Why are Americans so unhappy despite elite gaslighting that it’s the best economy ever?

I think the main reason is that the rents are too damn high.

And by rents I don’t simply mean the costs of a mortgage or fees for an apartment although that’s a huge problem. We have a high-cost economy, with financialization, corporate debt, personal debt, and privatized medical care, privatized education, where life is now a struggle because it’s no longer affordable for most Americans.

All of these developments affect the basic situation, in which reliable careers are scarce, college requires the burden of debt, health coverage is more expensive and less reliable, and housing is unaffordable. The “American Dream” of a good job, decent health care, homeownership, college education without crippling debt, and a better life for the next generation was once within reach of most Americans. Now, it’s far harder to attain.

Starting a small business is hugely problematic because rents, insurance, fees, utilities and regulatory compliance are all unaffordable, And so downtowns and once vibrant retail streets are half-empty or abandoned. All the little cafes, services, second-hand stores are all gone because these are inherently low-margin businesses that can’t afford rent in the thousands per month.

John Michael Greer calls our situation “lenocracy”, or a a government of pimps. “We live in an economy where nearly all exchanges are subject not just to the exactions of a single pimp but to whole regiments of pimps, each of whom has to be paid in order for the exchange to take place.  Furthermore, this orgy of pimping is sponsored, controlled, and mandated by government at all levels and by the holders of political and economic power more generally.  Thus, lenocracy.”

And heterodox economist Michael Hudson characterizes the “rents” as tollbooths. Where decades of financialized neoliberalism advocating the privatization of infrastructure such as transportation, healthcare and education, have placed tollbooths that hinder economic activity, and create a high-cost economy that makes it increasingly difficult to operate a small business, gain an education or raise a family.

Because of the curtailment of competition, our present high-cost economy is advantageous to the large, powerful, politically connected corporations that I’m sure you’re familiar with. If you’ve paid any attention at all you have noticed that there are one or two dominant corporations that sit astride every sector of the economy. Wal-mart, Dollar General, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Moreover, when you have a monopolies in certain areas it has enormous economic and political ramifications. These mammoth corporations also have gained the ability to extract political influence because of their positions of economic monopoly.

All of what I’m discussing is basic political/economy, with its examination of power, but we don’t do that sort of shit anymore and it’s way more politically correct to blame white-rural-rage than the oligarchs and their professional/managerial/class (PMC) apparatchiks that have made out like bandits due to this state of affairs.

Unfortunately, this is not something you can cure by radical measures such as re-nationalization, because the technical and managerial skills now lost would take a generation to reconstitute, even if that were possible. The political and strategic consequences, if this judgement is correct, are obviously very profound. Truly, the marketization and financialization of the western economy since the 1980s looks more and more like a form of economic suicide.

Just the other day, in an unintentional bit of comedy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was in China hectoring them on manufacturing too much and outcompeting the US. “When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is called into question.”

About that outcompeting thing. Yellen and the rest of our feral elite were the ones who outsourced our manufacturing to China while advocating imperialist wars to “spread democracy”. What should have every American outraged is that the US has spent $15 trillion dollars on war since 9/11 while the Chinese invested in modern infrastructure and the betterment of their citizens.

Meanwhile, as both political parties battle to cheerlead the loudest for Israel’s Gaza genocide, nobody’s talking about the need for structural change. Neither dares admit the basic, long-term declining empire and the key problems accumulated by four decades of financial neoliberalism that make the rents too high.