Without Republicans, I’d Be . . .

 Waiting for the next insanely stupid and catastrophic Trump shoe to drop, Mrs. Day and I spent a few moments talking about where we are today, how, and why.  The only way to describe my investment strategy is “conservative” (aka “timid” and a little shell-shocked).  Back in the mid-80s, when I was in early “middle-age,” I started looking to do more with my retirement savings than CDs and US Savings Bonds.  Flailing around a bit, after a decade as an electronics engineer, I realized that I was unlikely to escape my lower-middle income economic class in southern California.  I dabbled with real estate, insurance and investment sales (I even had a California license for those “professions”), and quality engineering and manufacturing consulting.  All while holding down a full-time engineering job and working toward a college degree. I was busy and barely afloat in the double-digit Reagan inflation and his “economic miracle” that everyone but brainwashed Republicans called “a prolonged recession.”  

I started my first stock market investment account in early 1986 with Merrill Lynch (remember them?).  Like me, my broker was a 30-something guy who had been, in his previous life, an Atlanta cop who moved to California to escape the Reagan economy and “only seeing the bad side of people.”  I’d built up a “six month reserve” savings, that was never going to leave the safe confines of Golden State Sanwa Bank as long as I lived in California and was safely employed. For almost everyone but people in the California aerospace/military industrial economy, the Reagan/Bush years were a 12-year disaster with interest and inflation rates well into double-digits and the beginning of out out-of-control national debt.  I did my best to not imitate our foolish national government.

In southern California, our neighbor, Mexico, was experiencing nearly triple-digit inflation and seeing how that made life insecure and dangerous was an up-close-and-personal life experience for me.  I did not dive into investing with both feet, I put some toes in, first, and a foot up to my shin, next, but I was in far enough to get burned in late October 1987 when Reagan’s deregulation of the FTC and other irresponsible policies blew up the stock market.  Over the next few months, I got a lesson in what “an economic recovery” looks like from the standpoint of a small investor.  (For example, when your investments lose 50% of their value, a 50% “recovery” over the next several years means you are still short 25% of regaining what you’ve lost.)

A decade earlier, in the mid-70s, the Nixon Vietnam recession turned my first mild real estate gains into a massive loss when all of the industry in our small Nebraska town vanished.  Two years earlier, I’d bought a $20,000 home with the $8,000 of sweat equity and my initial $8,000 investment from our first home in central Nebraska.  I put a lot of work and money into that house, hoping to keep improving on my equity investment.  It all vanished when, suddenly, more than 250 houses were for sale in a 18,000-population town.  My initial $16,000 vanished, tack on the real estate fees and taxes and the under-the-table $5,000 “down payment contribution” I had to make so the buyers could afford out house, and we were flat broke.  Along with 1,000 other residents, I was laid off and unemployed.  So, to say the least, I was gun-shy when it came to real estate investing in southern California when a less-skeptical investor might have seen opportunity.  Twice-burned from my 80’s stock market experience, I did, however, learn an important lesson from those closely linked experiences: “Republican Presidents equal economic instability.”  That appears to be a history lesson at least half of Americans fail to comprehend and a mistake they will keep making, because you don’t learn history from watching television or playing with your phone.

When I left California in late-1991, most of the Republican economic vampire bats had come home to roost, including the debt-ridden Reagan economic plan left the nation with 160% more national debt than when he took office.  Poor George Bush (the 1^st) tried to rein in some of the grossly irresponsible military-industrial spending wasted in California.  That mostly just resulted in California having to share the misery the rest of the country “enjoyed” during the Reagan years and the 90s were rough on California home owners, especially those who bought into the state in the late 80s and early 90s.

My conservative spending and savings habits had left me in pretty good shape, however.  For one, the dozen years of Midwestern recession had enabled me to buy, outright, a house in northeastern Nebraska for less than $5,000 in 1988.  That house was, for the next decade, my fall-back economic disaster reserve.  I never lived there for more than an occasional weekend the whole time I owned it, but I had “renters” living there for more than half of the years I owned it.  Mostly, they “paid their rent” with improvements on the house.  When I finally sold the place I’d used it as a substantial tax deduction for a decade and sold it for $20,000 cash with no realtors’ fees involved.  Not a great return, but a hell of a lot better than I’d done on the stock market up to when I bought the house.  And it served as a solid safety valve for the last years I lived in California. 

