Posted on 12/16/2025 8:20:23 AM PST by kaktuskid
With all the complaining about inflation - and who you vote for depending on the price of a pound of hamburger - who is is the real culprit in inflation, especially food? Who is that has the "twirling mustache" in this situation?
Tariffs? 80-90% of our food is domestically sourced-imports only 20%. Energy? Fuel prices have been coming down in the past year in most of the country-except for those over-taxed/regulated blue states. Labor? Agriculture is due for major automation - many crops are already machine harvested-more needs to. And, sorry Jazzie Crackpot,cotton has been picked by machine since the 1950s. Ag/food industry consolidation? Probably a main culprit, especially in the meat industry where you have 5 companies controlling 80% of the US beef supply. And you have a beast like Cargill which has its tenticles in manty parts of the business.
Some of the problem is us...we buy the name brand product, while the store brand is the same quality but much cheaper. Skip a few fast food meals-brown bag it instead-better for you healthwise and cheaper. Buy soda in bottles, not cans, which use more expensive aluminum and cardboard packaging. And quit buying the China-made crap sold on TV that falls apart after a few months.
Federal Gov’t printing presses are the ONLY cause of inflation (inflating the money supply with more dollars than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)).
The feds have been at since around 1900 which is why before around 1900, prices remained about the same and after around 1900, prices have relentlessly gone up.
Gov’t, especially the 80%+. $3+ trillion unconstitutional portion of the federal gov’t is not your friend.
Either we abolish it or it will abolish our lives, liberties, and wellbeing.
Government debt is a contributor to the value of the dollar. The more government spends, the more its value decreases.
I believe this has been known since antiquity, long before Milton Freedman.
Every time some country was short of money, they debased currency and pretty soon, you had inflation.
Copernicus was the first to put it in writing!
when McDonalds workers are earning $20 a hour, you can’t complain when you burger now costs $10
It is that simple.
Yup, currency debasement through over supply.
The powers-that-be discovered that it’s a lot easier to run a printing press than a gold mine.
Up until about 50 AD the Roman Aureus was nearly pure gold. In the following two centuries it declined to about 25% gold, the rest being alloying copper and silver to ‘save money’.
The "inflation" spoken of by the FED and in the MSM is diversionary, because the real cause is darker. What the FED/MSM talks about is price indexes. For a product/commodity, prices can be up or down due to micro causes.
Inflation is a macro phenomenon, endemic to fiat, central bankstering, fractional-reserve lending and money "printing".
Furthermore, the "2% inflation" target is pure theft, where they tell us and tell us again and again to hide the truth to us in plain sight. 1040 taxes does NOT pay for government - there's a reason that BOTH the FED AND the IRS were created at the same time. Federal taxes are SOLELY for the illusion that we as taxpayers fund government.
Missed it entirely: Government/Fed juicing of the money supply to cover (in part) massive deficit spending.
Example,
After Columbus, Europe was flooded with gold and, especially, silver.
The price of gold and silver, both used as money base, went down and major inflation followed.
This is actually argument against gold standard.
With gold standard, our currency would be dependent on mine yields in South Africa and other not always friendly, places.
But feds printing piles of money is not really that great option, either.
Gold production is distributed widely around the world. No one country has anything close to a monopoly.
Yearly Gold production increases the above-ground supply by only 1%-2% per year. Far better than political central bank inflation and money-supply increase
A nation may choose to horde its mined gold. So what? It's a form of savings. Now they horde treasuries bonds. It has almost zero influence on others. Like all savings, at some point they will need to deploy it to either invest further, or spend it on consumables.
I like the idea of having energy based money.
The unit of money would be the kilowatt hour. Almost everything has a price tied to energy. A kilowatthour is easily measured and understood. As energy prices come down, so do prices for everything else.
No, the greed of the retail stores are the only cause. It was their greed that chased our manufacturing base out of the country, and they continue to screw consumers by raising their prices.
Energy prices would always go up. Greed drives inflation, and greed is a permanent fixture of the merchant.
“Federal Gov’t printing presses are the ONLY cause of inflation “
Money supply can increase without federal printing presses, e.g. the rapid increase of credit card debt starting in 2023 expands the money supply and is inflationary. There has been ~$1.5 Trillion dollars in household debt added in the last two years.
The 2007 housing bubble is another example of monetary expansion driven by private/commercial lending.
And the federal government is spending more this year than last year (despite all the GOP talk of fiscal conservatism and saving money), so inflation shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expenditures-in-real-time/
An hour of labor buys more kilowatthours today (on average in the USA) than it did previously.
In 1980, a person could purchase about 150 kilowatthours for one hour worked. In 2024, about 205 kilowatthours could be purchased for one hour worked.
https://humanprogress.org/time-pricing-kilowatt-hours/
Leftist and pro-gov't/"progressive" nonsense and lies.
Sales do NOT inflate the money supply. Only gov't printing presses does that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.