The Dow lost another 88 points today. There appears to be no bottom. As Jim Geraghty says, we have only 88 days left of Dow to lose at this rate. That puts the Dow at 0 on May 25, 2009.
This is one of the biggest harms of liberal policies. Barack Obama and his administration is taking pride in the fact that investors and traders and brokers are cowering in fear of his policies. He doesn’t mind that every law and budget he intends to pass will make it less and less profitable to stick your money in the market.
This hurts the rich, of course, since they lose untold fortunes of wealth. But the rich are the rich. Their money isn’t all tied up in the market. They diversify, they have other assets that are secure. If the market goes to 0, they can still live a decent life because they are going to have things that are valuable.
But the middle class and the lower class don’t have that luxury. Whatever money they save is a pittance compared to the vast fortunes the rich amass. They rely on appreciation in the market for their retirement accounts to fill up. If they don’t see regular growth, they will never have enough money to stop working. They can’t stick their assets in the cooler or diversify it between high-return high-risk and low-return low-risk.
To those who are retiring soon, this stock market crash is especially devastating. Their assets have halved in value, or more. That means they are missing more money than they put in originally. What are they going to do? They can’t be expected to work until they die, can they?
The stock market has been the great wealth creator in the 20th century. This is how people moved from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy class. This is how they got enough to survive and much more to spare. But thanks to liberal policies, that tool is no longer there.
Thank you, liberals, for crushing the retirement accounts of America’s middle and lower class. Thank you, liberals, for forcing our elderly to keep working despite the hard work and wise financial decisions they’ve made over the years.
