My dollar buys a whole lot more gasoline than it did two years ago.
Yes it does. It is because we are in a the throws of deflation. Each month the FED sells, at the allowance of congress, given to the Department of Treasury, and they, in turn, delegate the FED to sell 40 billion dollars worth of bonds. That means they sell debt. The sell dollars. The FED even pays the international banks to take that purchase and sell it for them. Some goes to Japan, some to china, mostly to the banks. The problem is that since QE began the FED has sold 4.6 trillion dollars and yet, they fail to induce even a modicum of inflation. They want an inflation rate of about 2%, yet with all of the FED selling dollars they cannot do it. The FED can hardly break even the dollar. Where does it all go? Let me let you in on a secret. With the printing we all would expect inflation to be soaring. But NO! It is because though they print 40 billion per month, this country incurs debt at an even greater rate. We are in the middle of a debt bubble unlike anything the world has ever seen. And it is about to rupture. It did rupture on Sept. 16, 2008. That day the FED injected over 500 billion dollars and then closed down the markets. They broke the dollar. In other words the money markets (denominated in dollars) dropped below $1.00. The dollar became worth less than a dollar. The spiral downward had started and the only way they could stop it was to stop trading. The money markets seized-up. If it had not, there was no way to tell if the dollar would drop to .75 or .55. Trillions were lost that day.
And that was a much less complex problem then than it is today.
When it does begin that downward acceleration (and it may with the devaluation of the yuyuan) there will be no institution on earth which will stem the drop. It will develop faster and uglier than 1929. And it is coming at us like a freight train, and most of us are oblivious.
A little example.......You and your wife need some living room furniture. You go to the store and purchase 1500.00 worth of furnishings. You put down $150 and the store sells your note to a bank to pay them back, interest free over the next 30 months. You just printed, like the FED, $1,350. If you don't default (lose a jobs, incure excess medical bills, have to put unexpected money in repairs for a car, you will slowly wittle down that not and pay it off. Many, many people do not. Even Donald Trump refused to pay his bill on 4 corporations and defaulted. That kind of thing is accelerating all of the time.
Hell has our ticket and its about to cash it in. It is going to get ugly. War, famine, food shortages, civil upheaval. As you said your comedy (gasoline) is going down. So is diesel, gold, silver, cattle, orange juice, .....all commodities. We say it is cheap now. But when food producers (beef, corn, beans, etc) cannot buy diesel and fertilize to raise their crops, and the trucker cannot buy diesel to truck it to the food processor, then the diesel is not available to truck it to the outlets and stores the problems will become unmanageable very, very quickly. Get out of debt. Do not allow normalcy bias victimize you. See things as they are, not as you and I wish them to be.