Or, “Carter Country: The Return.” IBD:
Food and energy prices are rising, wages are flat and the top concern among Americans is unemployment. What was that word coined in the ’70s to describe a stagnant economy suffering inflationary pressures?
Since the Obama “recovery” started 4-1/2 years ago, inflation appears to have been relatively tame, with core prices climbing just 7% from June 2009 to December 2013.
But as CBS News discovered when it looked a little closer, the overall number is deceptive. In fact, it found food prices soaring.
The official inflation data confirm this. Overall, food prices are up 9% since June 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the cost of many staples is skyrocketing. Pork prices have climbed 14%; poultry is up 12%; eggs, 27%; milk, 20%.
Meanwhile, energy prices have climbed 18% during the recovery, and the price of gasoline is up a whopping 31.5%. Then there’s college tuition, up 23%.
At the same time, wages aren’t budging. In fact, measured in real terms, the median household income is 4% below where it was four-1/2 years ago. And while the official unemployment rate is down, that’s due to millions quitting the workforce altogether.
Yes, the economy has created 6.6 million jobs since June 2009. But the ranks of those not in the labor force climbed nearly 11 million, driving the labor force participation rate down from 65.7% to today’s 63% — a level not seen since 1978.
In fact, had the participation rate remained where it was, we’d have an unemployment rate of over 10%. So it’s no wonder the IBD/TIPP Poll continues to find nearly a quarter of U.S. households reporting that someone at home is looking for a job.
Or that, as the latest Gallup poll finds, the public lists unemployment/jobs as the nation’s top problem (23% listed that), with the economy coming in a close second at 20%. Immigration legislation, by the way, ranks far down the list at 6%, and the alleged issue of global warming, the fixation of the Obama administration, doesn’t rank at all.
Meanwhile, Obama seems bent on doing all he can to strangle the economy, raise prices and kill jobs.
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? The progressives certainly do. And the plan is called Cloward-Piven — which is meant to overburden the system, lead to economic meltdown, and create a permanent client state run by a “compassionate” Big Governmental entity that will run a command and control economy, dictating our wants and fulfilling what it decides are our needs, the end result being a citizen voting base all geared toward voting in their own “economic interests,” which amounts to voting to allow the government to engage in legal pilferage of the labor of others so that it may redistribute the wealth that labor created to those who demand it at the ballot box.
But naturally, the more nuanced on “our” side objected to such fearmongering rhetoric back when we embarrassing extremist Visigoths, with our silly constitutional fetishism and our anarchical hatred of overweening government, were pointing it out — Obama is and was, we were told over and over again, a garden-variety liberal Democrat (albeit one who had the rather strange habit of installing communists, racial segregationalists, and anti-Semites into important positions inside government), and by claiming otherwise, we were hyperventilating, exaggerating, unleashing some deep-seated racial animus that, to the “moderates” and “independents”, who are always painted as the most sensible among us, despite their not being able to pick sides between socialism and capitalism, was proving “unhelpful” to our “brand.”
And this pose continued even after the 2010 elections, and continues still to this day among a certain type of GOP cheerleader — the kind who has grown content with Big Government and is interested in eating off its edges or sharing in its spoils.
One further irony: several years ago now, a much-maligned, much attacked snowbilly hoochie — with her folksy delivery and her moronic reification of Reaganism and limited government — noted that food costs were climbing, and made the point that abundant energy, available to us right here at home, was one of the most important fixes to an economic malaise that, to that point at least, many many commentators on the right assumed Barack Obama actually wanted.
These claims — like the claim made by this same unpolished non-Ivy League pretender that ObamaCare would lead to “death panels” — were endlessly challenged and “fact checked” by “non-partisan” organizations, and, SURPRISE!, they were always shown to be “mostly untrue.”
Until, of course, they were exactly true. At which point they’ve been ignored.
I mention this because the same types who worked endlessly to discredit reality properly described are now working tirelessly to turn the hoax of global climate change and the “dreamer” vision of the noble savage arriving in our country to reintroduce us to the Christian work ethic, doing jobs lazy fat Americans won’t do, into settled science or historical truths.
Merely by repetition and a will to power.
But hey: wasn’t it fun when you could show your Democrat friends that you weren’t one of those kind of wingers by voicing your loud disdain for the idiocy of a certain besieged Alaska wolf slaughterer, with her slutty daughter and her “waterhead” baby?
Good times…
These are things where the increases can’t be hidden well since they are sold by the pound-dozen-gallon. Items that come in odd sized amounts, like say shampoo or the (so called) 3 pound coffee can have been continually getting smaller while the price remains close to the same.
Manufacturers have to do this since the “official” inflation rate is zilch while their actual costs have increased by quite a bit. If they just raised prices, while “official inflation” is so low then they would look like gougers.
Watch dairy go sky high. Dairy farmers in California are selling their cows for slaughter since they can’t afford to feed them out. This in turn is going to cause a distortion in the beef market. There is no water in the valley, so watch fruits and vegetables also skyrocket. Give it up on buying locally, since everything will be from Mexico and Central America.
