There’s a lefty meme going around suggesting everyone’s better off with a Democratic administration rather than a Republican one because hey, look at that stock market! Oh, my dudes, thought I. Good try, but that Dow clearly doesn’t track anything more substantial than collective hunches and a sort of mass hypnosis. When money no longer represents an honest exchange of goods and services, with all costs accounted for, we’re just a bunch of players trying to see how long we can keep imaginary ping-pong balls in the air.

In the very next week everyone was panicking because the Dow hitched down briefly like a bicycle with a bum derailleur and then a few days after that someone hooked up the magic chain again and we all chugged back up, and in all that time, whatever good the Democrats have done for America—and I stoutly believe they are by light-years the more responsible party—has not changed.

People with a stake in the stock market have “done well” in the last year, not that they “did” anything, but that’s how this works. People who have amassed enough to play the ponies have placed their bets and people who are barely squeaking by have no juice in the game, and those people aren’t doing all that well, because we’ve had a mild inflationary period along with everyone else in the world. And that means that if their income has not kept up, they are still taking a hit at the grocery store. Because inflation has come down faster than the experts expected, but it still exists. People tend to remember when they didn’t have to pay that much for a box of cereal. Even people whose incomes have kept up, and gotten ahead, tend to get upset about that. Since Trump did not have the honor of dealing with the post-pandemic Putin’s-war inflation, we will never know how he would have contended with it. My own hunch is that billionaires would have continued to do just fine.

His entire economic plan at the moment is to drill, baby, drill, even though Biden has presided over so much new drilling, baby, that we have been energy-independent for years now, which has evidently escaped Trump’s notice, and even though we need to get the fuck out of the drilling business if we want any shred of life left on this earth.

Whatever the Dow represents has come unhooked from the fruits of real labor or even innovation. Consulting the Dow for the health of the economy is like testing the health of the ocean by its yachtage.

I’m not saying you have to be rich to get excited about the stock market. I am a beneficiary of this Ponzi scheme—for the moment. Does anyone explain how it could be possible to have ever-continuing growth, whatever that may be? Don’t we know how this works by now?

I’m better off, this week, as long as I consider myself better off if mergers have been made that destroy businesses and send people into unemployment, and better off with a tragically altered atmosphere, and better off if income inequality is so titanic that growing swaths of people have been priced out of their shelter, and better off as long as I can imagine this big dick-ful of fairy dust will just keep fluffing itself.