A "hard capitalism" like the USA encourages "bubbles", situations where certain commodities or services creep up in price until it is hardly possible for the average citizen to save money, especially not people who earn minimum wage. No limits on what prices can be charged for commodities and services does NOT, contrary to popular belief, create a better economy or better services, no matter what rhetoric against "communism" has been cried by those who are making a killing. Let's examine where most of the Average USA Citizen's money has gone in the past 20 years.
1) GYM CONTRACTS - in 1995 when I first moved to Manhattan, the cheapest possible gym contract for the worst gym was still around $60/month. A really great gym contract like the one I had with Chelsea Piers was about $120/month. Notice that it was all on CONTRACT - the month to month gym contract that did not lock you into paying for at least a year was very expensive at that time. Bally's Total Fitness was still pulling their scam where they would try to lock you into a 3 year contract without telling you, that was more like a car loan or something of that nature, and then ruin your credit if you tried to get out of it or told them you weren't coming any more. They ruined hundreds of thousands of Americans' credit.
THE RESULT OF GYMS DRIVING THE PRICE UP AND INSISTING ON EXPENSIVE AND OPPRESSIVE CONTRACTS: Lots of people decided it was too expensive and too much trouble to go to the gym. (Doh) The USA became the country with the highest obesity rate, high rates of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other diseases that could be avoided or made less severe by exercise. Since Health Insurance was also too expensive and troublesome for almost half the people in the country, hospital emergency rooms got flooded with people with preventable health problems who had no insurance. The Hospitals, and then the Govt. who bailed out the Hospitals when they ran out of money, had to eat the cost of aaaalllll those sick people who were uninsured.
NOW: The $10/month, 24 hour, "no contract" gym has now been opened in most cities - even small cities and towns that do not allow a club to stay open till 4am, much less a 24 hour business like a gym. Planet Fitness and it's clones have seeminly sprung up EVERYWHERE with big signs that say "No Judgement! Everybody Welcome!"
So SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE caught on to the fact that if you allow all gyms to charge whatever they want and drive the price up and up, saddle people with long and binding "contracts" that they DO NOT want, and close them during the time people have off from work (nighttime), nobody will exercise. F-in DOH. And now Somebody, Somewhere is pushing it through really quickly, even in little towns that are conservative and most likely never would have allowed, a 24 hour gym. Keep in mind that this is AFTER not even thousands but MILLIONS of USA citizens have either got sick, got diseases or died - of PREVENTABLE problems.
******So how much of your money, that you could have been saving, was spent on an expensive gym with a contract, with the same service that you can pay $10 or $20 for now?******
2) HEALTH INSURANCE - Health Insurance Companies ran their big scam for many decades, driving the price of health insurance way up while heartlessly figuring out ways not to pay for people's expenses even if they had been paying the monthly premiums for years. "Fighting your insurance company" to pay for something became par for the course, something EVERY USA Citizen had to do. It became "normal" for them not to want to pay, even for those who had been paying their premiums for years. The average price of a premium was anywhere from $300-$1,000/month OR MORE, which 2/3 of USA Citizens couldn't afford. A third of those who couldn't afford health insurance qualified for Medicade, a Government Health Insurance program(Socialism?), and a third of USA Citizens simply remained unisured or payed the exorbitant rates of medical care out of pocket, or made due with "low cost programs" that gave spotty, low quality or insufficient care. This third, the Lower Middle Class, were the people flooding Emergency Rooms for problems that were preventable but hadn't been caught until they became an Emergency. Emergency rooms would then attempt to bill them $500 or more for services that shouldn't have cost much of anything (checking temperature, heart rate, etc?). Bills of $2500 were common - and sending these bills to people who were there because they couldn't afford regular checkups was kind of insane. These costs were then eaten by the hospital or the agencies which bailed out the hospital. Health Care became a nightmare, a scam and a joke in the USA for a third or more of it's citizens. General Practitioners made hardly anything compared to Specialists, who billed exorbitant rates to insurance companies, so it became hard if not impossible to find a General Practitioner - yet the first question anybody ever asked a sick person is "who is your General Practioner?" as though it was normal to have one. Health Care became a source of low self esteem, fear, and draining money in the USA.
