$141,974.35
That is the amount of real actual money that my father socked away in investment and savings instruments for our family. He went to school for quite a long time – became an industrial engineer with an MBA.
I know this is a tiny pittance to most people, in our family, it’s a LOT of money. In comparison, I have no assets, I only hold school debt. My net worth is a negative. You can imagine that $141,974.35 means something to me and to my mom.
My dad was also a first generation immigrant from Colombia, working, living, raising a family here in the USA as a full US citizen. Spoke better English than most Americans (as many professional class immigrants to this country tend to do).
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There was nothing virtual or inflated/deflated about the time he spent every day commuting and performing the hard work he was tasked with (from running a manufacturing company as the CEO to running the engineering logistics around decommissioning Trident Submarines when he was in the Navy Civil Service).
He was fit, he ran miles and miles, he used to be the goalie for Colombia’s national soccer team. He was assiduous about his health and his mind.
He saved and he invested, he also took out all sorts of life insurance.
In 1994, my mother had to finally admit what I knew and what the Navy finally told her in very gentle terms – my father could no longer work because he had progressed into functionally debilitating early-onset Alzheimers at the age of 56.
My father’s real, hard work, his daily sacrifice meant that when he had finished his long tortured death at the age of 61, my mother would have a nest egg of $141,974.35 and no debt burden at all from the massive costs of his extremely expensive but depressingly futile care.
My mother, who is a semi retired college instructor in Texas, she wrote an email to us kids yesterday to tell us that the amount of $141,974.35 now equals
$0.00.
This makes me angry, as you might imagine. The blame goes around for all (well, not us kids, we never got any benefit from the money and didn’t really count on it – none of us have illusions of inheritance or actual retirements – that $141,974.35 can only stretch so far for our young mother of 65, let alone to any of us three sisters).
No, my anger stems from a gut wrenching cognitive dissonance. On the microeconomics end of things, my mother now has NOTHING and the least of her worries is having to keep working to keep her health insurance. She has her ailing mother to care for too.
On the microeconomics level, food costs are hard – they are not fuzzy. Energy costs are hard, they are not fuzzy. Healthcare costs are hard, they are not fuzzy. The are all hard and they are all increasing in very hard ways.
But, when you get to the macroeconomics level, we get really fuzzy – $700 billion fuzzy.
You get banks that practically have indigestion from too much free State Bank money in their coffers who are REFUSING to play in the credit markets.
You get state banks that shrug their shoulders and say "Gosh darn it, them crazy banks. We will just have to give them even MORE money, so much MORE money that at some point they will feel like they have too MUCH money and then naturally they will start playing the credit/debit game".
RIGHT
Now the US Treasury and Chimpy’s goons are moving to nationalize our quietly failing banks – BOA must be one of them because they have absorbed quite a lot of the "margin of financial failure" from other companies.
Holy Jesus Christ – what sort of shit train is that? What about those of the rest of us who will have to close up the house to one room that has some heat so that the kids do not freeze in their beds, who will be eating scavenged food from dumpsters, who will be shooting themselves and their loved ones to go out "with honor".
Where is that fuzzy money for us?
Money is an illusion, a human construct that is a cruel joke for the starving, the fuel poor, the bankrupt middle class, and the lower income class that will simply fall through the bottom of the rusty bucket of the American Dream (tm – sic).
There is nothing fuzzy about the cold sweat of despair or hungry anger.
Lets see, whats fuzzy about this math:
$37,000,000 + $87,000,000 = $124,000,000 What AIG is getting from us tax payers through highway robbery.
$440,000 = AIG spa company outing
$0 = what is left of my mom’s $141,974.35 future.