When ol’ Ronnie Ray-Gun was running for President back in 1980, he was championing a “new” brand of economics called, depending on who you asked, either “Supply-side” or “Trickle-down“. (Yes, I’m sure some econ grad students would tell me that they’re not the same thing at all, but in reply I offer this cogent and insightful retort: blow me.) The premise was simple. We take away all the evil impediments to the very richest among us—the “owner class”—making and keeping their money, and we’d all benefit from their creation of new jobs both directly from their own companies and indirectly from the larger amount of goods and services that such people would buy. And a shower of gold would “trickle down” from the top, making us all richer and better-off.

Oh, we got a golden shower, all right.

And yours truly is the latest casualty of it. Just this past Friday, I was informed by my boss that the company wouldn’t be able to keep a full-time/permanent IT staffer on the payroll. This is why I hadn’t posted in a few days…it was a combination of shock, horror, depression, and wanting to see just how bad the damage actually is. As it stands, I’ve made a proposal to them I think is fair and which benefits us both as long as my retaining my full salary was off the table. I’m not going to go into that here, however.

This blog is not about trashing people and institutions I know and care about, even if they’re doing me wrong. I know these people and know very well that they wouldn’t do this if they didn’t absolutely have to. So, you’ll see no recriminations from me about my still-current employer.

Which isn’t to say I’m not going to call someone out. Oh no, I will be calling someone out. I’m calling out dopey dead Ronnie, poppy Bush, Slick Willie Clinton, dumb-fuck Dubya, Ayn Rand-acolyte Alan Greenspan, Grover “Drown it in a bathtub” Norquist, the Club for (locust-like) Growth, the American Imbecile (I mean “Enterprise”…oops) Institute, the caterwauling Cato Institute, and every other rootin’-tootin’, tax-cuttin’, laissez-fairin’ yoyo under whose Svengali-like sway the US economy’s been for the last 30 years or so. Damn right, I’m including the Dems-in-power here despite being a true Yellow Dog Democrat myself. As far as I’m concerned, Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican.

It was this bunch of deregulation-crazy morons who gave us the California energy bubble, the dot-com bubble, and now the housing bubble. These guys never met a ponzi scheme they didn’t like.

So, because a few highly-placed, money-grubbing assholes were given non-stop encouragement to build their house of cards for a quarter-century, they managed to fuck things up badly enough that several multi-billion-dollar financial institutions have gone poof, practically overnight in some cases. And in one case, that megacorp happened to be my company’s single largest (as in “big majority of annual revenues”) client. And, lest you think that having so many of their eggs in one basket was somehow amenable to them, the higher-ups at my company had been attempting attempting to diversify its client-base for several years. It wasn’t like they wanted to be that tied to the whims and vicissitudes of one company for their fiscal survival. But one marketing “genius” after another (current staff excepted since they seem to be doing better at this, even if it feels like a case of “too little too late”) proved unable to push the collective share represented by all other clients in the company’s annual revenues higher than about 25%.

The company went from flying high, nicely profitable, and on its way to a bigger, shiny new San Francisco offices to laying off about half the permanent staff, “going virtual” in terms of offices and facilities, and teetering on the precipice of financial ruin (thanks to the literally millions of dollars in unpaid invoices from the rotting carcass of said financial giant) in about the space of a month and a half.

Anytime a large company dies, it takes untold numbers of smaller businesses with it…everyone dependent upon either the company itself or the income of that company’s employees is also either out of a job or in dire straits in addition to everyone in the company itself…except, of course, for the C-levels who had golden parachutes in place despite running the company in their charge into the ground.

The really obnoxious thing is that some smart people…like certain recent Nobel Prize winners in Economics…had actually foretold all of this. Our leaders were listening to John Galt when they should have been listening to John Maynard Keynes.

Now, one way or another, I’m going to try to take these lemons and make a little lemonade (watch this space for more on that!). But still, this should never have happened in the first place, and in any economy with actual adult supervision, it wouldn’t have.

I just hope that future generations aren’t dumb enough to repeat our free-market fetishist folly the way we repeated the Roaring ’20s, and they repeated the age of the Robber Barons. Maybe we can finally put the “Invisible hand-job” to rest once and for all.