One way a citizen could get a descent Health Care Plan was by working for a corporation that enrolled them in their shared plan, so the message was "work for a Corporation or Die", "you are of no worth to the USA UNLESS a Corporation finds you useful", "spending your life in service to a corporation is the only way to stay alive and healthy in the USA", "You are not worth being kept alive UNLESS a Corporation finds you useful", and other life destroying messages. How many millions of people lost their lives in service to a Corporation, a life that was never fully lived because of the need to keep Health Insurance? The USA, a country filled with quietly despairing and dying people, wasting their lives on things they don't care about, don't believe in and don't want - just to stay alive. Sound like a fun place?
THE RESULTS OF HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES BEING ALLOWED TO DRIVE THE PRICE OF A PREMIUM SKY HIGH: I have a friend who is in his 80s, and he remembers when the doctor cost $10 and he came to your house. Since then, being a Doctor evolved into a social class that makes millions, "jet sets" and has it's pick of the cream of USA living and culture. There is a class barrier when visiting the Doctor that is evident to the extreme when dealing with Doctors - so few of them genuinely care and are more worried about their golf club, the expensive Rolex they are wearing and their $100,000 car, talk down to patients and make it obvious that they don't care. This is almost certainly due to the Insurance Companies that made it possible for them to make millions, and cruelly drove the price of a health plan premium way out of the reach of the average Lower Middle Class citizen while denying policy holders care whenever they could. This is so Evil - yet there are millions of people out there supporting this as "capitalism over communism", fighting against their own good, tricked by Republicans who have a huge promotion engine to change people's minds against things that are good for them.
NOW: After millions of deaths from preventable diseases and poor or non existent Health Care, forces in Govt and the seats of power in the USA have recognized that they MUST have a basic government health care plan in place for the Lower Middle Class, as Europe and Scandinavia have already had for decades. Hillary Clinton tried to implement such a plan during her tenancy in the White House as First Lady, but she was of course blocked by Republicans. Now President Obama has finally pushed through the Affordable Care Act which limits these companies from being able to deny people for Health Insurance, limits their ability to charge, and forces them to insure anyone who needs insurance. The nastiness with which this has been fought against by people who were making money from the suffering of the people is kind of unbelievable. But on October 1st, the Insurance Marketplace in all 50 states will begin accepting applications, and the plans awarded to the people will begin to be utilized on Jan. 1st, 2014.
A friend who luckily for him lives in a state where "Obamacare" is already being implemented (not every state is so cruel as to wait until the last minute to implement the Affordable Care Act), reported that his fee is $8 for his plan, after subsidization. How different would our lives have been if we had an $8 health plan?
*****So how much of your money, that you could have been saving, was spent on expensive Health Insurance Premiums or Out Of Pocket costs for Health Care? How much of your money was lost due to sickness due to inadequate Health Care? How would your life be different right now if you had Health Care aviailable to you at crucial times in your life instead of "not going because it's too expensive and it will probably get better on it's own"? The costs in money, human suffering and loss of function are kind of incalculable. Yet, the USA considered itself "civilized". *****
3) COMMUNICATION - a Cell Phone Plan used to cost hundreds of dollars a month. It's down to around $50/month now - unless you want to use a Smart Phone, which is increasingly necessary in today's world. During a period of sickness, my Smart Phone allowed me to call multiple people for as many hours as I needed while looking up and comparing health services online and lawyers, govt. agencies, etc all while staying away from home, and be in continuous contact with friends and family, so it really was a lifesaving tool. With it's ability to take high quality video and pictures and forward them or store them in other places, this phone is a must-have self defense mechanism for women in urban situations as well as others who need protection.
A Smart Phone is kind of not worth it unless you have an Unlimited Plan due to it's capacity to use data and allow hundreds of texts to be traded at high speeds - it can suck up money like crazy unless you have a plan in place to counteract that. For me, Basic iPhone Service with Unlimited Text and Data with sufficient Talk Minutes and Rollover Plan - $110. This is with Unlimited Data Service "grandfathered" in - others must pay more for their Data. Very few companies offered iPhone service, so the few that did were able to set high prices for their service. Now that bubble has been burst this year with other companies becoming able to service iPhones, and a variety of pre-paid services in place for the iPhone. Service has now come down to about $50 with Unlimited Talk, Text and Data.
