Nordic wrote:C2W, what are you SMOKING?
You're actually looking at the CPI for signs of inflation? Do you actually keep yourself informed about what's going on in the world?
I mean, c'mon.
Food prices have hit higher prices since the disastrous level of 2008.
I shouldn't even have to link this for you.
But here, just today:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/wal-ma ... -inflation
I do actually keep myself informed about what's going on in the world. And I noted back around when Obama was elected that all the corporate oligarchs started shrieking about how we had to prepare for serious inflation, by which they meant:
"OMG, deficit spending must be cut for no very clear reason that we can explain! Get rid of social security!"
Times are hard. Very, very hard. And it's my opinion that economically, they're going to be getting much, much worse -- although that's just my opinion, not a prediction.
I'm sorry that you don't like the Consumer Price Index. If you want, I can link to one of the other ones. But whether you look at Producer Price Index numbers, or Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index numbers, or real GDP numbers, or unemployment numbers, or any set of numbers you care to name that can be indexed and used as a measure of inflation, you'll see the exact same thing everywhere:
Overall, the economy is flat and inflation is minimal.
But in reality, the middle class is disappearing and we're headed back to a pre-Great-Society, pre-New-Deal, pre-basically-World-War-One three-tiered economy, with (a) few robber barons; (b) a modestly sized but highly competitive pool of professional/managerial class; and (c) teeming masses and masses of people who probably won't have any better longterm prospects than they can find at some point on the continuum between economically insecure and desperately impoverished.
That's been happening slowly but noticeably for the last decade-and-a-half or so, it was just concealed by two nearly back-to-back bubbles (dot.com and real estate). Apart from those (and before them, too, actually) people have been having a harder and harder time making a living roughly since Reagan left office.
That's partly because Reagan set up the economy to die a slow and lingering death via stuff like deregulation, and defunding public education, and making it the new universally accepted common wisdom that raising taxes is always an unalloyed evil, and so on and so forth. And it's partly because pretty much every successive administration (w/ the arguable exception of the Bush Sr. presidency, go figure) has been fully on-board with the exact same enriching-the-rich/destroying-the-foundations-of-social-equity agenda ever since.
Clinton contributed NAFTA and got rid of welfare, for example. And apart from consolidating and expanding on his predecessor's legacy, by this point, Obama appears to be absolutely determined to deal some kind of lethal blow to Social Security and health care/Medicare, come hell or high water. But he actually started to show signs of that in his first State of the Union, IIRC. (I think I even may have commented on it in passing in a post at the time, by saying that it seemed striking to me that he didn't mention protecting SS or Medicare or something like that.)
Anyway. If you want to see what's going on with your own eyes in a little more detail,
this here link will take you to one of those Google graphification thingies we all enjoy so much, which you can twiddle around with to see rates of growth (or non-growth) in the trends they use to calculate real GDP -- compensation of employees, personal income per capita, disposable income, taxes and subsidies, and [blah, blah, blah].
It only goes up to 2008, but things haven't changed all that much since then, they've just continued to rot slowly.
Let me know if I've overlooked some particular inflationary measure that's meaningful to you, and I'll try to find it for you. I do know that corporate profits had been up for a number of consecutive quarters, last time I looked, fwiw. Because that's not in the figures I linked to at all, at least per se.
You might want to get caught up on this subject.
I keep an eye on it.
Also, "worthless gold?" It's fiat currency that's worthless. Gold has always been money and always will be.
I said "worthless gold and silver coins," not "worthless gold." And I didn't mean it literally. They actually have negative worth, once you subtract what you paid for them from what the pawnbroker would pay you for the meltdown value.
I don't know if that applies to the gold and silver coin vendors that the NIA is pushing, I should add. I'll go check and report back to you after I have.
It does apply to the one Glenn Beck pushes, though. There's a nice infographic about those with additional links
here. But it's a pretty common scam, they're not the only ones.
Let's just agree to disagree.
