Thanks to Elizabeth Renter at NerdWallet, we have a striking application of 2021-2022 market metrics, revealing just how dramatically prices are rising in response to another decade-plus of Fed money-supply inflation and D.C. pander-spending on everything from useless “green tech” to unconstitutional military handouts for the Ukraine war.
Using Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) data from the close of 2020 to mid-2022, Renter calculated the costs for real people. And it’s as ugly as the Biden administration is deceptive.
Since 2020, inflation has added $961/month to the average household’s preexisting expenses, which equates to $11,532 a year - or nearly 19% - more for the same standard of living.
And even that doesn’t calculate qualitative downturns in products or services one might have gotten at the end of 2020 versus today, or take into account slight shifts in purchasing behavior caused by things like the government-imposed lockdowns.
As Renter writes:
“It’s worth calling out — spending was a bit unusual in 2020. People spent less on commuting, child care and entertainment, for example, and more on home improvements. It’s a safe assumption that people will spend less in certain categories this year too, if for no other reason than avoiding high prices. This is primarily why we think spending in 2022 will be more similar to 2020 than 2019, for example, another year for which such spending data was available.”
But let’s go with the numbers on their own, and explore:
“In all of 2020, American households spent $61,300, on average. This number includes everything we spend our money on: housing, food, entertainment, clothing, transportation and everything else. In 2022, it stands to reach $72,900, a difference of more than $11,500 if consumers want to maintain the same standard of living. Keep in mind, this is an average, a number that represents an approximation across all Americans, but one that’s exact to a very few. Those who earn (and therefore spend) more will see more dramatic dollar increases. Those who earn less may see less dramatic dollar jumps, but the impact of these rising prices could be more significantly felt.”
And, one must remember, this is for U.S. price increases so far. It’s possible that the Green-agenda-meets-Ukraine-fandom economic self-destruction of many Eurozone nations and the concomitant devaluation of the Euro and European national sub-currencies could promote the U.S. Federal Reserve Note (aka the “Dollar”) as a relatively safer haven, but U.S. government mandates, taxation, and reckless favoritism have crushed American productivity, so the old playbook for the U.S. economy might not be in the cards.
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Is it any wonder why boosters of Big Government have been promoting people like Biden’s 2021 nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, the former student at Moscow State University who thirsts for a CBDC or “Central Bank Digital Currency”?
Is it any wonder that Biden in March issued Executive Order 14067, commanding his Attorney General “in consultation with” the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to produce a strategy to create and adopt a Central Bank Digital Currency?
That would be a "reset" currency which, as China has shown, the central government or its monopoly central bank can extract from your account (recall Cyprus taking money from people’s accounts in a “bail-in” circa 2013), a currency that the central government can deem off-limits for spending on certain “verboten” goods or activities, and a currency that the central authorities can even claim will “expire” unless spent by a certain date, thus claiming additional power over “consumer demand” numbers and the favored sectors or corporations the political players target.
More than 20 years ago, libertarian author and medical doctor F. Paul Wilson wrote a novella entitled “Aryans and Absinth,” which you can find in his 2012 collection called “Aftershock and Others.” Effortlessly recalling the hedonistic recklessness of the pre-crash leftists in Weimar Germany, Wilson did something else that was very cagey: he made inflation the unseen “monster” of the tale, using exchange rates between the Mark and the Dollar as a form of chapter breaks, as the inflation in Germany quickly became hyper-price-increases, madness ensued, and scapegoats were targeted.
We already see the madness in the U.S. system. It’s been around since the dawn of time, in the form of hubristic politicians thinking they can tell people how to live, what to buy, how to work, and what kind of money they can use in their peaceful exchanges.
These 2022 price numbers might send a shiver down the spine of anyone who has read “Aryans and Absinth” but, likewise, one need not have read the tale to know the monster – monsters, plural – who have been eating up the buying power of our hard-earned income.
We need the freedom to escape their currency and their political control over a nation many of them cynically call "the land of the free."
Related: Crypto Crosscut? Federal Reserve Points Itself Towards Digital 'Money' | MRCTV