My first economic benefit from Republican economics came when I left California and ended up in Denver, CO in early 1992.  If you’re old enough and have retained any sort of memory, you might remember Billy Clinton’s campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  In 1992, Denver was an economic train wreck with half of the commercial property and one-third of residential property under the administration of Resolution Trust Corporation.  (Remember them?  The Resolution Trust Corporation, “a U.S. government-owned asset management company first run by Lewis William Seidman and charged with liquidating assets, primarily real estate-related assets such as mortgage loans, that had been assets of savings and loan associations (S&Ls) declared insolvent by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) as a consequence of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.”)  Reagan trashed the savings and loan industry, handing it over to his mobster friends with little-to-no supervision resulting in the recession that led to Bush I’s defeat in 1992.  Denver had an up-close-and-personal view of all that with George Bush’s 4^th should-have-been-an-abortion offspring, Neil, blowing up the city’s real estate with Silverado S&L.  I, on the other hand, landed in Denver with very little cash, but a good friend who put me up in his basement, a decent job, and a couple of racks of audio equipment that I repaired and sold for enough money for a decent down payment on a house.  And there were still lots of foreclosed Denver houses to choose from in 1992, before Clinton’s 1992 election provided the country with a little confidence and prices started climbing. 

After some tough house-buying lessons, I learned enough to trust realtors almost as much as Republican politicians and I landed a nice 1980s, 1,300 square foot, split-level, three bedroom, single-car garage house on what was the far southern edge of Denver (Parker, CO) for $71,000.  The house needed a little maintenance, but I have never been afraid of that and I set to work making the place “mine.”  When the house was new, it sold for $184,000 in 1984.  Six years of Reaganomics and it had lost $113,000 in value.  As I’ve described before, my Colorado employer didn’t last long and I ended up being a landlord after following the economy to Minnesota in 1996.  At the time, I owned two houses with renters and that mostly taught me more than I wanted to know about long-distance property ownership.  I’d always intended to move back to Colorado with my new employer, but that didn’t work out and I sold both of my rental properties in 1999.  Not the peak time to sell, but a lot better than it was 8 years later when my Colorado house sold, again as a foreclosure, for $54,000.  That house is, of course, valued at A LOT MORE today, but there were some seriously lean years where not being a landlord was a good thing.  Denver, historically, experiences economic catastrophes sooner and recovers later than most of the country, so the next few years will be a test of that history. 

When we moved to Minnesota, the Twin Cities were just recovering from the Reagan/Bush recession and I lucked into another about-to-be-repossessed property where we lived for 18 years.  That house was more than 125 years old and the previous owners had been about as responsible as my renters.  So, it needed a lot of maintenance and improvement.  It would be hard to say that we “made money” selling that house in 2015, but my conservative financial tactics put us in good position to weather the Great Recession (2007-2009) and, when it was over, I’d paid off most of that home loan and that put is in the most secure economic situation we’d ever experienced.  We bought another foreclosed house for cash in 2015, sold the Little Canada house for a lot more than real estate agents had said it was worth, and invested the extra cash very conservatively because the economy had recovered enough under President Obama that it would be time for foolish Americans to toss the dice and gamble on the insane promises of another Republican fool.  And they did in 2016, with Trump blowing up the national debt, crashing the economy and losing more jobs than any previous president in US history, and killing off more than a million of us in an epically incompetent pandemic non-response.  Four years of a competent, but boring, Democratic administration was all the ignorant goobers could tolerate and in 2024 76M nitwits re-elected a convicted felon and, in December 2024, I got the hell out of every slightly risky investment I’d made money on for the previous 4 years. 

My IRAs and other investment accounts have been undamaged by Trump’s yoyo stock market games and I’m doing my best to ignore the “opportunities.”  Most of Trump’s market manipulations have been transparent and if I’d been willing to spend the past 120 days glued to a computer monitor and the news I might have done pretty well.  That is exactly how I created my retirement fund during the Bush II fiasco.  But I was glued to a computer monitor at work between 1997 and 2001 and one result of that “activity” was a lot of misery.  So, I’ll just wait out the Trump recession/depression and hope the morons don’t blow up the FDIC or put the country back into Reagan-style double-digit inflation (or worse).

Scaring Ourselves to Death

In the 70s, my first job out of electronic tech school was servicing mobile and stationary electronic scales.  While I was still in school, I’d started working as a very low skill welder for an ag equipment manufacturer in Dodge City, Kansas.  I was so low skilled that an old friend, who was a real welder, had to show me every step I’d need to perform to pass the job application.  After I got the job, he’d stop by my work station and setup my welder for each task I’d have in front of me for the day.  After a few weeks of cobbling welds on to equipment and grinding them down to almost look acceptable, I graduated to installing the components of the electronic scales to the company’s equipment as it was added to customers’ trucks.  After only a couple of months of that job, and the training and experience I was receiving at the local community college, I started troubleshooting new installations, since the two suppliers of the electronic scales that company used were marginally reliable.  Before I finished my first semester in the electronics program, I was doing almost all of the troubleshooting and repair work, while the two “old guys” who had been holding down the workbenches in the office watched and complained.  I had gone from barely-more-than-useless to indispensable and began to do field service along with bench repairs.  When Ms. Day discovered she was pregnant, I could no longer afford to work part time and accepted a job doing the same kind of work with a competitor in west Texas.  After less than 3 years in Texas, I took another position managing a similar department in central Nebraska.

