Tag: inflation

Ticking Time-Bomb: Food Inflation Is Crushing Millions Of Low Income Americans

In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”  The sentiment was expressed right on the heals of a banking crisis which led to the Panic of 1907.  The event was widely blamed on a liquidity crunch, and this same crisis was used as a rationale for the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913-1916.  Of course, it is the central bank and its ability to generate fiat money from thin air (unbacked liquidity) that has led the US to the stagflationary disaster we face today.  The “solutions” offered by establishment elites are often worse than the problems they are supposed to solve.  

The total inflationary damage done to Americans consumers since 2020 varies according to who you ask.  Stats from the Federal Reserve and government are muddled in a series of creative mathematics in order to make the situation look much better than it is.  CPI is not a valid indicator of true inflation given it is watered down with over 80,000 items and services, and many of them are not necessities for the common US household.  If we look only at necessities like housing, food and energy, the economic picture looks increasingly bleak.

Food, as Alfred Lewis noted, is particularly vital to civil cohesion.  The human body can in fact survive up to three weeks without a meal, but the vast majority of people in the first world are not acclimated to such conditions and might just panic after one or two days without sustenance.  

The potential for this scenario might sound exaggerated to those in a higher income bracket, but it’s important for these people to understand that a 25%-50% increase in food costs for them is not the same as a similar increase for people on a low or fixed income.  For example, food price increases for the average middle-class to upper-middle-class households amount to around 11% of their annual income in 2023.  However, for people in the low income bracket, food costs now amount to 31% of their annual income.  That’s a pile driver to the wallet.

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NY Times’ Paul Krugman says ‘inflation is over’ — if you exclude food, gas and rent

Paul Krugman’s assertion that “the war on inflation is over” if you exclude food, energy, shelter, and used cars is being mocked online.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist posted the comment on his X social media account on Thursday.

“The war on inflation is over,” Krugman wrote in the caption, adding: “We won, at very little cost.”

Krugman attached a graph titled “CPI ex food, energy, shelter and used cars” that showed a declining rate stretching from 7% in January of last year to slightly below 2% in September.

The reaction on X to Krugman’s post was scathing, with critics noting that the Labor Department’s consumer price index (CPI) — the most widely used by economists to gauge prices faced by consumers — factors in those day-to-day living expenses.

“This is fantastic news for all Americans who don’t need food, a place to live, or fuel & electricity,” wrote Tim Murtaugh.

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Can’t Afford Groceries In Biden’s America? Wall Street Journal Says Just Don’t Eat!

As many Americans struggle to put food on the table, The Wall Street Journal proposed an idea this week: Instead of Biden taking responsibility for his destructive public policy, you should just skip breakfast.

Titled “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast,” the article analyzed three popular breakfast foods — eggs, juice, and cereal — and offered explanations for why they cost significantly more since last year. According to the Journal, eggs are up a whopping 70 percent, frozen orange juice is up more than 12 percent, and cereal is up 15 percent since just one year ago.

Why the crippling increases? The explanations were as plentiful as they were diverse: avian flu, bad weather, citrus disease, dead chickens, and Vladimir Putin.

Global food supply includes a myriad of liabilities and moving parts, and of course, a drop in supply will play in role in rising prices. But the Journal neglected to mention perhaps the most important contributor to Americans’ economic woes: Biden’s apparently limitless federal spending.

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Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

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Inflation Used To Squeeze The Middle Class. Now It’s Hitting The Poor The Hardest

The primary burden of inflation has shifted from middle class to low-income households thanks to a shift in the spending categories hardest hit by price hikes, according to a study published Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

At the onset of rising inflation in the spring of 2021, middle-income households, defined as those earning between $50,000 and $150,000 per year, bore the brunt of inflation as they purchased more used cars and gasoline than other demographics, according to the New York Fed. However, as the cost of gas falls and the price of food and housing surges, lower-income households, defined as those earning less than $50,000, now face higher effective costs — roughly 0.3 percentage points higher than average — since they spend a larger portion of their income on food and housing than middle and high-income households.

