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The Year Was 1982 - Top Three Takeaways – January 13th, 2022
- Back to the Future wasn't even a thing, though the Delorean was. Olivia Newton-John's “Physical” was the number one song in the country. The average price for a home was $67,800. A dozen eggs would only set you back 84 cents. AT&T was broken up by the courts. Canada was granted sovereignty from England. NASA’s Columbia Space Shuttle conducted its third successful mission and Ronald Reagan was actively engaged in bringing the United States of America back from the abyss that was Jimmy Carter’s presidency. After having peaked at 18% during Carter’s last year in office, inflation was rapidly on its way down but still clocked in at 6.2% for the year. That’s the hottest inflation would run for the next 39 years. That is until the first year of the Biden administration. The inflation rate was a super low 1.4% the day Joe Biden became President of the United States. By the end of his first full month in the office, which included regulations curtailing US energy supply and a host of new regulations on businesses, inflation ticked up to 1.7%. In March, there was the passage of the “American Rescue Plan” - which many warned would be highly inflationary. With the government engaging in over a trillion dollars in debt spending, on top of previous relief measures passed during the pandemic, we began to see inflation take off. We ended March at 2.6%. By April, when the administration began to lecture us about inflation only being transitory, we hit 4.2%. And all throughout the year, inflation ticked higher and higher and higher as we literally paid the price for the compounding effect of poor public policy. So here we are having now reached 7% inflation. Of course, these aren’t just numbers. These are harsh realities...
- We literally pay for every day. The bottom line...you have to be making 7% more money today than a year ago just to break even in Biden’s America. The lesson which must be learned here is that nothing’s free. That includes the so-called “stimulus” checks most Americans received last year. They’ve proven to be anything but “free”. And they did serve to help stimulate inflation. That’s because the money didn’t exist. It was federal debt spending, which means we not only have to pay the money back, but we have to pay it back with interest. And bonus, with people spending the artificial funds, it created a one-two punch of creating manufactured demand. This contributed to the highest inflation rate in 40 years. Good times. Not trying to depress anyone but we have three more years of Joe Biden. He’s done all of this in under one. Who’s ready to take a ride in the Delorean?
- Reality is setting in. FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said this on Tuesday... It’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is most people are going to get Covid. I’m at a loss as to why that’s hard to process, but it’s helpful that health authorities are at least awakening to reality. And maybe at the point where they’ve made peace with reality, they can acknowledge that it’s not a bad thing, but instead necessary to help put this pandemic behind us. Her comment got me to thinking. I wonder if I, if many of us, have given health authorities too much credit for what we’d expect they know. For example, I wonder how many healthcare “experts”, know that the average flu shot efficacy is a paltry 43% at prevention? I’d think that if all healthcare experts were fully aware that flu shots fail at prevention most of the time, they’d not find themselves in a position where “it’s hard to process”, that despite nearly 80% of the country being vaccinated, most of us will contract COVID-19 before it’s run its course given how contagious it is. But that type of a lack of understanding of non-pandemic realities would account for why the only thing these health-care wizards seem to be able to do in a pandemic is recklessly recommend ever more vaccines. Vaccines which are failing miserably at prevention. Think about this, they’ve issued recommendations for tens of millions of children who aren’t susceptible to the virus to get vaccinated because in their minds that’d stop the spread. They’re clueless and now one of the commissioners is admitting it. Reality is setting in for me too. I think I’ve given too many “healthcare experts” credit for knowing more than they do. After all, common sense isn’t so common these days.