People are complaining as housing costs rise. This teacher can’t afford to buy a home that she wants, but also complains that rent is too expensive, as rent costs nationwide are above $2,000 for the first time ever. But, hey, she doesn’t have to read mean Tweets, so she has that going for her.
“Rents are going up just as fast as home prices are,” says Fairweather. Yes, that is how economics works. People buy houses, then rent them out. If the cost to buy goes up, then so does rent. The same thing happens in restaurants, when the cost of food goes up, the prices at the restaurant go up. It isn’t rocket science. Take a look:
Beginning in February/March of 2021, rents began to skyrocket. Renting a home costs 15% more than it did a year ago. If only we could pinpoint an event that happened in January of 2021 that could be responsible for this rapid increase in housing costs.
It appears as though the Federal government was just getting started. Six months later in May 2021, it was said that 40% of every dollar that has ever existed was created in the preceding 12 months.
Another 5 months later, that had increased to 80 percent of all dollars that have ever existed were printed in the past 22 months.
This is a cycle that causes hyperinflation: Printing more money causes that money to become less valuable. To counter this, more money is printed, which causes it to become less valuable. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
In fact, the Fed printed an average of $27 billion per day in 2020 and put those dollars into circulation.
In 2021, the Fed increased that rate to nearly double that. Of course, most money today isn’t physically printed. It exists only in the electronic minds of computer systems. That’s because no one could physically print that many bank notes.
This out of control creation of money is warping the entire economy. Excluding food and energy, consumer expenses are up 4.9 percent from a year ago. This is the largest increase in 40 years.
According to a friend of mine who works in the banking industry, the Fed governors were recently polled on where they see the Federal funds rate going in the next 24 months. The average was 2 percent.
A two percent increase is a big deal. It also isn’t enough. The greatest impact that higher interest rates will have is on the largest borrower in the world — the United States government. The United States national debt is nearly 30 trillion dollars, which it finances through Treasury bills, notes and bonds. The public holds 80 percent of this debt, which requires direct interest payments, rather than ledger transfers on the Treasury books.
The fiscal year 2021 United States budget included over $562 billion spent paying interest on the federal debt. To put this into perspective, the cumulative net worth of the five wealthiest people in the US (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet) was $465 billion. So, the interest paid on the debt in 2021 is more than these five people’s net worth COMBINED.
An increase in those interest rates will cost the government a lot of money. Money that they do not have. Any increase in interest rates will add hundreds of billions of dollars of interest to the federal budget. In fact, a one percent increase in interest rates means an extra $300 billion in interest on our national debt.
The only way for the government to pay the higher interest is- you guessed it- to print the money, which will cause the currency to be devalued, and worsen inflation, which will again cause higher interest rates. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
We are riding this sinking ship all the way to the bottom.
Just last week, I asked how people could afford to simply up and quit their jobs as a part of the great resignation. It seems as though the child tax credit was a big part of it, and now that credit has come to an end.
Yahoo brings to us a piece that explains how those who have quit their jobs are now complaining that the loss of the tax cut means that they have no money for bills, believing that the government should pay them to sit at home and do nothing but breed.
Roberts, who lives in Marks, Miss., left her job as an insurance agent at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic when her employer wouldn’t let her work from home…”This tax credit is the only way we’ve kept food on the table,” said Roberts, who is raising a 5- and 7-year-old. “For a lot of the working poor, it gave us a chance to finally take a freaking breath and not stress so much about how the bills get paid every month.”
Imagine how easy it would be to pay your bills if you didn’t quit your job.
Back in Mississippi, Roberts – who took custody of her cousin’s grandchildren five years ago – says she’ll probably let her car insurance payments lapse so she can buy groceries. She has just $388 left in her bank account but feels lucky to own her house, which she says puts her in a much better position than many friends who are at risk of eviction or foreclosure.
This poor woman is stuck having to raise and provide for the grandkids of her cousin. I feel bad for her, but it isn’t the responsibility of the US taxpayer to give her money, simply because she has a sad backstory.
Who else is sad because they aren’t getting checks anymore?
In San Antonio, Nathaniel Miller and his wife used their monthly payments to buy gluten-free food, oat milk and diapers for their 1-year-old daughter, who has severe food allergies. Without it, he says his family of four will have to start using their savings to cover everyday expenses.