“As of December 2022, the bottom 40 percent have the highest year-on-year inflation rate of the three groups, and the inflation rate of the middle-income group is below the national average,” the report reads. “It is likely the case that the same rate of inflation represents a greater welfare loss for lower-income than higher-income households because of the former’s lower capacity for substituting to less expensive goods, greater liquidity constraints, and larger marginal utility of real income.”

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Things We Should Understand: The Aristocracy Is Eating The Peasants

Most people (especially most Americans) still seem to view the events of the past half-century as more or less random.

Booms and busts erupting out of nowhere, impoverishing all but a handful of lucky elites. Political crises that end up dividing rather than uniting. Wars that cost fortunes and resolve nothing. Everything is bad, and nothing is related to anything else.

But of course that’s not true. Each of the above events serves the same purpose: to enrich a modern aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. And the endgame is looking even worse.

To see the scam play out, let’s go back to 1995. Two decades previously, in 1971, the US and by extension the world had ditched sound, gold-backed money in favor of “fiat” currencies that their governments, via their central banks, could create in infinite quantities out of thin air. The result was spiking inflation and exchange rate chaos in the 1970s and soaring government deficits in the 1980s.

By the 1990s it had become clear to the people running major governments and big corporations that unsound money would lead to unsustainable debt, which in turn would destabilize the financial world and bring about a hyperinflationary depression followed by a French Revolution-style reckoning for those responsible.

That generation’s elites were thus left with two choices:

  1. Return to the gold standard and avoid monetary collapse — but at the cost of giving up the ability to create money at will.
  2. Or use their fictitious currencies to steal as much real wealth as possible from the peasants and let future elites deal with the eventual collapse.

They, as the sociopaths we now know them to be, chose the second strategy.

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Fed Blames Inflation on Americans ‘Splurging’ on Goods — Not the Trillions of Dollars they Printed

A few weeks ago, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen appeared on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert to discuss a range of issues both political and personal.

The most widely reported moment in the interview came when Yellen talked about practicing her signature (don’t ask me why this is newsworthy, I have no idea). However, a significantly more important moment has not gotten the attention it deserves.

When asked by Colbert to explain the reasons behind the worst inflation the US has experienced in 40 years, the former Federal Reserve chair blamed it primarily on rising consumer spending—Americans “splurging” on goods—at the start of 2021 once the Covid-19 lockdowns were lifted. This, compounded with supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine can sufficiently explain inflation, Yellen claims.

But can it really? Let’s take a closer look.

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American voters don’t need Russian trolls to tell them how bad things are

As US voters head to the polls for the much-anticipated Midterms, talk of Russian trolls monkeying with US democracy is back in the news. But does the country really need Russia’s help in “stoking anger” among the electorate?

If the hyper-liberal New York Times can be taken at face value just two days before an epic election, Russia’s underground army of trolls is, once again, attempting to seed the minds of malleable US voters to the Kremlin’s advantage. If those charges sounded outlandish in 2016, when the Democrats accused Russian ‘influencers’ of denying Hillary Clinton the presidency, they seem doubly so today.

The Times reported that the goal of the reactivated Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg is to “stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system.” Judging by the looks of things, the Russians are a bit late to the party. It would be hard to name another period in US politics when the level of anger and distrust has been so extreme, and that is something the Russian trolls, despite their supposed superhuman abilities, can’t take credit for.

Take inflation, for example, the single most pressing issue among US voters. It doesn’t require any sort of Russian mind-bending operation to inform Americans that the economic situation is deteriorating before their eyes, and has been ever since Biden entered office. They only need to look at their food and utility bills each month, and the price at the gas pump, to feel fury for what the Biden administration has done to the economy in a shockingly short period of time. Any effort to blame these negative sentiments on “the Russians” is just another way of the Democrats saying that soaring prices is “disinformation” and unworthy of your attention.

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