Gas at an all time high for February. Natural gas rising, food prices rising fast. Health insurance premiums rising. Taxes rising. Yeah, better to just keep one's eyes closed and trust the experts.
Yea, I just got back from a week and a half in VA and the price of gas (in paper) in CA went up close to $0.50 in that period. The country is awash in reserves, and capacity to refine has to be well over falling consumption (we’re even exporting refined product now) and there isn’t any inflation???
And this spiel about “no inflation until wage pressure manifests” is bullshit. If there was an expanding force of well educated and skilled fabrication and manufacturing blue collar workers, maybe you’d see it, but they aren’t coming until the regulatory costs of building a structure that utilizes energy and heat to cast, pound and mill things drops to one commensurate with places like China where you can do same and emit all of the byproducts essentially without any treatment or after-processing.
I was looking at “Made in China” on the bottom of a coffee mug today. Something that doesn’t take a hell of a lot in the way of knowledge on the employee side to produce, but which the structure to make same, here, would take about 2 years to build, cost $200,000+ for the building permit, Lord knows how much for some lackeys business permit, and an additional half to million dollars to design and build out all the environmental crap (storm water, excess traffic fees, air handling and cleaning fees, NOx emmission credits purchase or fees if it’s gas fired, ad nauseum).
So there you are, needing to sell something on the line of 200,000 $10 coffee mugs just to break even on expenses, not even considering the in-production overhead costs (wages, health, OASHA compliance), and because of “Free Trade Agreements” agreed to by dog excrement swilling politicians your competitor merely faxes or emails an order for 500,000 of the same mugs to some schmuck in Zangschwing province China at Peoples Reeducation Ceramic Facility #324534 for $0.65/apiece, sells them for $8.99 and you’re screwed.
To add insult to injury, unless you greased the right palms for some sort of tax break here and are a large company, you have an additional 25%+ tax burden over PRCF #324534 costs, but on the opposite end of it the government takes 0 risk on the downside of the equation so when you go bust they say “Oh, to bad, time to think up something else that might make a buck utilizing YOUR capital with YOU taking the RISK, and don’t forget after going through our cornholing all over again to send us our cut if you heaven forbid actually do make money”...