With this devastating existential political threat of right-wing theocracy consuming all our attention, there is something else TERRIBLE that's happening that will substantially degrade life maybe forever, and we are too distracted to even notice.
Americans are really fucked, even ignoring the fascist theocracy that's descending on us.
It's the housing market.
Banks and investors have noticed how convenient and profitable the single family housing market is, so right now they're starting to buy massive blocks, sometimes entire subdivisions, of regular houses for investments.
Not only do they not have to pay the mortgage rates we do, they mostly don't have to borrow money at all, because they just use cash from their funds instead of buying securities or other investments.
What does this mean? Housing prices are going WAY up, to the point that almost no one is going to be able to afford to buy houses anymore, and everyone is going to have to pay step rent to live in houses.
Not to mention supply will become increasingly constrained as houses are taken off the market, so competition will become extreme and drive prices up even higher.
And that's if you're lucky, because quite often they don't even bother to rent the houses out, it's easier to just let them sit empty.
The silver lining may be that there will be more work for caretakers hired to maintain all these empty houses, but that's pretty cold comfort.
Already there a significant fraction of houses that are sitting empty while people live on the street.
It's going to get much worse.
If you already own a house, good for you. But if you're younger and expect to move for any reason in the future, good luck.
The corporate kleptocracy doesn't care if we live in a democracy or autocracy, because the government works for them no matter what.
Autocracies are typically not that sympathetic to the economic problems of ordinary people, so the odds that we can hope for any kind of government regulation to help us will steeply dive as the conservative fascist minority takes power.
The only speck of cheer we're gonna get is to watch the shock of Republican voters as they realize they've fucked themselves just as bad as they've fucked us.
They won't be enjoying liberals tears because of the massive dilution from their own.
Yes, WAF. Well and truly.