NOW- you will save about $60 - $120/month on your Smart Phone plan. That's $720 - $1,440 / year. What could you have done with that much money in the past? When you add up what you have been paying each year for the amount of years you've had your phone... that could have been a new car, a downpayment on property....anything. For Phone Service that in the past used to cost very little. In the 80s, telephone service was about $15 or $20 per month. These corporations expanded the amount everybody was paying over 1000%. And for what???
4) TRANSPORTATION - cities are the only places in the USA which have sufficent public transportation. Outside of cities, EVERYBODY must own a car. This is a form of societal control (cars are frequently stopped by police and the occupants IDed, addresses must be given at the DMV so any citizen can be located quickly and easily, cars must be paid for so people must work, etc.
The cost of a car that reliably runs is about $10,000 used, and car insurance is another scam - everybody must have it in order to drive, and everybody must pay exorbitant prices for it. With a perfect driving record I was still being charged $200/month living 15 minutes outside NYC in Woodside. Even more exorbitant is the gas, which is about $4.10/gallon for Premium and creeping higher - the $5 gallon is probably going to hit within our lifetime - and gasoline dependancy is another story in the USA. Tensions in the Middle East where the gas is coming from have finally forced the Powers That Be to break USA's dependency on gas as a fuel. Previous to this, a Republican Oil Family had purchased the Presidency (the Bush family), and no progress towards reducing the amount of oil used was allowed. Solar and other alternative energy sources were suppressed, and the Republican Rhetoric Machine had everybody believing that "alternative energy wasn't possible" (all BS of course, many people are ALL SOLAR in their homes and getting along fine. That is another section).
Electric cars were viciously suppressed and in some cases the inventors done away with, that Oil could become a huge business in the USA. Everybody knows it, nobody could do anything about it. The internet is full of stories of inventors that had bad things happen to them, or were simply "bought out", paid off, etc.
NOW- Enter the PRIUS, a "hybrid" vehicle that still uses SOME gas but far less than previous all-gas models. In a twinkling, all cabs in NYC became Prius, and some city vehicles as well like police cars, etc. In the future, hybrids and all-electric models will be the norm.
*****How much money did you spend in your life on gas, that you could have been saving? And how much car exhaust have you sucked down into your lungs, eaten, absorbed through your skin, etc? Will we ever be able to get the toxins out of the atmosphere that we have polluted? Imagine the human suffering that could have been prevented since the days of electric cars? What do you think it has done to your system, your children, family members, etcc to have these toxins in their bodies? What do you think it has done to the Earth in general?*****
****Soon the All-Electric Car will be out, and Solar will be the accepted form of energy with panels on every building. How much money did you spend on Con Ed - your Electric bill, that could have been coming from Solar Panels EASILY???****
5) RENT/MORTGAGES - I already have a blog here about the Mortgage Scam - People's living arrangements were the biggest form of societal control and the most money being taken from them. Rents crept from about $300-$500 in the 80s to a whopping $1200-$2500 today, with heavy Credit Checks, References demanded and other forms of screening that discriminate against anyone not wealthy or in a Corporate Job. Mortgages are rife with out and out Usery and Loan Sharking from banks that ultimately make people pay $400,000 for borrowing $100,000. Draconian Zoning Regulations in most places actively prevent people from just building their own places to live, even if they are young, strong and healthy enough to wield a hammer, saw and nails - even if they or their family are homeless.
NOW: the Small/Tiny House Movement and other social movements in the USA are pioneering the taking back of Property Ownership and shedding light on the senseless fleecing that Banks/Landords have perpetuated on USA citizens. Average cost per month after building expenses: $200-$500(as it was in the 70s/80s originally).
*****How much money have YOU wasted on Rent/Mortgage that you could have saved had you been allowed to build your own place to live in a size that you could afford at the appropriate time in your life? By skewing the amounts people had to pay at innapropriate times in their lives (should a recent college grad be saddled with a $400,000 debt and huge payments? Should a recently divorced person be saddled with a high rent? Etc, etc) by not allowing low cost rentals to be built in safe places, how much human suffering and deprivation has been caused in the USA?*****
Can you think of any other "bubbles"???
