Posted on 09/06/2023 4:55:39 PM PDT by jfd1776
“I haven’t grilled in years, what if I’ve forgotten how?”
“I haven’t done long division since high school, can I still do it?”
“I haven’t danced in so long, I’m afraid to go out on the floor.”
In dozens of examples in our daily lives, we may go years without doing something that we used to know how to do, but someone is always there to reassure us: “It’ll come back to you. It’s just like riding a bike.”
And it usually does. In most cases, if we knew how to do something once, the memories come back and we find a way again.
Unfortunately, this really doesn’t apply to everything in life. The Middle Ages are notorious as the era when Europeans forgot how to make concrete, how to repair aqueducts, how to work a water screw, and the world was transformed from Roman progress to the regression of the Dark Ages.
Those of us who look at the business pages are seeing a similar example in real time, as we try to make sense of numbers in an age of Bidenflation.
Hopefully, all of us have the occasional meeting with a financial advisor, either the managers of our personal IRAs or the one our employer assigns to help with our 401K. They advise us to think of inflation, and to remember in our twenties and thirties that a two or three percent rate of inflation will make a real difference in our needs when we reach our sixties and seventies.
We therefore should have always kept inflation in mind, as we looked to the future, even if it wasn’t particularly noticeable from year to year.
The last 2.5 years, unfortunately, have changed everything....
(Excerpt) Read more at afnn.us ...
I am not seeing this kind of wage inflation in Virginia. Not at all.
Handy tip to amaze your drunken friends - divide the whole percentage into 69 to get the approximate doubling time, e.g., a steady 3% growth rate means a doubling every 23 years.
Since it’s approximate anyway, you can use 70 if that makes you more comfortable. Some folks just love 69 though.
So if the average inflation rate is about 3% and you were making 50K a year 23 years ago and 100k today, you are static.
My trailer repair shop has a full time crew of 6, only 3 of whom show up any given day.
Some call in sick, often the just don’t show up for their shift.
The way the economy worked in the Carter years is everything got really messy:
—Lots of labor strikes
—Impossible for businesses to plan long term capital investments
—Any business that required estimates of future cost made lots of mistakes, some fatal
—Pricing and wage decisions were often wrong, again sometimes fatal
At some point businesses just slow down or stop risk-taking and do turtle imitations.
You get what you pay for.
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