It is one position that seems to cross ideological lines. It’s like literally everyone other than people who are very invested in the stock market (and even then) really want to see this thing crash and crash hard.
As someone who lived through and lost a job during the GFC, I think a bit of this is not realizing how bad an economic crash is even if you don’t think it will affect you much. It will. Some people think the residential real estate market will crash too and they can finally buy a house. But that’s hard to do when either you’ve lost your job or your job feels so precarious that you really don’t feel safe emptying your savings and taking out a mortgage. Or if you have a “safe” job, you think you can weather the storm. But in a depression, there are very few “safe” jobs.
But with that caveat aside, I think things are different now because so many people are struggling and barely getting by with their current employment situation. Life already feels so precarious, might as well throw a spanner into the works and see what happens. And that part feels very different than in the run up to the GFC. It affects everyone, regardless of political ideology.
Of course now I’m convinced that because it’s something everyone is expecting and wants to see happen, it will never actually happen. US will just limp along with high inflation, no job growth, and everyone getting slowly squeezed for years.
So I’m in s relatively okay position. Stable job, mortgage is manageable, pension even. But, the only reason I have all that, is I’m union. Wife was for quite a while too. So for me it’s like, I have a modicum of niceness not because of the “free market” but because of the tiniest shred of worker power left in the economy. That more worker power is what will lift people up, not the status quo. And even then, it’s taking a two income household to get even close to the relative level of what our parents had on one income, so the downward trajectory is still obvious.
As far as what will happen: my feeling is that the US economy is one of those, does not bend but will break things. It doesn’t adjust or accommodate for the real economic malaise l, but that also means that when the collapse comes it’s not going to have any way to break the fall.