You’ve probably heard about the $20 burrito as a measure of our enserfment. The “evening out at Taco Bell” depicted in Demolition Man all those years ago isn’t sci-fi anymore. It’s just sans the live music and nice tablecloths. Well, I’ve got another measure of our enserfment: The cost of a load of firewood.
I live in rural SW Virginia, where most of us use firewood to keep warm in winter, partially because it’s cozy but also because it’s either free – if you have wood on your land you can cut for firewood – or cheaper to buy than it is to pay for propane or (God help you) electricity, if you have a heat pump or (far worse) baseboard heating.
It isn’t anymore.
When I moved to where I live now in the early 2000s, if you needed to buy a load of firewood (a load being a full-sized dump truck of split wood) it cost $250. That same load today costs $500. Well, it did last year. God only knows what it costs now, thanks to Trump’s taking us to war with Iran. The dump trucks generally burn diesel and chainsaws/log splitters burn gas. When the cost of diesel and gas goes up, so does the cost of cutting/splitting and delivering firewood. So now people who used to able to keep warm in winter inexpensively no longer can – unless they’re still able to cut and split their own wood on their own land. The ones who can’t get to pay for the war – again. First at the pump and then when the truck with the load of wood shows up.
Anyone with eyes to see can see what is happening. We are being eaten up – like a termite riddled house – by the rising cost of necessities. It used to be that people could kind of offset the cost of things by spending less on some things. There used to be, for instance, cheap food. Have you priced a box of Cream of Wheat recently? It’s more than $5 at Wal Mart. How about an evening out at Taco Bell? Order a bag of burritos for the family and you’ll probably leave the drive-through at least $40 lighter. Back in the early 2000s, a $20 would buy more food at Taco Bell than you could eat. More than a couple of guys could eat.
Today, a trip through the drive-thru costs as much as a couple of good steaks used to. How far away are we from that scene in Soylent Green? Do you remember? Charleton Heston’s old mentor – played by Edward G. Robinson – finagled a steak, which was an almost unheard-of luxury item for all but the “elite” who ran the world.
The cruel irony is we’re getting exactly what we Voted Harder to not get – which is probably exactly why we’re getting it. Trump put the reds (as they are now interestingly styled; at one time, red was the color associated with Communism while blue was the color of its opposition; that changed – somehow – sometime around Reagan’s second term and since then red has been the color of the Republicans) to sleep by promising to not do (and to reverse) the things the blues (the real reds) typically do. This put the reds in the position of having to defend everything they didn’t Vote Harder to get but got anyhow or repudiate the man who betrayed them, which many are hard-pressed to do because they fear it will lead to the blues regaining power. 
That seems to be a fait accompli regardless. It was probably “the plan” Trump and his paladins urged the reds to trust. What have they got planned next? It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that if the midterms go blue, the reds – Trump – may say the results are invalid (and maybe they will be; how could we tell given no-ID requirements and no paper ballots to check?) and pull a Zelensky, which of course is likely to incite the civil unrest via the blues that is perhaps the plan. In order to give Trump the pretext to declare himself President for Life and impose martial law.
Or he may just drop the Big One, which he has already blatantly threatened to do. If he does either thing, an evening out at Taco Bell is likely to become even more of a rare treat than it was in the movie – and keeping warm this winter even more so.
. . .
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Inflation is the very purpose of fiat currency. There is no other reason to use it.
I got a letter from my health insurance company a couple of days ago. My policy will not be offered next year and I can be enrolled in a replacement policy. The cost will be $33K per year for 2 people with approx $10K per person deductible. Of course, the policy covers nothing except a flimsy wellness exam (which I hate because they just want to order blood work and they generally don’t touch you). So basically $33K for a catastrophic policy and the total cost before any benefits are received would be $53K.
The Rs passed a bill last year about this time that they promised would lower health insurance premiums by 11%. This insurance policy is up 26%. It was up 20% last year and 10% the year before.
Think I’m voting for a single R this year? Not a chance.
Maybe Luigi could be induced to write this company a stern letter from prison, since he’s got nothin’ to lose, but still enjoys some serious street cred.
‘We are being eaten up by the rising cost of necessities.’ — eric
America has seen it before — the post WW II inflation; the Vietnam War inflation which really took off after the oil shocks of the Seventies. Today it’s the Israel permawars inflation.
All of these happened after that fatal transition in 1943, when Treasury debt overtook gold as the largest asset of the Federal Reserve. Today gold is literally just a footnote on the Fed’s balance sheet, still carried at a negligible $42 an ounce — one percent of its market value. This is appropriate, since much of the Fed’s unaudited gold is unmarketable, being only 90 percent pure, and probably isn’t there at all.
Inflation is not going away. Now the Uniparty runs a permanent, baseline annual deficit of $2 trillion. It will rapidly metastasize to $3 billion or even $5 billion in the next economic crisis. The Federal Reserve will ‘buy’ this debt with kited checks and add it to the
moneycurrency supply. This allows the bankrupt US fedgov to ‘service’ its $1 trillion annual interest bill by borrowing those payments too.Note that in a ‘fiercely contended’ [so they tell us] midterm election, fiscal responsibility is not even on the menu from either wing of the welfare/warfare party. We have reached the Weimar stage of currency debasement, in which everyone agrees that ‘there is no alternative’ to spinning the wheels ever faster in a joyous blur of paper confetti.
The contentious French, with a centuries-long tradition of happy rioting, are hurling paving stones in the street to protest that everything is trop cher [too costly]. Impressively, they burnt down the 19th century town hall in Limoges.
What will it take to make browbeaten Americlowns riot for
breadDoritos, Cheez-its and Little Debbie cakes? Evidently, the Uniparty is hell-bent on finding out. 🙁You go out on Saturday night
You spend too much money on wine
Well I work hard all week long
And I gotta have a little fun sometimes
We′ll get ahead someday
We’ll get ahead someday
If the sun comes up
And we both cut down
We′ll get ahead someday
— Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton, We’ll Get Ahead Someday (1968)
Errata: $3 billion to $5 billion –> $3 trillion to $5 trillion [annual deficit]
Hey, who’s counting?
“…in the early 2000s, if you needed to buy a load of firewood (a load being a full-sized dump truck of split wood) it cost $250. That same load today costs $500.”
They’ve tripled the M2 money supply since the 2009 crash. And it’s gone up about 40% since the COVID hoax.
It’s as simple as that. They printed more money, thereby increasing the cost of everything and simultaneously devaluing your “savings.” It’s a stealth tax that they used to pay for the 2009 crash and for COVID. It enabled them to run up a $40 trillion debt and pay bondholders back with inflated dollars.
Both parties did it.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/m2sl
Funny how the key economic data changes over time. After Milton Friedman’s assertion, way back in 1963, that ‘Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,’ the Thursday evening money supply report was followed with bated breath in the inflationary 1970s.
Today the monthly labor report is the make-or-break statistic, whereas you won’t read about the metastasizing M2 money supply even on economically oriented sites.
How convenient for the currency counterfeiters! Got wheelbarrows?