The Investors.com article was published yesterday. Today’s release of the Consumer Price Index for January includes revisions going back to January of 2009. Using the revised overall index for June of 2009 of 214.790 and January’s reading of 234.933, the change is 9.4%. Given the compounding factor, this turns out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a 2% annualized rate of change between then and now.
The indexes for food were 217.813 and 238.368, respectively. This also works out to be a 9.4% difference.
However:
The energy indexes were 197.033 and 247.575 for a 25.7% increase or an annualized change rate of around 6%.
Fuck the government’s numbers on anything…fucking crooks one and all. The government long ago passed the point of being worth a shit. Sometime around FDR the government decided to become my fucking keeper. Fuck that. Now they point guns and shoot people for worthless bullshit reasons because they can…we are fucked.
Btw I got to speak with that loony snowbilly hoochie back at the SRLC 2010 in New Orleans and I was moved. She deserved to be defended by the Republican establishment did not it was a tell. After meeting this beautiful, honest, mom and realizing that she was exactly the sort of President we needed I was disgusted and pissed off that she was thrown to the wolves by the Republican Establishment. It was my final month of identifying as a Republican. When asked these days I say I am a member of the LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE PARTY.
There is now a concerted, collaborative effort to discredit a Harvard credentialed conservative politician — Sen. Ted Cruz — begun on the weekend political theater talk shows last Sunday by the Democrats and their pocket-media [example: The Bobs, Bob Schieffer and Bob Woodward, doing their best Junior High School gossip-mongering imitation discussing Cruz eating alone in the cafeteria], and continued later in the week, oddly enough, by Thomas Sowell, now joined by Ann Coulter and soon I don’t doubt other establishment types. Watch the machine at work and marvel at its success. Democracy, after is, is by definition the rule of the ignorant, so who ought be surprised that the US is governed by morons?
* after all is *
moron news
Senate Democrats: Why Didn’t Someone Tell Us Obamacare Would Cut Medicare?
I just had dinner with my cousin who used to live in Anchorage and now lives in the burbs of Minneapolis. She saw the Snow Hootchie more than once while she was out working or shopping. She drove herself around, no messing with drivers or the like. In the airport, she acted like a normal human and drew no attention to herself. My cousin shared a plane with her once. My cousin was in First Class because she flies for work and they pay for it, and the snowbilly was in coach.
Like her or not, she is the genuine article.
By the way, JohnPaulAdams, McGehee formed the Get Offa My Lawn (or something similar, age is trashing my memory) party a few years ago. I think I got it in as a charter member.
CRUZ STORMS GOP ESTABLISHMENT STRONGHOLD IN SUNSHINE STATE WITH RECORD-SETTING CROWD
i like food one of our vendors sent us a king cake today
it’s so good it make you wanna perform violent revolutionary actions
GOMLP has been superseded by the Tea Party movement, which had the advantage of not being led by lazy old me.
I still like the “the taxes are too damn high” guy, whatever his party.
It’s “The Rent is Too Damn High”.
My son likes him, too.
rent taxes bribes payoffs protection money
anymore it’s all the same
I was reading about a guy who lives in Italy as an ex-pat. His contract or whatever their equivalent of a lease agreement is was up in a few months and he had decided just let it lapse but continue to live in the home. Evidently, their government is so inefficient people do this all the time and seldom if ever get caught.
Reagan was ridiculed too, and his intellectual pedigree paled next to Cruz’s.
I’d love to see his GPA at Harvard law next to Oblabla’s.
>rent<
as a landlord i'm offended and i want victim status to your racist slur.
leigh
The horror of the Fed rape of the Central Valley is just beginning. Not just dairy cows, but ranchers are selling their herds to Texas ranchers. Beef prices are already up and will go up so much more.
Of course the Green-terrorists will applaud this. They want us to eat nothing but root veggies & locally grown fruit & nuts. (as square miles of orchards have died)
There is now a concerted, collaborative effort to discredit a Harvard credentialed conservative politician — Sen. Ted Cruz
Orrin Hatch and his goons in the Utah media have been making sure Mike Lee’s reputation is trashed as well.
When you’re over the target…
I’ve read that Cruz is going to speak to Friends of Abe …
I have a friend who is a member. I need to drop him a note to see if he’ll be in attendance.
Darleen, not only are the nut trees and fruit trees dying, the growers are shipping them overseas to Asia where they get top dollar.
Tech investor’s plan to split California into six states closer to getting on ballot for vote
Quick somebody! Get Roger L. Simon on the case. He’ll put a stop to this ruinous infighting that can only serve to benefit Hillary Clinton at this dark hour.
Making Things Work is a Revolutionary Act
Good luck with the Congressional ratification tech investors.
>Good luck with the Congressional ratification tech investors. <
per levin tonight – if the measure passes home rule is allowed in the 6 proto states. hit them every way.
So one state and five new territories. Be sure to have plenty of popcorn on hand when the fighting breaks out over which California is the California.
>Be sure to have plenty of popcorn on hand when the fighting breaks out over which California is the California. <
who said saving "fail america" would be easy?
>So one state and five new territories.<
1 state: 6 home ruled districts
yes Subsidiarity
G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were fond of it.
Of course, suggesting that the principal is also applicable to the market may cause varying degrees of heartburn in some classical liberal/libertarian circles….