronavirus Stimulus, and the think tanks have concluded that most people with jobs saved their stimulus funds, so very little of it stimulated the economy like it should have.
I don’t like it when the entire system puts people so low that they have to be snaked around the block of the food bank or living in their cars, and it really does come down to having some kind of a job, even eking out a living.
There are stages in going down, and it can be stopped at a certain stage and people can go back up. That is my horse sense of it.
So, yes, there are the contributions to the small local charities that really get the job done, but we also need to spend some of those funds on local business, like restaurants, shops, entertainment, just to heave a sigh of relief and feel normal when we have the normal amenities of civilization. I do not like all of those lovely bistros and bars dark and broken. I do not like the shops I once enjoyed with a ten-dollar luxury gone and never coming back. The small business people who support the locals with fine services that we can all afford. When the dust settles, I do not want to come back to a world of only Walmart.
I’ve got a grand here that says BOAT and an old hull worth saving, so here we are, down to West Marine for some batteries, Home Depot for some paint, whatever Fabrics for upholstery fabric. My underemployed nephew who was going to be in college this year is getting some of the funds for scraping and sanding. Some marine contractors and salvage firms will get some more. The marina itself has a regular payment coming out of our regular jobs that still exist.
We can’t just slip into a depression with fear making us dig in tighter than we need to and cause a lot of beautiful things to be gone.
Like the boats. They should not be gone.
