For those who believed in Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" mantra, life is getting tough. Not only is their paycheck eroding through unemployment, underemployment, or the cessation of Federal Benefits, but now they are getting a double whammy with the erosion of their buying power from the ever growing inflation rate.
The rich? Well, they're just a little less rich.
Our good friends over at ShadowStats.com tell us that while the baseline CPI has risen to a ridiculous 5.39% for the year, the true inflation rate is 13.4% (as originally measured before they politicized the number), and the Cost of Living Adjustment is 13.9%. Those are staggering numbers and they are driving people into even greater poverty as opposed to lifting them out by taking from the rich.
In fact, the inflation is getting so bad that even the mainstream media is beginning to cover it. CBS' affiliate in Minneapolis is reporting the following quantity changes with no price drop:
Oatmeal packets of 10 cut to eight for some varieties
Tuna cans from seven to five ounces
Family size cereals slimming down from 19.3 ounces to 18.8 ounces
Breyers ice cream is going from 64 ounces to 48 along WITH a 25% price hike
As Kim Sovell says in the article linked below, "We check prices every time we shop but we rarely check weight."
Then there are outright price hikes. According to the same article: "the maker of Huggies diapers and Cottonelle toilet paper announced it will charge 4% to 9% more through 2022. Proctor and Gamble, behind products like Gillette Razors and Tide detergent, is also looking at price spikes."
Others Include:
Rental cars: 42.9%
Gas: 42.1%
Used cars: 24.4%
Hotels: 18%
TVs: 12.7%
Furniture: 11.2%
Meats, poultry, fish and eggs: 10.5%
New cars: 8.7%
Appliances: 7.1%
Electricity: 5.2%
Restaurant prices: 4.7%
Rent: 2.9%
That's quite a ways from Jen Psaki's flippant statement that it's a tragedy that a rich persons treadmill did not come in. This, "tragedy of the treadmill" remark is particularly callous in my opinion because she was specifically asked about the above figures and how they are impacting real and average people.
Look, when you artificially manipulate the market, the market reacts to cover its new costs and expenses. Give people free money for not working, then the prices go up because they are not producing so what is being produced costs more. Increase "environmental compliance" costs, and you get a higher cost in the grocery store et al. Increase the labor costs because that is what it takes to get someone to come to work during COVID, then those cost increases have to be paid by someone.
Economists the world over manipulate the numbers to attempt to make it look like either a) companies DON'T raise prices as costs increase or b) are at fault for the raising prices because they are, "taking advantage of a situation to make profit." Yet, in the end, that is why businesses exist, and while some would call it "anecdotal," the current economic reality that we are living in shows once again that there is AT LEAST a correlation (I would argue causation) between increased market interference and increased consumer costs.
Should businesses, who I should remind you are not churches, really relinquish profits in order to "take care of people" out of their own and their shareholder's pockets?
No, they're trying to keep their profits, of course. A company does not owe it to anyone to make less profit simply because of COVID-19 or any other reason, and only a idealist of the most extreme version could even imagine a scenario in which some, let alone many, of the companies in the world would see it that way. "All of them" is such a ludicrous pipe dream that I will not even entertain it in my discussion.
People are suffering because of the policies of this President, period. His party's staunch refusal to support the building of any new fuel refineries in the United States, his anti-energy policies (canceling the Keystone-XL pipeline, re-closing ANWAR, supporting cap & trade, rejoining the Paris climate accords, putting out unrealistic emissions goals while knowing they are unreasonable and unfeasible), his anti-manufacturing policies (cap & trade, heavy handed environmental regulations, growing minimum wages, heavy handed and almost anti-trucking regulations), and, of course, his massive COVID policies and mandates that are causing unnecessary labor shortages in a market that already is stretched to the breaking point.
It seems like the only thing left for him to do is light a match and throw it on top of the gasoline soaked paper pile that he's built. The economy is about that fragile right now.
Oh wait, the TRILLION plus dollar "infrastructure" plan is still pending, guess we know which match it is that he'll throw.
What you are currently feeling and experiencing is the cause and effect of socialistic policies. Time and time again idealists have neglected to accept the basic tenant of human self sufficiency (greed as they call it) as a factor into their utopian ideals. In their mind, if they feel that a company should make no profit in order to care for those in need, then everyone else, particularly the company, should feel the same way. Except the companies do not feel that way, and neither do most people...
So the socialistic trending crowd sits stunned.
You see, they just cannot accept that people disagree with them, and so their response is to do the heavy governmental hand thing and force people to comply. Except that the more you do that, the more workarounds people will find, and the higher the number of people who WILL work around simply because they do not want to be constricted.
As has been written and said many times throughout history, if you build a better mouse trap, the only thing you build is a better mouse.
That's what these socialists and government cheerleaders will never understand. People who do not share your idealism, which is most of them out there, will always find a way to get around whatever government barrier you put up. Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and others have proven over and over again that they'll just come up with something else to place value on and set up black markets. You can legislate behavior to a point, but you cannot legislate belief or acceptance of an ideal.
This, more than anything else, is what upsets them. It is what they least understand about how things work when the conservatives regain control of the government. They truly believe that their idealism should have inspired you to agree with them. They'll never understand that it is their idealism, or refusal to accept the reality that is, that is the problem.
They're simply too invested in their belief.
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