1) GYM CONTRACTS - in 1995 when I first moved to Manhattan, the cheapest possible gym contract for the worst gym was still around $60/month. A really great gym contract like the one I had with Chelsea Piers was about $120/month. Notice that it was all on CONTRACT - the month to month gym contract that did not lock you into paying for at least a year was very expensive at that time. Bally's Total Fitness was still pulling their scam where they would try to lock you into a 3 year contract without telling you, that was more like a car loan or something of that nature, and then ruin your credit if you tried to get out of it or told them you weren't coming any more. They ruined hundreds of thousands of Americans' credit.
THE RESULT OF GYMS DRIVING THE PRICE UP AND INSISTING ON EXPENSIVE AND OPPRESSIVE CONTRACTS: Lots of people decided it was too expensive and too much trouble to go to the gym. (Doh) The USA became the country with the highest obesity rate, high rates of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other diseases that could be avoided or made less severe by exercise. Since Health Insurance was also too expensive and troublesome for almost half the people in the country, hospital emergency rooms got flooded with people with preventable health problems who had no insurance. The Hospitals, and then the Govt. who bailed out the Hospitals when they ran out of money, had to eat the cost of aaaalllll those sick people who were uninsured.
NOW: The $10/month, 24 hour, "no contract" gym has now been opened in most cities - even small cities and towns that do not allow a club to stay open till 4am, much less a 24 hour business like a gym. Planet Fitness and it's clones have seeminly sprung up EVERYWHERE with big signs that say "No Judgement! Everybody Welcome!"
So SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE caught on to the fact that if you allow all gyms to charge whatever they want and drive the price up and up, saddle people with long and binding "contracts" that they DO NOT want, and close them during the time people have off from work (nighttime), nobody will exercise. F-in DOH. And now Somebody, Somewhere is pushing it through really quickly, even in little towns that are conservative and most likely never would have allowed, a 24 hour gym. Keep in mind that this is AFTER not even thousands but MILLIONS of USA citizens have either got sick, got diseases or died - of PREVENTABLE problems.
******So how much of your money, that you could have been saving, was spent on an expensive gym with a contract, with the same service that you can pay $10 or $20 for now?******
2) HEALTH INSURANCE - Health Insurance Companies ran their big scam for many decades, driving the price of health insurance way up while heartlessly figuring out ways not to pay for people's expenses even if they had been paying the monthly premiums for years. "Fighting your insurance company" to pay for something became par for the course, something EVERY USA Citizen had to do. It became "normal" for them not to want to pay, even for those who had been paying their premiums for years. The average price of a premium was anywhere from $300-$1,000/month OR MORE, which 2/3 of USA Citizens couldn't afford. A third of those who couldn't afford health insurance qualified for Medicade, a Government Health Insurance program(Socialism?), and a third of USA Citizens simply remained unisured or payed the exorbitant rates of medical care out of pocket, or made due with "low cost programs" that gave spotty, low quality or insufficient care. This third, the Lower Middle Class, were the people flooding Emergency Rooms for problems that were preventable but hadn't been caught until they became an Emergency. Emergency rooms would then attempt to bill them $500 or more for services that shouldn't have cost much of anything (checking temperature, heart rate, etc?). Bills of $2500 were common - and sending these bills to people who were there because they couldn't afford regular checkups was kind of insane. These costs were then eaten by the hospital or the agencies which bailed out the hospital. Health Care became a nightmare, a scam and a joke in the USA for a third or more of it's citizens. General Practitioners made hardly anything compared to Specialists, who billed exorbitant rates to insurance companies, so it became hard if not impossible to find a General Practitioner - yet the first question anybody ever asked a sick person is "who is your General Practioner?" as though it was normal to have one. Health Care became a source of low self esteem, fear, and draining money in the USA.
