Happy Holidays to everyone making a Million or more in salary. You have the money to buy whatever your heart desires. For the rest of us? Well, let’s just say that many people (especially those losing their unemployment benefits) are in the market — to sell:
With three young children, Kevin Huffer is desperate to find a way to support his family now that he no longer gets his $430 weekly unemployment check.
The former car salesman and his wife, Heather, have sold his treasured coin collection, their wedding rings and a sterling silver hair brush set that was her great grandmother’s. That’s what helped save them during his two-plus years of unemployment.
He’s applied for jobs ranging from working construction to serving as a WalMart greeter, but he hasn’t received so much as a call back.
But hey, it’s Christmas time. The season when everyone has to buy stuff right? Well, yes and no. See this story about how pawn shops in New Hampshire are acquiring more stuff, and selling less of it even during the Holidaze:
Jason Kimball, owner of Plaistow Trading, said his sales, too, go up about a third during the Christmas season. But he’s also seeing a lot of people coming in to sell.
“Mostly, people sell jewelry,” Kimball said. “It’s the easiest thing to do a loan on and it doesn’t take up much room. But we have a little bit of everything. You never know what’s going to come in.” […]
“When the economy goes up, pawnshops do well and when the economy isn’t good, pawnshops don’t do well,” Nolan said. “I used to do $40,000 of business in December in the late 1990s. Now, I’m lucky if I do $4,000. You have to sell the merchandise you end up with and if sales are off, your business is off.”
Right now, Nolan said, everyone wants to sell everything and not buy anything.
Giaimo agreed. In the past few years, he said, more people have come in to sell their old jewelry for cash.
Of course, not everyone uses the local pawnshop to get rid of their no longer quite so necessary stuff. Like wedding rings, for example:
There are thousands of ads on Craigslist for things like used appliances, furniture, and cars from people who need a little quick cash to get by, with the seller frequently revealing a glimpse of the problems necessitating the sale. For upfront desperation, few ads are more poignant than the ones for wedding or engagement rings from people in financial straits. When contacted by HuffPost, sellers typically said they posted their ads in an effort to take care of their children.
“It is a big sacrifice but what else am I suppose to do at this point?” emailed one woman whose ad said she was “beyond sad that I have to sell this but bills need to be paid somehow.” The woman was not interested in sharing her name.
“It is really the only thing I have that is worth anything and of course I do not want to sell it but tough times call for tough decisions,” she wrote. “My son is who I need to look out for and when you put it in perspective it is only a material item and although I still have emotional ties with it it really comes down to what is more important. We are losing our home and where are we suppose[d] to go? This ring is hopefully a little lifeline to get into a place so we can have a roof over our heads. This is why I am trying to sell my ring on craigslist and yes it breaks my heart but hearts mend right?”
Driving back from Pittsburgh the other day I heard an ad on the radio for Buffalo News which referred to their classified ads as “Cashified” ads. I wonder what genius thought that one up. Of course, its been a while since I’ve heard a radio ad for classified ads at all. I must admit it was very cheery ad, though it did emphasize how much money you can make selling your “unwanted” possessions with a “cashified ad” far more than it focused on what you can buy.
Of course, the big boys are selling stuff too, just not at a discount, as commodity prices for wheat and oil demonstrate:
Wheat jumped 7.2 percent Wednesday while gasoline rose 5 percent. Oil, corn and many industrial metals also posted hefty gains.
No wonder the Consumer Price Index excludes food and energy prices when it calculates core inflation. The price of those necessities might be important to you, but it makes the government and the federal Reserve look bad. Besides since most adjustments to inflation for social security, etc. are tied to the CPI index, you can see who really matters in America. Hint–it probably isn’t you if you’re on a fixed income or if your wages have essentially stagnant for the past ten years.
If you are a hedge fund manager on the other hand …
Republicans are adamantly opposed to efforts to strike down one of the most outrageous provisions of our disastrously unfair tax code – a loophole that is so unfair it has been criticized even by some of the tycoons who have benefited from it. Under it, “carried interest” compensation, income received by private equity fund managers, gets special treatment which basically provides that the earnings of these extremely wealthy individuals is taxed at 15 percent rather than the top marginal rate of 35 percent.
According to data published in March of this year, the top 25 hedge fund managers took home an average of $1 billion in 2009 – that’s not a typo – one billion dollars in one year. And yet, they pay taxes at a rate that’s less than half of the rate for top income earners. The GOP wants to give them a tax cut.
I wonder when the great unwashed American masses will realize that the tipping point in the class war between the rich and the rest of us has already passed, and the rich won? Will that realization come when there is nothing they have left to sell on eBay that anyone wants to buy? Will it come when their food prices and energy prices and health insurance prices and tuition prices, etc. continue to rise while their incomes decline, or in the case of the long term unemployed simply disappear?
Or will we have to wait for the number of homeless people to rise so high that tent cities full of these expendable people who were chewed up and spit out by the “Great Recession” dominate our urban landscapes?
From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation.
Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they’ve experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report’s release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening. […]
The phenomenon of encampments has caught advocacy groups somewhat by surprise, largely because of how quickly they have sprung up. […]
The relatively tony city of Santa Barbara has given over a parking lot to people who sleep in cars and vans.
The city of Fresno, Calif., is trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood.
The last time I saw shelters made out of scrap wood was back in 1985 on a trip to Jamaica. Is that where we are headed? Is that what our politicians who will do anything, apparently, to make their lobbyist friends and corporate contributors happy, really want? Are they that deep in denial about what a decade of excess, lax federal legislation of the financial sector, costly and unnecessary wars and tax cuts that primarily benefited the rich has accomplished or do they, in the recesses of their moldy corrupt hearts, simply not give a damn?
Or will the Fall of the House of Bank of America (and a likely bailout by the Fed or Congress) finally be the the “event” that triggers an outpouring of outrage at the policies that have defended the wealth of the rich while chipping steadily away at the income and net worth of the middle and lower classes in America? Somehow I doubt it, especially when one considers the manner in which news is slanted to the right in this country (and no, I don’t mean merely Fox News). A country where defending social security and medicare and health care reform and all the other parts of our threadbare safety net are considered “hard left” positions that only a socialist or Marxist could support.
I watch, aghast at what is going on in my country today. I fear for my children, one a Dean’s list senior in college with no viable job prospects, and the other an equally bright and intelligent sophomore in High School whose dreams for college may depend upon her obtaining a tuition scholarship as her older brother did four years ago?
I watch as banks fraudulently foreclose on people’s home and our government takes no action. I watch as people like me struggle to keep their 150,000 mile junk heaps cars still running because we can’t afford to purchase a used one, much less a new vehicle. I watch as storefronts across America close their doors and go out of business. I watch as investment bankers at Goldman Sachs and others celebrate the highest bonuses in their history while good, hard working people cannot find work.
These are hard times for most of us. What I want to know is when those hard times get harder (and they will) who will step up to fight the battles to restore America; not Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck’s America, filled with their lies and bigotry and hatred wrapped in the flag, but the America I knew once upon a time, when a thriving middle class drove the economic engine of the most advanced country in the world. Right now, I don’t see that leader stepping out willing to take on the Money Power in this country.
And that my friends is what most discourages me about the future of our country.
