The extraordinary and unprecedented fiscal and monetary measures wisely adopted by the Trump and Biden administrations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020-2021 resulted in emergency infusions to businesses and households that summed to well in excess of $5 trillion in income/stimulus. The massive interventions made the steepest recession in U.S. history also the shortest recession in U.S. history, staving off an economic and social catastrophe. The fiscal measures amounted to a greatly expanded social safety that supported the households of the poor and the unemployed in particular. Components of the safety net included the economic impact payments; expanded unemployment insurance eligibility, increased payment levels and extended durations; expanded child income tax credits; extended and expanded Medicaid coverage; food assistance; housing assistance and eviction moratoria; and emergency cash assistance. In addition to supporting the income of hundreds of millions, the interventions were powerful enough to reduce the poverty head count by more than one-third, an unprecedented feat in such a short period of time (https://www.investopedia.com/government-stimulus-efforts-to-fight-the-covid-19-crisis-4799723; https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/robust-covid-relief-achieved-historic-gains-against-poverty-and).

In addition to averting absolute deprivation for the working class and the poor, a main effect of the fiscal and monetary policy responses was the rapid expansion in easily-accessible liquidity (credit) that wealthy actors and others used in ways that supercharged the prices of the assets that are the building blocks of wealth. The Federal Reserve estimates that household net worth (wealth) in the U.S. grew some 30% from about $110 trillion at end-2019, the last full year before the pandemic emerged, to $142 trillion at end-2021. The wealthiest 1% of households in this interval increased their share of total wealth ownership from 30.7% to 32.2%, while the share of the wealthiest 10% was largely unchanged at just under 70% in both periods, suggesting wealth accrual was disproportionately captured by the very highest ranks of the rich. It is notable, however, that the lowest half of households’ share of net worth nearly doubled from an abysmally low 1.8% to a ridiculously low 3.4% of the total.

An analysis of the value of specific assets reveals that increased stock prices accounted for 64% of the $12 trillion increment in household wealth for the richest 1%; rising value of non-corporate business assets contributed about 20%; and “other assets,” defined as money market funds, savings accounts, checking accounts and personal debt, accounted for about 10% of the addition to their wealth. Among households at the bottom half of the upside-down wealth pyramid, 58% of the $1.8 trillion increase in their total wealth was due to real estate asset inflation. Another 20% was accounted for by the increased purchases of consumer durable assets like cars, major household appliances, sporting goods, household electronics, etc. followed by “other assets” (checking and savings accounts and the like) which were responsible for 10% of wealth growth. (The forgoing data is taken from downloadable spreadsheets available at https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/. Also, see https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-commentary/2021-economic-commentaries/ec-202116-durable-goods-spending-during-covid19-pandemic.aspx).

What the data suggest is that, on the national level and on average, the wealthiest captured the lion’s share of added net worth during two years of pandemic, while the authorities’ outsized efforts to avert disaster buoyed the bottom rungs of the wealth ladder. This allowed those at or below the 50th percentile to retain and marginally augment wealth holdings in general although the character of asset appreciation in the southland was quite different than for those living near the mountain top. In the aggregate and at the national level, the relatively less well-off, due to the temporarily strengthened social safety net, did not fall off a financial cliff in great numbers. In California, however, the picture is somewhat different.

There is no tax deduction at the Federal (for sure) or State level for any State that I looked at (CA, NY) for employees. There may be applicable ones for the self-employed but that would exclude government employees just like any other employee.

The troubled marxist can always go live in one of his “Utopian” countries that is more to his ideological ideals –
Venezuela and Cuba are calling…
it may even help you maintain your diet & health?

——– “Venezuelans lose average of 19lb in weight due to nationwide food shortages..” —–

The Venezuelans are majorly anti-Obesity – they chose a government that helped them change
their dietary habits – and were able to lose an average of 20 lbs. per person.

