From some guy in Florida:
“If you look back to the Great Depression, the house was only three times the average salary. Now, it is eight times the average salary. The car was 46% of the salary [back then], the car today is 85% of the salary. And here’s the craziest part: [residential] rent then was 16% of the average salary, it is now 42% of the average salary.”
I’d love to see the same stats for groceries and electricity. On the other hand, maybe not.
Upon reading this cheerful little note:
The economy sustained above-trend growth in the third quarter of 2023, with gross domestic product rising 5.2% year-over-year, greater than the 2.1% that was seen in the second quarter of this year. Analysts are mixed on recession predictions for 2024, with strong growth but persistent inflation leaving mixed signals of the U.S. economy’s strength.
Since Biden took office, costs have risen over 17%, while average hourly wages have only risen 13.6% as of November. The resulting price increases mean that families have to pay more than $11,000 in additional costs to maintain the same standard of living.
…I have only this to say: with the exception of commodities-based products like gasoline where raw material costs are closely tied to the retail price, once prices go up, they never come down.
Seriously: when last did you see the everyday retail price of grocery store products — to give the best example — get reduced?
Forget it. Ain’t gonna happen. And as for those products which keep prices stable simply by shrinking their size (e.g. chocolate), if you’re expecting the products to go back to their original size once inflation comes down, I have an Arizona rainforest to sell you.
And as for “average hourly wages have only risen 13.6% as of November“, people on fixed income (like me) haven’t seen anything close to that — 4.5% for us, and that was well over a year ago.
About two-thirds of households at the bottom 20 percent of the income bracket pay over half their income in rent and utilities.
In my case, without New Wife’s salary it would be 78%.
Ask me how I feel about all this.
Option A:
Option B:
Option C:
I remember being mocked on these very pages — and it wasn’t that long ago — for paying $275 for my Inland M1 Carbine. Here’s an ad from J&G Sales:
Had I not lost it in the Great Canoeing Accident On The Brazos, I would now be sorely tempted to sell it and pay off the Ferrari. [/hyperbole]
I know, I know: some of you Olde Pharttes got yours for $50 (and no doubt some of you likewise sold them for “stupid money” — $350, for a 7x ROI — thinking yourselves clever).
Given that said rifles were made in these quantities:
Inland Mfg. Division of General Motors — 2,362,097
Winchester — 828,059
Underwood Elliott-Fisher — 545,616
Saginaw Steering Gear — 517,212
National Postal Meter — 413,017
Quality Hardware — 359,666
IBM — 346,500
Standard Products — 247,000
Rock-Ola — 228,500
Irwin-Pedersen — ~4,000
…one would think that there would be little or no “scarcity” pressure on their resale prices.
But what with the attitude of various Socialist politicians towards eeeevil guns (Clinton, Obama, Biden, Schumer etc.), I suppose it’s not at all surprising that the humble M1 carbine is now being priced at secondhand Ferrari levels, relatively speaking.
Still makes me sick, it does.
Saw this recently and it got my blood boiling:
I just looked at my electricity bill, and it went up 25% compared to last year this time (i.e. summer compared to summer). Other commodities show similar increases, the lowest being 12%. So:
Where the FUCK does that 3.2% number come from?
I want to see exactly which categories showed less than 3.2% inflation, to bring the average down. And don’t insult me with bullshit like “Office Rents” (which go down, on the aggregate, when people move out and stop paying the rent): I want to see like for like.
Wait, I can see my future… and it involves shooting double the amount of ammo at this afternoon’s range session.
The usual snow job on the economy:
The CPI report shows that inflation rose four percent from last May, which is less than half of what it was at its peak in 2022, when it hit 9.1 percent year-over-year in June. Economic forecasts had predicted inflation would come in at 4.1 percent, meaning that the current economic climate is doing better than expected.
Uh huh. Considering that our “expectations” were of the Four Riders genre, that doesn’t mean much. And it gets worse:
However, core CPI – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – rose 5.3 percent from last May, which is a far less-rosy picture of the state of the economy.
Yeah, I’m so glad that the first inflation “estimate” just happens to exclude the two categories which affect ordinary people’s lives the most. And for the record, I’m still of the mind that the “5.3 percent” inflation rate is only about a third of what I’m seeing at the grocery store — i.e. 15 percent would be closer to the mark, which is about how much my closely-budgeted grocery spend has gone up in the past three months.
By the way: has anyone priced tires recently? Holy shit.
When the history of this era comes to be written, one of the most egregious falsehoods to be exposed will be the “official” inflation rate.
A couple of people sent me this article, and I see that Insty referred to it as well:
South Africa’s power blackouts: Solutions lie in solar farms, battery storage at scale, and an end to state monopoly
Rolling blackouts are costing South Africa dearly. The electricity crisis is a barrier to growth, destroys investor confidence and handicaps almost every economic activity. It has raised input costs for producers and retailers, and has triggered a new round of inflation and interest rate increases.
Any solution will obviously incur cost because it will require the adoption of new technologies, such as large-scale grid-connected solar farms that are linked to battery energy storage. But these technologies are expensive.
…which means that none of this is going to happen. South Africa has been plundered by the Usual Suspects until the coffers are pretty much empty, taxes are about has high as can be levied without causing collapse — what happens when only about 15% of the population is at all economically active, and only 0.5% of taxpayers contribute over 85% of tax revenues.
Even in a perfectly-ordered society (which South Africa isn’t even close to), the job of fixing its power woes would be be pretty much impossible. As things are… not gonna happen.
And let’s not even think about foreign investment. While the amounts are quite small, relatively speaking, one always has to factor in corruption — which takes anywhere from 40% to 60% off the top — and loans will never be repaid. Not even China will countenance investment, given that their previous forays into Africa have been, so far, disastrous. And South Africa is not Sri Lanka. They can’t be bullied into compliance with the Belt & Road program because the distances are just too great and the population large and resistant. (China could say, “Okay, you’ve defaulted on your loan; give us all your platinum”, whereupon South Africa would just say, “We can’t get the ore to the port; come and get it.”)
Even if South Africa were suddenly to discover vast resources of lithium (similar to its vast coal reserves), they’d never be able to get the stuff out of the ground. One would think that in a country with huge gold mines all over the place, a few lithium mines would be no problem. Alas, the gold mines are now producing only about 40% of what they used to produce under the eeeevil Apartheid Government.
Those giant solar farms the article talks about? They’d be stripped for parts within a month of installation. And yes, surround them with security guards — except that the guards would become the new entrepreneurs, flogging solar panels and batteries to householders desperate for electricity.
As with any African catastrophe, there is no workable solution, no possible way that any kind of fix will be either implemented or have any kind of longevity. If even ESCOM, an established, one-time robust powerhouse [sic] that once delivered South Africa’s excess electricity to all its neighbors can be mismanaged into complete collapse, why would some newfangled, sophisticated (and fragile) eco-friendly solar system fare any better?
To paraphrase some guy’s earlier words: let (South) Africa sink. They deserve no better.