By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
The press reports that inflation in the United States isn’t doing too bad; it just inched up a bit in December, 2023 – to about 3.4 percent, year over year.
That means, prices only rose by about 3.4 percent from December, 2022 through December 2023.
Considering the fact that we were looking at double-digit inflation in the first two years of the Biden-Harris regime, inflation at only 3.4 percent looks good, at first glance. Finally – the regime tells us – prices are getting back to normal again. Maybe it’ll even return to a proper 2 percent eventually; won’t that be great?
Well, actually, no.
Certainly, 3.4 percent is better than ten or fifteen percent per annum. But what kind of an improvement is that? A reduction in the rate of destruction is not enough; we need a recovery.
The first two years of this regime were horrendous, with costs increasing far beyond the ability of wages to ever catch up.
The American people fell far behind, in terms of the average standard of living, for those two years. If the rate of increase finally slowed somewhat in the third year, that doesn’t mean prices fell and people recovered; it means things are continuing to get worse, just not quite as fast.
Let’s consider an analogy:
You’re walking home, late at night, in a Chicago alley, and you get mugged. A thug beats the heck out of you for two hours, then, since he starts to get tired, he spends the third hour hitting you less frequently, and not quite as hard, not because he’s become a nice guy, but just because he’s winded. Is that third hour of being beaten up a welcome sight, when what you really need is an ambulance and a policeman? Oh, and by the way, to complete the analogy, keep in mind that you still have one more hour of this to go, before there’s any hope for relief.
The problem with inflation is that it’s usually not a temporary problem. Once a nation suffers serious inflation, like we did in 2021 and 2022, it can never fully recover.
The product that cost $100 under President Trump, then cost $105 in 2021, then cost $113 in 2022, then cost $118 in 2023. It didn’t go down in price just because the inflation rate dropped, the price still went up, just not as cripplingly quickly.
We have become accustomed to measuring inflation as a year-over-year rate, because that’s a convenient way to capture it and report it. Economists, politicians, and newspapermen like the annual rate of inflation because it’s an easy concept to work with. But is it really helpful?
A better way of looking at it is to ask what has happened to the things you buy, over the course of a longer period of time, say, from the final year of the Trump administration to the present – the final year of the Biden-Harris regime. A four-year period is more helpful.
· The average automobile price has jumped by about 50 percent since 2020.
· Rent has grown by an average of 18 percent per year, which means most rents have almost doubled in the past four years.
· What groceries do you buy? The sale price of a 12-pack of name brand soda pop was about $2.50 per case four years ago; you’re lucky to find it on sale for $5 per case today, and non-sale prices have doubled as well. The same rate of increase goes for beef, produce, and most products that are heavy and therefore expensive to prepare or transport.
· With a lot of the Trump-era tax cuts expiring at the end of 2023, most taxpayers will pay considerably more in federal taxes in 2024, though there’s too much variety to identify an average. On the state side, the difference is stark; while many Republican-governed states will enjoy tax cuts in 2024, the Democrat-governed states will see tax increases, such as Illinois’ huge property tax increases (one of the drivers of the huge jumps in rents mentioned above).
It’s easy to see that the reported December inflation rate – a random data point, nothing more – is relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The cost of living has skyrocketed past most Americans’ ability to earn the difference, and that, by definition, means that most Americans are suffering a serious annual drop in their standard of living – every year – as a result of the Biden-Harris economy.
It is much more useful to look at what is happening to our purchasing power over time, while thinking of our expected annual salary increases. That house that we buy over time, with a 30-year mortgage, or the car that we buy over time, with a five, or six, or now even seven year auto loan. With default rates so high and the federal budget sucking up all the money to be loaned, these larger purchase prices are now commanding higher interest rates – for these ever-higher durations. The idea of paying off a car or home early is getting less and less possible.
And what does that mean, by extension? That the ability of the average American worker to ever be able to climb out of debt so he can start saving seriously for old age is slipping away as well.
Fifty years ago, a hard-working American, whether blue collar or white collar, could expect to enjoy a stable retirement from a combination of savings, pension, and social security. Today, bled constantly by taxes and inflation, such targeted savings become more and more difficult to build up, just as it’s becoming evident that Social Security is rendered so thoroughly insolvent that we can hope for less and less help from that end.
And this brings us to the greatest unseen damage done by Bidenflation: What it does to the savings you or your parents or children have already accumulated.
Let’s say you’ve spent thirty or forty years, diligently working, contributing to your IRAs and 401K plans, hoping to be able to retire in a few years. You’ve saved $500,000, which sounds like a lot of money; it certainly was when you started out. You might never have dreamed that you’d ever save such a huge amount of money.
Thanks to Bidenflation, what is that retirement fund of yours worth today?
With just the publicly acknowledged inflation rate, a $500,000 account in 2020 – that is, an account worth half a million dollars in 2020 four years ago, was worth only $424,695 in 2023. That means that in just those three years, the Biden-Harris economic policies essentially robbed that individual, or couple, or family, of $75,000 in savings, just by destroying the value of that investment. And it gets worse each and every day.
If you had a quarter million in savings in 2020, Bidenflation robbed you of $37,500 of that account. If you had a million, they robbed you of $150,000. And that’s all in addition to the ten to fifteen thousand dollars per year that your higher gasoline prices and grocery prices and other inflated purchases are costing you in your daily life.
It is impossible to agree on what is the absolute worst crime of the Biden-Harris regime. The foreign policy weakness that has emboldened foreign enemies to wage war; the open borders that have flooded our country with illegal gatecrashers; the regulatory policies that have crushed our energy and manufacturing sectors; the culture rot that has discouraged marriage and encouraged licentiousness and even bodily mutilation; or the war on policing that has sped up the collapse of retail as shoplifting and flashmob costs destroy whole malls and downtowns. The contenders for “worst policy area” are legion.
But surely the economic destruction caused and fanned by inflation is at least tied, up at the top of that list. Only inflation literally robs everyone – it robs employees of their jobs, robs savers of their nest eggs, robs children of their futures, robs the aged of their retirement.
And what’s so infuriating is that we all know how to control inflation. It’s really not that hard.
You just can’t ever let fool leftists like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – and the equally foolish leftists they would appoint to high office in their regime – ever get their hands on the levers of power.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. Once a County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” and his 2021 political satirical discourses about current events, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” Volumes One, Two, and Three, are available in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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