Americans Selling Possessions to Stay Afloat

Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville at 2:06 PM on April 30, 2008.

In the wake of the housing crash and rising food and energy prices, Americans are pawning their clothes, furniture and more.

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I want you to think of President Mondo Fucko's total shock at hearing gas would hit $4/gallon and how blissfully isolated his precious ass is from actual Americans as you read this item:

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful — families forced to part with heirlooms.

…At Craigslist, which has become a kind of online flea market for the world, the number of for-sale listings has soared 70 percent since last July. In March, the number of listings more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period. Craigslist CEO Jeff Buckmaster acknowledged the increasing popularity of selling all sort of items on the Web, but said the rate of growth is "moving above the usual trend line." He said he was amazed at the desperate tone in some ads.

Like a Georgia teenager whose mother lost her job and whose ad pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out." Or like Alabama mobile home resident Ellona Bateman-Lee, whose husband was disabled in 2006 by an electric shock on the job as a dump truck driver: "Among her most painful sales: her grandmother's teakettle. She sold it for $6 on eBay."

Now, according to conservative philosophy, private charity is supposed to step in and help these struggling Americans in their time of need. That's the whole plan: Let people keep their tax money, starve the government, subcontract welfare to via faith-based initiatives to private charity, who will be phat with donations from the Americans who have been allowed to keep more of their income care of tax breaks.

But guess what?

The trend may be hurting secondhand stores too. Donations to the Salvation Army were down 20 percent in the January-to-March period. George Hood, the charity's national community relations and development secretary, said that was probably partly because people were selling their belongings instead.

There's your trickle-down economics at work, right there.

Tagged as: economy, middle class, energy, food, housing