Preppers’ PING!!
5.56mm
I think it is smart to invest in food before gold if possible. Gold and silver should be invested in just in case you have to leave the food behind, but food first.
The ability to grow or hunt food is even more valuable.
Gold is not at the top of my prep list. Food, lead, sanitation, and medicine are much higher priorities. I think lead will be worth as much as gold if Obama succeeds in fundamentally transforming our country as he dreams of doing.
Just saying...
5.56mm
Amazing how little effort the author put into proving the basis for his article, that food prices have consistently gone up. And therefore should be expected to do so in the future.
There are really, really good reasons for having a supply of food on hand. But saving money because food prices inevitably go up isn’t one of them.
Here’s how many minutes an employee of median income had to work to purchase a gallon of milk and a loaf of white bread in various past years.
1955 Milk 23 minutes Bread 4.5 minutes
1975 Milk 16 minutes Bread 3.1 minutes
1995 Milk 10 minutes Bread 3.1 minutes
2015 Milk 9 minutes Bread 3.4 minutes
BTW, I picked two random food items to come up with this info.
A VERY large chunk of what people view as increasing food prices is their purchase of prepared rather than staple products. That is a lifestyle choice, not an increase in the price of food. Recently saw frozen PB&Js at Publix, and they weren’t cheap.
Stats aren’t purely comparable because they’re based on median family income, drastically influenced by average family size.
Went back and ran same number for gasoline prices.
1955 6 minutes at median income
1975 7 minutes
1995 4 minutes
2015 8 minutes
Interesting, what?
Don’t speculate with food, or you will lose. Since the turn of the 20th Century, the US has had such an overabundance of food that it is an economic problem.
Even at the height of the Dust Bowl, when tens of thousands of farms were wiped out from Texas to Canada, there was still a crushing surplus of food. When the Great Depression-era deflation hit (currency shortage), food was worth less than it cost to bring it to market.
So, at the same time as corn was being burned as fuel, people in the cities worried about starving.
FDR intervened, with emphasis on reducing the surplus *first*, and then providing some of the surplus to soup kitchens to feed the hungry and unemployed. Only by reducing the surplus could agriculture hope to recover.
So FDR created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, and one of their first acts was to drive, with armed police, from farm to farm, killing and burying pigs in the highly decentralized pork industry.
The FSRC killed and destroyed SIX MILLION pigs, and that was just the start. Farms entire harvests were confiscated and destroyed, and the families told that they were no longer farmers, but to move to the city, or starve.
Everyone today should remember the vast amount of corn that was set aside to produce ethanol. While it did drive up prices in many things *some*, there was no real crisis. It barely made a dent in our food supply.
Yet enough ethanol was produced to support every gas station in the US, with perhaps 10% of the fuel they sold.
In 2014, 136.78 billion gallons of gasoline were sold in the US. Imagine how much corn was needed to produce the ethanol one tenth of that, 13.7 billion gallons?
My husband said he was listening to Clark Howard the other day who said that inflation over the past year has been zero. What?? He must be using government numbers.