will have there own bucket load of money…

…was see a young kid on a motorcycle with a gym bag full of money. That being somewhat suspicious, to an American anyway, we promptly gave chase. After he slipped his bike off a muddy trail beside an irrigation canal we grabbed him. The gym bag was stuffed full of dinar, unfortunately, rather than catching a terrorist with his payoff for the latest IED or attack, we had a teenager who had been sent to the market to buy groceries. It took a gym bag full of money just to get some bread and a stringy old sheep haunch.

I’ve read about people pushing wheelbarrows full of money to buy bread in Atlanta during the Civil War and seen pictures of similar circumstances in Wiemar Germany. I fully expect that when Americans are pushing wheelbarrows full of dollars through abandoned parking lots to the doors of run down Walmarts, Joe Biden will tell us we need to print more money to keep from going broke and congress will authorize “dollars for duffels” so we can carry enough dollar bills to buy a big mac and a soda for lunch. The illegal immigrants will be hiring Americans off teh street corners for temporary jobs and paying with the now coveted peso.

like we had in the ’70s and early ’80s. The CPI is flat or, if measured honestly, deflationary because of shelter prices. Yet prices for most everything else, especially food and other basics, is rising. These increases are offset by declining shelter costs. Yet, shelter cost declines don’t reflect what happens to real people unless you change your shelter every month. It is a fixed cost for most people so most people are experinceing considerable inflation.

Unfortunately, people on fixed incomes if they have any indexing at all have indexing based on CPI so they’re experienceing a seriously declining standard of living. High unemployment and labor surplus keep most in the workforce from being able to increase their wages, so they experience the inflation as well. Even union workers in the true private sector cannot get wage increases. Consequently, the only people who can get wage increase are those in the third sector which is mostly in commodities and basic services, e.g., health care, utilities, transportation, aerospace/defense. etc, which increases tend to force up costs for others in the society. And finally, the public sector at the federal level and in the Blue states, mostly unionized, will be able to keep up with inflation through politically driven wage and entitlement increases until the government can no longer support it, e.g., Wiemar, or there is a tax revolt by the citizenry or both. And both is the helter-skelter scenario.

Comrade Obama and his minons are praying, not that they really pray, that some stupid white “extremist” does something that they can sieze on as a crisis and impose more federal authority to squash dissent before the people in the doughnut cities figure out that even with Comrade Obama in charge, they’re still going to have to buy gas for their car and make their rent/mortgage payments and all Hell breaks loose.

While I generally agree with your conclusion, Francis had a great column on the subject a couple of months ago at TNL and his conclusion was that the problem would be deflation.

Maybe Erick could persuade a diary on the subject from him… HINT, Erick, HINT!!!!

All this reckless spending by the Congress would not be possible without Ben Bernacke and the Federal Reserve system enabling the Congress to spend fiat money created out of thin air. If the Dems in Congress are the junkies, it is the Fed that is pushing the habit of spend, spend, spend! It is the cause of price inflation that diminishes people’s purchasing power and savings, it is the source of these vicious boom/bust business cycles, and it is the lifeblood of big government.

I am glad to see the monetary issue coming to the forefront in recent months. But it is going to get worse and worse until those in Washington embrace the principles of sound money.

Good references on how the government has royally screwed the dollar over the last 100 years include:

Murray Rothbard: What Has Government Done to Our Money?

Jörg Guido Hülsmann: The Ethics of Money Production

or at least not more weak, relatively, but that all depends on your starting point. If you look at the currency markets starting from just before the current crisis (August ‘08, say), the Dollar is up against every major currency except the Yen. Now it has lost since January, but it hasn’t been enough yet to wipe away the fear-induced gains made just a few months before. It’s true, as Kudlow points out, that the price of gold is high, but so what? Gold isn’t a currency, and its price is just about meaningless when it comes to international capital flows, despite what gold fetishists may wish.

People who buy and sell currencies every day and who have the most to gain or lose depending on sudden inflation spikes are not afraid of holding the dollar; if there were any credible risk of inflation, they would have priced it into the market.

The real economic risk right now is that the Fed may respond to improving economic conditions by raising interest rates prematurely rather than insisting that the White House roll back the stimulus first. As I said, though, I don’t think either is called for (beyond the obvious point that the stimulus is wasted money regardless, but in this case I’ll treat it as generic “fiscal stimulus,” would could have been useful, theoretically, and some people are still willing to believe it is). I do agree with the author, however, that the call to spend more, even as the Fed is making noise about raising interest rates (which is itself treated by the market as an interest rate increase), is completely insane.

how about the nation, the Constitution, private property, the war, the once valued “privacy”, budgetary restraint? And last, what remains of what used to be social and civic comity, as the swine in the WH, the other set of swine in Congress, and liberal swine in general, do their sickening best to engender a regime of domestic conflict, one that borders on civil strife.

Since it makes our goods cheaper for other countries to buy. There is a balance between a currency that is too strong, making our products uncompetitive abroad, and too weak, making foreign goods too expensive.
The bigger problem, as pointed out, is runaway spending. I pointed this out in my diary entry, where in order to balance the budget, we would need to cut a full third of spending.

There isn’t any way to cut this much, without gutting at least a few sacred cows, which will take political leadership and courage, commodities in short supply these days.

When people get to DC, they join the “political class”.

That’s why we need term limits. The Executive Branch consists almost entirely of career civil servants. The Judicial Branch consists entirely of appointees-for-life. If the Legislative Branch also fills up with government lifers, there is no constituency for limited government.

Government spending is going to destroy America. I believe drastic action is called for. I set-up a webstie, spendenforcer.com, but in an attempt to increase exposure, I recently made a video and posted it on Youtube. Please visit it and pass it on if you agree with this strategy. Thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-fdvepD7C4

Obama is doing them: like appearing on the cover of Men’s Health and winning the Nobel Appeasement Prize for doing nothing.

He is making our dollar a joke and he is making the Nobel a joke.

People in Detroit, MI are lining up by the tens of thousands for their Obama Money!

None of them understand where the money is coming from. They just know it’s a free handout.