So you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell
Blue skies from pain– “Wish You Were Here,” Pink Floyd
BALTIMORE – Today’s economy no longer seems to work for the average American.
His earnings go down. His debt goes up. He works longer to stay in the same place.
He had to work 990 hours to buy a Ford F-150 pickup in 1976. Forty years later, he has to put in 1,220 hours.
More for Less?
But economists claim he gets a lot more pickup for his money.
They adjust prices for “hedonic quality adjustments.” This allows them to tell us that a $26,000 pickup today is actually worth $36,000. Or more.
We buy a laptop computer for $1,000… and lo!… we have gotten $2,000 worth of computing power.
Economists are full of numbers. And their numbers are all lies.
Using their fake inflation numbers, they fake the numbers for GDP growth, using COLAs (Cost-of-Living Adjustments), TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities), and more.
According to USA Today, monthly Social Security checks will rise a measly $5 in 2017, while Medicare premiums could jump as much as $149 per month.
Breathtaking Flimflam
We asked our expert researcher Nick Rokke to do a bit of recalculating.
What if you figured out the inflation rate the way the government did under the Reagan administration? we asked.
And what if you adjusted today’s GDP for a more honest rate of inflation?
“Wow!” says Nick.
You’d get a “real” (inflation-adjusted) GDP loss of 60% since 1989.
Wow is right… all the growth of the last 27 years disappears. Instead, we’ve been living through a massive depression.
Economists have ruined the economy. The working man knows it.
Deep State scams and rich cronies have walked away with trillions of dollars of other people’s money. There’s a vast assortment of more sleazy giveaways, too, hidden in a pile of federal regulations 80,000 pages high (with Obamacare regulations alone some eight times longer than the Bible!).
Thousands of plums are hidden in that pudding. And somewhere in the great Parasitocracy are lobbyists and insiders who know where they are.
But the man in the street has gotten poorer.
The feds, with their economist enablers, corrupted our money… and twisted the numbers so much, you need a torch and hammer to straighten them out.
And in the mangled numbers they hid a flimflam so grand it takes our breath away – that they can’t tell the difference between Heaven and Hell.
More Is Not the Answer
It wasn’t just the economy they bent. No one could have watched the presidential debates without noticing how our political system has been warped, too.
We’ll be laying out the whole argument in the upcoming issue of our monthly newsletter, The Bill Bonner Letter.
But the short explanation is that cheap credit made it appear as though we could get away with anything.
And if you can get away with anything, you don’t need any cranky old conservatives telling you to “hold on”… “not so fast”… and asking annoying questions, such as, “How are we gonna pay for this?”… “How do we know this will do any good?”… and “Who the hell do you think you are, interfering in other people’s lives like this?”
The feds and their economists can’t tell if anything is really good or bad… better or worse. All they have is the basic 10 digits. They can bend, twist, turn, crunch… and spin them out… any way they want.
Plus or minus. More or less. In their simpleminded way, the feds’ economists figured that more must be better – bigger numbers, they thought, are generally better than littler ones.
So they do all they can to encourage borrowing, spending, making, using, forcing, wars and destruction, burning, diddling, throwing away, subsidizing, outlawing – everything possible to create activity they can measure, mismeasure, and mislead.
Want to recycle old tobacco sticks? Want to take care of your own children? Want to stay at home, plant your garden, tend your chickens, run your life the way you want without some jackass from the government telling you what you need to do…?
Want to sit down and calmly reflect on what is really important to you and your family… and maybe come to the conclusion that more is not the way to Heaven?
What? You don’t want to go to the mall and buy something? What are you? Some kind of kook?
Regards,
Bill
Category: Economics