Inflation of 2.7 percent. LOL! Yeah, right. Who are they trying to kid???
I know for a fact that the house I lived in in 1972 was available for $17,500. Today, it's $150,000. That's almost nine times the price in 40 years. Add up and compound the annual CPI and tell me if it gets us anywhere CLOSE to 900% in 40 years.
In 1970, a cheap car was $2,000. Numerous other products were a LOT cheaper. Gas was typically $0.299 a gallon, (though on a trip across the United States in 1972, I remember we bought gas for 13.9 cents in . . . Arkansas or Oklahoma, I think. That's the cheapest I've ever seen, an aberration I won't use for this post.) Gas today is 13.3 times as expensive as the "twenty-nine-nine" that was typical in Northern California!
What's happened to prepared foods? Unfortunately, I can't be specific. I remember Banquet pot pies were 25 cents. Today, more like a dollar. But are they the same thing? I don't think so.
Banquet chicken TV dinners used to be 15 ounces... with THREE pieces of chicken, as well as potatos and a blend of vegetables. They phased the chicken dinners down to just one piece, then gave them a different name and upped the price. The more generic TV dinners Banquet has now look and taste terrible, weigh about 7 ounces, and sell for $1.25. Unfortunately, I don't remember what the chicken TV dinners used to sell for... but I'd be surprised if they were more than 50 cents.
So, inflation is eating away at us in THREE ways. Smaller products. Crappier products. More expensive products.
As far as I'm concerned, most things needed by typical citizens are ten times as expensive as they were forty years ago. Now I'll have to see if I can figure out what the CPI claims has happened in that time. I bet the CPI will tell us prices are only triple or so what they were back then...
There's a fourth way we're all being ripped off, too. We are being robbed of the production improvements brought about by better technology. NEWS FLASH - Prices don't naturally rise! They FALL!! We get better and better at making things, easier and easier, cheaper and cheaper.
But we're not receiving that benefit, are we? Prices are moving up. They have - ever since 1913, when we moved to a Central Bank and stopped honoring our promise to back money with something real.
We're clearly being lied to, and it's nice to see that the deceit is happening in Europe too.
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