“The economic crisis in Venezuela is so severe that 75% of the country’s population has lost an average of 19 pounds in weight”

“A third of the nation’s citizens are now only eating 2 or fewer meals per day,
as soaring inflation creates food shortages.”

Lol, you tube?
So Sad, so Very Sad.
The comedy is in your remarks.

Perhaps the last refuge of the sane is comedy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1humfpe1K4w).

On the SJSpotlight twitter feed Putin Propaganda videos and comments are being posted,
and it looks like Econolast is trying to indoctrinate with some Revisionist History and attempt to further marxist ideals in the SJInside.

Recessions do widen income and wealth gaps between rich and poor in California and everywhere in the U.S. But if we really want to understand the character of our country, and the social system in which we live, a longer view reveals much more than a focus on the past 2-3 years. We have a 400-year history that connects Jamestown and Plymouth to California. There is ample documentary evidence of who settled in the colonies, who was dragged to the colonies in chains, who arrived as indentured servants, who was displaced, dispossessed and subject to forced labor, who immigrated and labored for starvation wages across four centuries and a very large geography. There is also sufficient amounts of evidence regarding what was taken from natives, how it was used, what and how much slaves produced and where, what was produced by coerced and badly paid natives and immigrants, who owned or controlled the various production processes, who accumulated the surpluses from those processes and who ultimately inherited those surpluses over time.

As it turns out, the U.S. Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank or Fed) has for decades tracked the cumulative monetized value of inter-generational transfers of wealth, the historically accumulated remnants of property in the form of slaves, land, real estate, businesses and financial instruments representing ownership of assets or debt. The Fed has also provided detailed accounts of the relative distribution of that wealth among the population as well as details of the distribution by income levels, by type of assets, by education level, by generation (Silent, Boomer, GenX, Millenial) and by race (see https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/#quarter:129;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:all;units:shares). While the data presented only goes back to 1989, wealth is a cumulative measure expressing the value of monetized assets generated, aggregated and bequeathed from one generation to the next over extended periods of time. Thus, the Fed’s data captures the value of whatever is left of the assets that have been inherited and augmented by private households in what is the United States for more than 400 years.

By end-2021, the wealthier half of the population owned 97.4% of the net worth (wealth) the Fed was able to account for while the poorer half of the population owned about 2.6% of said wealth. The wealthiest 10% of households alone owned about 70% of that wealth with the top 1% owning just under one-third of the total. A casual review of the data in the sourced Fed page also indicates that, since 1989 at least, wealth has been more unequally concentrated.

From the perspective of wealth distribution, little has changed over the course of U.S. history. For example, one-tenth of Boston taxpayers owned about two-thirds of all taxable wealth in the 1760s. In the heavily slave colonies, the concentrations were dramatically more pronounced as a large segment of the population were themselves counted as owned assets rather than as people (http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinntyr4.html; https://www.aeaweb.org/research/southern-wealth-persistence-civil-war-leah-boustan). The radical inequality in income and wealth distribution—not to mention deep racial, ethnic and gender distinctions and discrimination—that prevailed in the British colonial period were systematically reproduced and elaborated in each generation since, despite the so-called “free republic” established by the U.S. founders.

The present condition is the direct descendant of the settler colonial past as produced by the inter-generational processes of marriage, birth and bequest. All wealth accumulations can be directly and indirectly traced back to the multifold coercive labor processes that produced them and to the familial connections that transfer them from one generation to the next.

Of course, that is exactly the expected and intentional result from closing down all the stores, restaurants, theaters, hair and nail salons, etc. Did anyone expect a different result from this heartless and fruitless attempt at slowing the spread of a virus that everyone caught anyway, and our hospitals were never even close to being over capacity? I was foolish to think that all the health directors, governors and city/county leaders were out to get Trump. I realized later they were out to get all of us.

It would be worthwhile for readers to go back into January and February of the San Jose spotlight and look at his predictions at that time. All failed predictions.