In 2007 a Cheeseburger was $2.52 from one of my Favorite burger chains. It is now $4.00 and some change. A Quart of Oil was $1.00, it is now $4.00. Milk has almost doubled. Beef has almost doubled. I paid $43.00 to take three family members to dinner last night at a very modest restaurant. Three of us had Cheeseburgers. And so on.
One of the first things the Obama administration did was to remove fuel and food from the inflation calculation. For awhile, gas went to almost $4.00/gallon. Yes, it's back down now, but that is entirely due to the new sources of oil brought online by the advent of fracking technology.
And, I hope you haven't been investing in silver or gold over the past few years.
No, I don't have any serious investments in Gold or Silver. At the base of it, they are just metals and not particularly useful outside their purpose as currency. I have been preferring to invest in more real-world useful metals like brass and lead.
Even if we ignore government figures, can we safely ignore what markets are telling us about the last 5 or 6 years? Those markets are real and they are telling us that Inflation just hasn't been an issue lately.
The markets are ever more driven by arrays of computers in the hands of the financially connected, bidding against each other according to various algorithms calculated to make money off of the churn. They would appear to be inflating large financial bubbles, and I have no real knowledge that the markets are still a reliable indicator of the financial health of the nation.
Too much has been rendered uncertain because of tampering of the sort that didn't previously exist.
But none of this addresses the 100 trillion in retirement debt and entitlements this nation faces. How are we gonna pay for all those baby boomer retirements? How are we gonna pay for the ever ballooning incidence of people on the dole?
I have been pondering this question for Decades. Since the Reagan years, the Democrats have led financial policy that calls for every increasing spending and especially on entitlements. I used to wonder if the Democrats were just stupid, or crazy, because the path they insisted on appeared to me to be fraught with future danger.
Then one day a chilling thought occurred to me. Perhaps they are Malthusians, and regard it as an acceptable outcome for many people to die or get killed when financial disaster comes to a head?
This puts them in the "evil" category, and I have since yet to see a single flaw in this characterization of them. "Evil" explains a lot of things that just didn't make sense before.
Obviously, there are at least two possibilities when a nation faces a debt that truly cannot be paid. The first is that a nation just doesn't pay the debt fully - the rules are changed. The second is that it pays the debt, but with currency that is of less real value. Or, a mixture of the two.
It doesn't mean that the world will come to an end or that the nation will cease to exist. And, it doesn't mean that there will be mass starvation or misery. No matter what rules you pass today, there will be distributional issues in the future and those distributional issues will be resolved by people in the future.
Whether we who are alive today like it or not, we cannot bind the people of the future. In the future, the people who are then living will produce goods and services and those people will decide for themselves how those goods and services will be distributed among them.