Virtual vs Real Estate (Inflation, Real-Estate, and Government)Gavin Newsom has been bragging about CA's $31B surplus this year but we know that the state has been struggling for a while now. A locked-down economy and people/jobs leaving the state will kind of do that. CA owes the Feds $21B in unemployment debt, btw.
www.sacbee.com
Looking at the budget closer, you'll see that they gave educational institutions a modest increase (not enough to off set the damage COVID regulations they made them follow, of course) while most essential services are actually getting massive cuts.
www.ebudget.ca.gov
That 66% cut in environmental protections is pretty much a slap to the face to environmentalists everywhere. (Maybe that had something to do with why Newsom "disappeared" during the climate summit last year.😂) But Big Pharma and corporate tax cuts are doing great, at least.
If budgets could give the middle finger to taxpayers, this is probably as big as a flip as you could get. We had the chance to get rid of Newsom last year so guess he felt emboldened enough to double-down on the abuse. But it is what it is, I suppose. Kind of too late, now.
Note that despite Newsom's claims of economic recovery, we see a huge increase in labor dev funds, for reasons that should be pretty obvious by now. They know people are leaving and employers aren't hiring so something needs to be done but they can't be honest about it.
Big picture, is this really about COVID, California's labor market, or is it the beginning of the 4th Industrial Revolution, as Andrew Yang and the #YangGang forewarned? "Supply chain issues" may be masking the reality that a lot of those jobs aren't simply coming back, at all.
And it seems fitting that the day this comes out, we see Jerome Powell starting to look panicked about #inflation after a year of denying that it ever existed. Deer caught in the headlights, really. It's obvious that they really have no idea what they're doing at this point.
Either way, we have government loaning each other money with the Feds just printing more money to keep the states afloat on their unsustainable path. It's a house of cards ready to come crumbling down, and it's going to trickle down all the way to state and local budgets, too.
Lots of people probably thought I was crazy to double-down on #crypto during these times but the more I read about this stuff I feel better about the path I took. I often feel like an outsider to traditional financial institutions but maybe that's not a bad thing, after all.
There's going to be a lot of people who claim that the sky is falling but that happens at every downturn so take it with a grain of salt. But it's not all bad -- some sectors will do well so the best thing people can do is to stay focused on areas of growth. 📈
What are those areas? Crypto, #NFTs, software in general, and service sector industries that aren't beholden to supply chain issues and can adapt to new economic landscapes very quickly. The #metaverse will adjust to inflation much better than real-estate, for sure.
We're due for a market correction in the USD at any given moment, anyway. Long-term, it'll be a good thing, though, since all the FOMO in Wall Street and the government has created a monster that's out of control. A crash will fix a lot of that by removing the $$.
Either way, good luck, folks. Been saying a while that the next few years is going to be a roller-coaster so I hope people are prepared for anything to happen. The smarter ones have seen the writing on the wall and are planning accordingly already. 🧐