One way a citizen could get a descent Health Care Plan was by working for a corporation that enrolled them in their shared plan, so the message was "work for a Corporation or Die", "you are of no worth to the USA UNLESS a Corporation finds you useful", "spending your life in service to a corporation is the only way to stay alive and healthy in the USA", "You are not worth being kept alive UNLESS a Corporation finds you useful", and other life destroying messages. How many millions of people lost their lives in service to a Corporation, a life that was never fully lived because of the need to keep Health Insurance? The USA, a country filled with quietly despairing and dying people, wasting their lives on things they don't care about, don't believe in and don't want - just to stay alive. Sound like a fun place?
THE RESULTS OF HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES BEING ALLOWED TO DRIVE THE PRICE OF A PREMIUM SKY HIGH: I have a friend who is in his 80s, and he remembers when the doctor cost $10 and he came to your house. Since then, being a Doctor evolved into a social class that makes millions, "jet sets" and has it's pick of the cream of USA living and culture. There is a class barrier when visiting the Doctor that is evident to the extreme when dealing with Doctors - so few of them genuinely care and are more worried about their golf club, the expensive Rolex they are wearing and their $100,000 car, talk down to patients and make it obvious that they don't care. This is almost certainly due to the Insurance Companies that made it possible for them to make millions, and cruelly drove the price of a health plan premium way out of the reach of the average Lower Middle Class citizen while denying policy holders care whenever they could. This is so Evil - yet there are millions of people out there supporting this as "capitalism over communism", fighting against their own good, tricked by Republicans who have a huge promotion engine to change people's minds against things that are good for them.
NOW: After millions of deaths from preventable diseases and poor or non existent Health Care, forces in Govt and the seats of power in the USA have recognized that they MUST have a basic government health care plan in place for the Lower Middle Class, as Europe and Scandinavia have already had for decades. Hillary Clinton tried to implement such a plan during her tenancy in the White House as First Lady, but she was of course blocked by Republicans. Now President Obama has finally pushed through the Affordable Care Act which limits these companies from being able to deny people for Health Insurance, limits their ability to charge, and forces them to insure anyone who needs insurance. The nastiness with which this has been fought against by people who were making money from the suffering of the people is kind of unbelievable. But on October 1st, the Insurance Marketplace in all 50 states will begin accepting applications, and the plans awarded to the people will begin to be utilized on Jan. 1st, 2014.
A friend who luckily for him lives in a state where "Obamacare" is already being implemented (not every state is so cruel as to wait until the last minute to implement the Affordable Care Act), reported that his fee is $8 for his plan, after subsidization. How different would our lives have been if we had an $8 health plan?
*****So how much of your money, that you could have been saving, was spent on expensive Health Insurance Premiums or Out Of Pocket costs for Health Care? How much of your money was lost due to sickness due to inadequate Health Care? How would your life be different right now if you had Health Care aviailable to you at crucial times in your life instead of "not going because it's too expensive and it will probably get better on it's own"? The costs in money, human suffering and loss of function are kind of incalculable. Yet, the USA considered itself "civilized". *****
3) COMMUNICATION - a Cell Phone Plan used to cost hundreds of dollars a month. It's down to around $50/month now - unless you want to use a Smart Phone, which is increasingly necessary in today's world. During a period of sickness, my Smart Phone allowed me to call multiple people for as many hours as I needed while looking up and comparing health services online and lawyers, govt. agencies, etc all while staying away from home, and be in continuous contact with friends and family, so it really was a lifesaving tool. With it's ability to take high quality video and pictures and forward them or store them in other places, this phone is a must-have self defense mechanism for women in urban situations as well as others who need protection.
A Smart Phone is kind of not worth it unless you have an Unlimited Plan due to it's capacity to use data and allow hundreds of texts to be traded at high speeds - it can suck up money like crazy unless you have a plan in place to counteract that. For me, Basic iPhone Service with Unlimited Text and Data with sufficient Talk Minutes and Rollover Plan - $110. This is with Unlimited Data Service "grandfathered" in - others must pay more for their Data. Very few companies offered iPhone service, so the few that did were able to set high prices for their service. Now that bubble has been burst this year with other companies becoming able to service iPhones, and a variety of pre-paid services in place for the iPhone. Service has now come down to about $50 with Unlimited Talk, Text and Data.