“We’re a one-income household, so that money has been a lifeline,” said Miller, 34, who works in communications. “Now that it’s gone, I don’t know where that extra money is going to come from. We have a little bit in savings, but savings deplete quickly. If anything else comes up, we’re kind of screwed.”
My wife and I both have jobs. Why doesn’t yours?
Caroline Nasella, a government attorney in Sacramento with 3- and 6-year-old daughters, said the extra $400 a month helped cover child-care costs and provided extra breathing room during the pandemic.
Or how about this woman:
Kelly McKernan, an artist and illustrator in Nashville, used her $250 monthly checks to cover mid-month bills and buy school clothes and winter boots for her second-grader. Her income has been cut in nearly half, to about $25,000, during the pandemic.
“Not having that money is already having a really big impact,” said McKernan, 35, who’s working on a graphic novel anthology with the rock band Evanescence and is looking for art teaching positions to make ends meet.
It’s good to know that my paycheck is cut in half by taxes so my tax money can be used by a woman to sit at home and work part time on a comic book about a rock band.
I think that true inflation is even higher, because this number still doesn’t include food and energy. Remember that gasoline is up 58% for the past year.
While standing on the deck of a ship and it appears as though the level of the ocean is rising, this is an optical illusion. It is actually the ship that is sinking. Similarly, inflation isn’t an increase in prices. It’s a decrease in the value of your nation’s currency. For the US dollar, it’s value has decreased by 6.22 percent in the past 12 months.
If the rate of increase of inflation continues, and there is no reason to think that it won’t, November will see an inflation rate of 7.17 percent year over year. At this point, there is no sign that the rate of inflation stops in November.
The last time that the United States saw an inflation rate of more than 3.8 percent was in 1981, when the end of the Carter administration had the US suffering through 8.9 percent inflation. The year before, 1980, the rate was even higher- 12.5%. By that time, the Fed had increased the prime rate to a whopping 18%, to no avail.
At a 12.5% rate of inflation, prices double every 5 and a half years. The only thing that stopped the Carter caused inflation was a massive tax cut initiated by President Reagan. This tax cut reduced the highest marginal rate from 70 to 50 percent, then again to 28 percent. That isn’t going to happen any time soon, so…
The government will try to spin it. They will fudge the numbers by saying that increases in food and energy don’t count, as if no one is affected by paying $4.50 a gallon for gasoline. However, they won’t be able to hide the decline in purchasing power for much longer. If Biden’s the left’s stupid policies continue, the level of fuckery chicanery required for the Democrats to not get slaughtered in the midterms will be epic.
For decades, the returns that one can expect from the stock and bond market have dictated how much a retired person can withdraw from their retirement savings without fear of running out later. That rule of thumb has been 4% per year. That is, a person with $400,000 in retirement savings could withdraw $16,000 per year and be comfortable knowing that their nest egg would last for the rest of your life (well, at least 30 years, which for most of us is the same thing).
Not anymore. The lower performance of the market has reduced that rule of thumb to 3.3%. This means that every retired person in the country just saw their retirement income drop by nearly 18%. That person with the $400,000 retirement fund can now only afford to withdraw $13,200.
Now couple that with inflation, officially at 6.22% for the 12 month period ending October 2021, and you see that the retired person with the $400,000 retirement savings now has seen the $16,000 they had to spend last October only able to buy $12,400 worth of stuff. That’s right, retired people have just lost a quarter of real purchasing power in just a year.
President Biden looked at the September jobs report and called it a big success. Even though the number of jobs added in September was much lower than expected, he pointed to a decline in the unemployment rate and a boost in wages as evidence that the economic situation is improving.
He couldn’t be more wrong. The number of new jobs were low, unemployment decreased, but average wages increased. The only explanation that fits the facts is this:
Low wage jobs are disappearing. When people are out of work for six months or more, they are considered to be out of the work force. Once out of the work force, they are no longer part of the unemployment figures. Unemployment goes down.
Once the low wage earners are out of the market, the higher wage earners are the ones left. This raises the average income of the employed.
This is bad, bad news. At least I am out of the stock market.
