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Love it!
If you watch the MSM, you’re like someone locked in a dark room who’s being told the sun has been extinguished. Weeping, wailing, afraid–whyncha look out the window?!? In reality, it’s a beautiful day.
It’s a beautiful YEAR, my friend. In one week, we will have completed 9 full months of the Trump Presidency. None of the terrible things forecasted by the Left, or the MSM, but I repeat myself, have happened. Every doom-and-gloom prediction has turned out to be false. Women are not being – well, I don’t know exactly what the Women’s March people were saying would happen, but it was supposed to be terrible, and it hasn’t happened. Gays are not being rounded up and sent to gulags like Maddow said. All these terrible things just haven’t happened.
Things are – actually and truly – much better than they were a year ago. Much better, by any standard you choose. Imagine how much better their lives would be if they would only open their eyes and look around!
I’m not happy about that inflation rate.
I just checked. The inflation rate is 2.2%, 0.2% more than the target rate. So it’s slow motion government theft rather than just hitting you over the head with a billy club and taking your money. Why slow motion theft (2% inflation) is better than no theft (0% inflation), no one has ever been able to explain to me.
Remember pious Jimmy Carter and “stagflation”?
I was trying to earn a living then.
Inflation is a response to growth. It’s important to not worry about it so much that the government thinks it has to “fix” things. We have to settle into a healthy feedback loop on the economy and let things stabilize.
It’s the wrong response, and due to govt trying to fix things.
For example, I’m opposed to the inflation deliberately caused by the fed’s bond-buying program – something it had no business doing.
I’ll take the growth. I too don’t think fixed inflation is a given, but this is what we have.
I’m a little confused guys: Inflation is a normal thing. It’s the shadow behind growth.
I’m not sure this is true. Inflation has other causes, too.
Here is a screenshot from a Business Insider article.
It suggests to me that inflation is correlated more with the growth of government than the growth of the economy.
Government can make it worse that’s for sure. My point is that it is never zero — that’s all.
If we had 0.2 percent inflation, I wouldn’t consider it worth complaining about.
Exactly, Larry. Inflation actually helps business, which needs all the help it can get after 8 years of Obummer.
I say 2.2% is actually good, because if business can’t get a little price growth, they will decrease the size of the package or the size of the product. That’s still inflation. If a business has to cover the rising cost of insurance, regulations, fuel, etcetera, how else do they do it?
Optimism is good news, we just have to be wary of what happens after everyone gets happy and optimistic…
So buy when despondent and sell when euphoric, such a simple rule! :-(
You don’t mean clothes or shoes or knick-knacks, I presume. Just to be clear to a certain subset of the audience…. (-:
You’ve met me, Phil. You should know I’m only partly a dumbass.
One. Rising prices are not necessarily the same thing as inflation.
Two. How did they manage between the civil war and wwi, which was a time of huge growth and little or no inflation?
B-b-b-b-b-but Black Lives Matters! The Resistance! War on Women! Tweeting! Collusion!….
Let’s put it in perspective. This chart covers January 1913 – September 2017:
What’s the perspective? That there’s been inflation almost every year since the Fed was created to control it?
Ok then, I guess you convinced me. I’ll be grumpy that the thing that cost me a dollar last year now costs me a dollar and two cents. But I’m blaming Putin!
How about I made it through 7 years of school (college at a very expensive school, and law school at Tennessee) owing $3k? I did it by working in the summers. No one can do that now.
It’s not necessarily a normal thing. One of the greatest periods of economic expansion in American history was also accompanied by deflation. This time period also brought us a 25% increase in wages and many technological innovations that allowed for a shorter work day/week and greater production. This period was the late-Victorian era between 1876 and 1910 according to Prof. Jackson Lears. The Left begrudgingly has to point this out because it is pretty much the up-ender of all their Keyensian BS. There were hardly any labor unions, particularly in the early decades of this period, no income tax, and no central bank and the U.S. was leaps and bounds more free during this time.
If the economy really does take off because of new investment, we have to watch inflation carefully. The money base has ballooned but the supply has been restrained by stagnation. The monetary base could explode into money. We’ll have to be ready to cut spending and allow interest rates to climb again don’t you think?
There is actually a lot in this graph. You can chart when the US ended a major military excursion, when the economy had a tremendous downturn, and when the people began to think they were coming out of it. But over the course of the chart the trend line has been virtually the same, just above zero percent.
I would say the number one cause of inflation since the FED has been manipulation of money supply and detaching that money supply from a fixed source of value, gold for instance. If you can “pump” any amount of currency into the market with no constraints on how much or how that currency is valued, then your inflation from “other causes” become negligible.