NOW- you will save about $60 - $120/month on your Smart Phone plan. That's $720 - $1,440 / year. What could you have done with that much money in the past? When you add up what you have been paying each year for the amount of years you've had your phone... that could have been a new car, a downpayment on property....anything. For Phone Service that in the past used to cost very little. In the 80s, telephone service was about $15 or $20 per month. These corporations expanded the amount everybody was paying over 1000%. And for what???
4) TRANSPORTATION - cities are the only places in the USA which have sufficent public transportation. Outside of cities, EVERYBODY must own a car. This is a form of societal control (cars are frequently stopped by police and the occupants IDed, addresses must be given at the DMV so any citizen can be located quickly and easily, cars must be paid for so people must work, etc.
The cost of a car that reliably runs is about $10,000 used, and car insurance is another scam - everybody must have it in order to drive, and everybody must pay exorbitant prices for it. With a perfect driving record I was still being charged $200/month living 15 minutes outside NYC in Woodside. Even more exorbitant is the gas, which is about $4.10/gallon for Premium and creeping higher - the $5 gallon is probably going to hit within our lifetime - and gasoline dependancy is another story in the USA. Tensions in the Middle East where the gas is coming from have finally forced the Powers That Be to break USA's dependency on gas as a fuel. Previous to this, a Republican Oil Family had purchased the Presidency (the Bush family), and no progress towards reducing the amount of oil used was allowed. Solar and other alternative energy sources were suppressed, and the Republican Rhetoric Machine had everybody believing that "alternative energy wasn't possible" (all BS of course, many people are ALL SOLAR in their homes and getting along fine. That is another section).
Electric cars were viciously suppressed and in some cases the inventors done away with, that Oil could become a huge business in the USA. Everybody knows it, nobody could do anything about it. The internet is full of stories of inventors that had bad things happen to them, or were simply "bought out", paid off, etc.
NOW- Enter the PRIUS, a "hybrid" vehicle that still uses SOME gas but far less than previous all-gas models. In a twinkling, all cabs in NYC became Prius, and some city vehicles as well like police cars, etc. In the future, hybrids and all-electric models will be the norm.
*****How much money did you spend in your life on gas, that you could have been saving? And how much car exhaust have you sucked down into your lungs, eaten, absorbed through your skin, etc? Will we ever be able to get the toxins out of the atmosphere that we have polluted? Imagine the human suffering that could have been prevented since the days of electric cars? What do you think it has done to your system, your children, family members, etcc to have these toxins in their bodies? What do you think it has done to the Earth in general?*****
****Soon the All-Electric Car will be out, and Solar will be the accepted form of energy with panels on every building. How much money did you spend on Con Ed - your Electric bill, that could have been coming from Solar Panels EASILY???****
5) RENT/MORTGAGES - I already have a blog here about the Mortgage Scam - People's living arrangements were the biggest form of societal control and the most money being taken from them. Rents crept from about $300-$500 in the 80s to a whopping $1200-$2500 today, with heavy Credit Checks, References demanded and other forms of screening that discriminate against anyone not wealthy or in a Corporate Job. Mortgages are rife with out and out Usery and Loan Sharking from banks that ultimately make people pay $400,000 for borrowing $100,000. Draconian Zoning Regulations in most places actively prevent people from just building their own places to live, even if they are young, strong and healthy enough to wield a hammer, saw and nails - even if they or their family are homeless.
NOW: the Small/Tiny House Movement and other social movements in the USA are pioneering the taking back of Property Ownership and shedding light on the senseless fleecing that Banks/Landords have perpetuated on USA citizens. Average cost per month after building expenses: $200-$500(as it was in the 70s/80s originally).
*****How much money have YOU wasted on Rent/Mortgage that you could have saved had you been allowed to build your own place to live in a size that you could afford at the appropriate time in your life? By skewing the amounts people had to pay at innapropriate times in their lives (should a recent college grad be saddled with a $400,000 debt and huge payments? Should a recently divorced person be saddled with a high rent? Etc, etc) by not allowing low cost rentals to be built in safe places, how much human suffering and deprivation has been caused in the USA?*****
Can you think of any other "bubbles"???
