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Posts Tagged ‘grocery prices’

Their Views On Our Future Prospects

Posted in Thoughts of the Day, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 15, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Their Views On Our Future Prospects

It seems there is no longer any attempt to maintain anything. It’s all being allowed to fall apart. The thinking appears to be highly short-term. There used to be consideration for both the short and the long term. Instead, there is this sense that everyone is trying to butcher the cash cow and get their share of the meat before it’s gone. There is the sense that people are trying to wring all the blood out of the middle class. But wringing the middle class out of its discretionary income through inflation and higher interest rates has long-term repercussions and I doubt the rich and the economists are too stupid to realize this. For example, what will the banks be left with if people can no longer afford to maintain their homes? A surefire way to ruin a house is to allow the roof to deteriorate. What will happen when the middle class can no longer afford to buy the goods from small businesses — the major, still existing employer of American citizens? Can they really not realize the domino effect that will ensue if they rid us of all our money? Or, is it they believe we are transitioning away from the economic paradigm we had all grown up with, and it will soon be replaced by one with extreme wealth coupled with extreme poverty? Where the majority work for no more than room and board — if we’re fortunate enough to afford even that much?

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Whose Money Is It Again?

Posted in Thoughts of the Day, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Whose Money Is It Again?

It’s pretty clear to me that one of the major reasons people vote for big government spenders is that they are hoping to get a slice of the pie for themselves. It can be overwhelming when the propagandists get to talking about trillions of dollars. It feels as though there is a limitless supply of money to be had. But in actuality, there couldn’t possibly be.

I noticed that they sold out our industrial base in the 1990s. I figure that’s largely why Millennials and Gen Z have very few career opportunities that require a college degree now. Those jobs were given away before many of them were born. I realized that a college degree would have a limited payoff attached to it when the 2000s came upon us. But there were still some careers worth having then — that were still worth the college price tag — if you had the talent to separate yourself from the pack. But that’s not the case so much anymore. What we seem to have left are largely unskilled labor jobs. And they are currently flooding those mostly service jobs with labor from other countries. This, of course, will drive up prices for goods like food while suppressing wages. Meanwhile, the service industry is liable to take a hit with the inflation and interest rate hikes eroding the discretionary income of the lower and middle classes. Isn’t that likely to reduce even the unskilled service jobs? Also, the wages aren’t likely to increase if labor is being brought in to compete with domestic workers. This wouldn’t be so distressing if our cost of living weren’t so disproportionately out of sync with our income. And it seems clear that we US citizens aren’t welcome to just go to countries with better jobs or lower costs of living. American citizens are tied to the land. We are not allowed to follow the jobs to other countries. This apparently isn’t the case for citizens of other countries in regards to the United States.

And as an aside, what brought about the re-evaluation of house values that drastically increased the cost of houses not just in regional hot spots but all across the country? Since we middle/lower classes actually have to live in our houses then anything we gain by the price hike will likely be taken away at the other end.

Anyway, we are being told the inflation is due to an increase in domestic demand. But how can that be? If the prices were just a matter of domestic demand, then how can they exceed the amount people are able to pay? I’ve heard that some facets of the economy such as social media and tech companies had been paying quite a bit. But enough to inflate the entire economy? What did these people with substantial incomes do? Start eating copious amounts of food? I doubt that. It seems more likely to me that the inflation is a result of government overspending, competition with wealthier nations such as China, and supply restrictions.

And by the way, when the government overspends the money it isn’t being reinvested in the United States. They begrudge spending the money on us. East Palestine, Ohio and the fire in Maui demonstrated that.

No, we are supposed to fund our own disaster relief with our nonexistent discretionary incomes. We are supposed to pay for our own security now that they’ve defunded the police. When they mandate prohibitively expensive furnaces we have to buy those. (“Biden Announces Restrictions on Gas Furnaces,” 2023) These mandated furnaces are also not as highly rated as the former models. Meanwhile, they are too busy spending the collective funds of the United States, which had allowed the middle and lower classes to live an acceptable standard of living without having to be wealthy, on their own agendas (which also happens to be the agendas of the globalists) to bother with our welfare. If our society, infrastructure, and services deteriorate, we will just have to suck it up. Safety, what’s that? Hygiene? That’s not necessary — not for us anyway. Luxuries like those are only meant for the people who can afford them — so says the people who rule over us with their mansions and private jets.

Biden Announces Restrictions on Gas Furnaces. (2023, October 3). IER. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/regulation/biden-announces-restrictions-on-gas-furnaces/

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Inflation Rate Blues

Posted in Thoughts of the Day, tagged , on December 18, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The latest inflation figures provided by Consumer Affairs/Datasembly show a 5.3% increase in grocery prices for 2023. Last year the price increase was 25.5%. So the inflation increase rate has slowed. The article by Justin Klawans entitled: “2023: the year of sticker shock” suggests that this is a good thing and that regular people should see it as the improvement that it is. But alas, apparently we’re too unsophisticated and ignorant to appreciate economics. We’re too hung up on the prices we’re paying — which are incidentally eroding our discretionary income — to grasp the beauty of the rate of inflation increase slowing down — not stopping mind you just slowing down. And we actually have the nerve to compare the prices to the pre-COVID numbers as well. How stupid is that! Everyone knows that that world no longer exists! What I didn’t realize is one of the symptoms of COVID was inflation. Silly me.

One of the things I found interesting in the article is the implication that our expectations are too high. What we’ve been wanting is deflation — where the prices actually go back down. Silly us. Of course, we should instead be satisfied that the prices, though still rising, are rising slower than before. Call me crazy, but I never thought the prices would continue to rise at the absurd rate they had been rising.

But the fact of the matter is we are paying a cumulative rate of inflation. Yes, they would prefer we just compare the prices to last year instead of pre-COVID. But really, what sense does that make? It’s like a sinking ship that’s already taken on a lot of water. They would have you focus on the rate of the ongoing leak rather than measure the standing water in the hold. And once again, the leak is still ongoing; the ship is merely not taking on water as quickly as it had before. What is troubling though is the captain and the crew appear to believe this is good enough. While the boat is continuing to take on water, they not only have not stopped the leak, they have no plans to bail out the boat from prior inflationary damage.

There is impracticality in their take on the economic forecast. They want people to focus on the abstract rather than the concrete. But in real life you deal with prices. When you get a bill more than likely you are obligated to pay the full amount. You can’t tell a utility company, I’ll pay 3/4 of the bill but increase my payment rate by 5% month over month and expect to get away with it.

Of course, the author also seems to think that grocery prices are decreasing. How does he figure that? They have increased by 5.3% compared to last year’s baseline according to the figures the author provided.

In the end, it would seem reading between the lines that these high prices are expected to be here to stay. The open question is whether people can actually afford to pay them.

Klawans, Justin. “2023: the year of sticker shock.” THE WEEK US, 14 December 2023,

https://theweek.com/sticker-shock-inflation-2023

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