From the beginning of field work in western Kansas until I left that industry and moved to California, I spent a lot of hours and miles driving through the practically empty Midwestern desert at all hours of the day and night.  You don’t get a real feel for how isolated the people who live in those areas are until you are on one of the many remote US, state, or county highways on the western end of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and the Dakotas in the middle of the night.  
 Back in the 70s, I used to try to imagine what it was like living in one of those isolated homes watching television shows depicting life as it rarely was in urban America.  “Kojak,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Baretta,” “The Rookies,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “S.W.A.T,” “N.Y.P.D,” and the endless stream of overly dramatic crime shows featuring white cops battling the invading hordes of brown people.  Obviously, those cities were overflowing with all kinds of terrifying stuff: drugs, murder, rapists in every dark alley, loud noises, bright lights, rock and roll music.  It clearly terrified the folks who would elect Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and finally Trump.  I’m not much of a conspiracy fan and I don’t believe the people who have profited the most from this distortion and polarization are smart enough to plan much of anything.  Whether they planned it or it was all just a happy accident, the outcome is the same: half of the country is scared to death of the other half. 

I’ve lived in some cities—Dallas, Omaha, Los Angeles, Denver, and Minneapolis—and while all of those places were certainly noisy, they weren’t particularly scary.  Statistically, at least two of the small towns I’ve lived in (including the one I’m living in now) have higher crime rates and the assault and murder rates are equal if not higher, too.  When I first moved to Red Wing, I was listening to a couple of geezers babble about how dangerous Minneapolis was, while I was waiting for someone to write up my invoice.  “I wouldn’t go into downtown Minneapolis if you paid me.  It’s like a riot’s going on every day down there,” one of the geezers confidently claimed.

I couldn’t resist and I put in my two cents, ”Actually, Red Wing is more dangerous than Minneapolis.  I’ve lived here less than a year and there have been two murders and, if you watch the Sherriff’s report, the county has almost twice the property crimes per 100,000 residents as the Cities.” 

They looked at me like I was a little green man from space and one of the geezers replied, “Der aren’t 100,000 people in this county.”  And they went back to their conversation as if they’d corrected a small child. 

That is still one of my favorite rural Minnesota stories and I tell it often.  Statistically, the most dangerous places in the United States are rural red areas, mostly in the southeast, but rural areas practically everywhere in the country are a good distance from “safe” and free of violence and property crime. 

I’ve been surprised, in every rural place we’ve lived, at the people who are so afraid of “the big city” in their area that they have never experienced any part of those cities, unless they were brought there by ambulance.  When we lived in a small town in eastern Nebraska, we invited some twenty-something friends to ride with us to Lincoln, about 70 miles away, to see a concert.  On the way, they admitted they’d never been to either Lincoln or Omaha and they were more than a little worried about their safety.  In 1980, Lincoln’s population was about 200,000 and Omaha’s was about 500,000, considerably less than a “big city,” in either case.  Later, we learned that lots of their friends had never been to Lincoln, either, and wanted to hear all about their “adventure” in the city. 

At the other end of that spectrum are the people who live in those cities and rarely think twice about being in a “dangerous” place.  Doing stupid stuff, like wandering through dark alleys with money dangling from your pockets, will get the expected result in most cities (large or small).  Exercising reasonable caution and being aware mitigates that risk considerably.  The thing rural people are most afraid of, in my opinion, is the competition.  Discovering that being the smartest, fastest, tallest, strongest kid in small town America means that you are almost average in the city is a big come-down.  Villages across the country are full of pissed-off people who went to the city to find their fortune, discovered that they are unable to compete in the real world, and went back “home” with their tails between their legs to spend the rest of their lives jealous and bitter.  That is probably the real story of where the American Dream vanished.  The smartest, best and brightest humans are smarter and better than any other time in human history, but the rest of us appear to be getting dumber, slower, weaker and more gullible and dependent.  The 2016 and 2024 U.S. elections were a showdown between the two extremes and, for the moment, the worst of us “won,” but it will probably be a disappointing victory for all of us.