The really infuriating part is that these same damn people were just screeching insistently about how "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is unrealistic.

The really infuriating part is that these same damn people were just screeching insistently about how "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" is unrealistic. The kind of savvy it takes to not slip backwards in a high inflation environment is exactly the same kind of savvy it takes to pull one's self up by your bootstraps. Regardless of how realistically achievable you think the latter is does not change the fact that the cognitive dissonance is apparent. This will come back to haunt them. People don't like economic uncertainty but they can't do much about it so they just deal. People really, really don't like spineless shysters that change their opinions to whatever is convenient that minute and they can marginalize said shysters in response. Where is the captain of this ship? Why isn't there someone with a longer than next week timeline saying "hey let's stop lighting our credibility on fire like this"?