1971 was a turning point. The gold window was closed by Nixon, leaving central bankers and politicians to debase the currency, enrich themselves, while impoverishing the rest of us. Watch your money dissipate.
1971 was a turning point. The gold window was closed by Nixon, leaving central bankers and politicians to debase the currency, enrich themselves, while impoverishing the rest of us. Watch your money dissipate.
OTOH,
The average person has more and lives better than in 1971.
Progress in everything from manufactured goods to food production to medical care has offset a lot of the loss by requiring less personal income to be spent on them and making them more abundantly available to the average person.
Bullshit
Are you as dumb as you appear?
WTF is up with that graphic?
Okay, and I agree….but I also have a question. The dollar was the worlds reserve currency via petrobucks and if ever growing trade had to be conducted in dollars backed by gold, as I understand it, there isn’t enough gold in the world to do that. I totally agree that going off the gold standard marked the beginning of the end for our fiat and all the household/personal/business realities associated with ponzi bucks, but what was the alternative? Should they have just reduced the backing to allow more dollars or ? What am I missing?
The alternative was to live within our means. The economy would have grown solely based upon our savings, investment, production, and productivity. Instead, the bankers and politicians loaded the country with $60 trillion of total debt. The apparent prosperity is a delusion built upon mountains of debt.
The average person in 1971 was not a debt slave. The credit card didn’t even exist. People saved to buy stuff. Families could live a middle class lifestyle with just the husband working. Now the average family has $145,000 of debt and must have two workers to make the debt payments.
In addition, 47 million people depend on food stamps to eat. But Jamie Dimon and his ilk live in $20 million penthouses and tell the politicians how to write the laws regulating Wall Street.
Good graphic, Admin. I’d not seen that one before.
Admin- The answer to the question in the JFK thread was Lee Harvey Oswald. I think I confused you and Tim when I posted A Dulles tidbit to show they both have VERY notable bloodlines, So solly.
Knowing Oswald was of a noble bloodline should make you go Hmmmmm.
So far as this thread, a dollar just does not buy what it used to and I have less buying power with every passing day. Loss of the gold standard was the cause of all of this fake wealth here in the USA!USA!USA!.
That graph is very telling. Inflation and lack of wage parity is killing us, both workers and retirees. And then there’s the ones who want to, but can’t get a job, any job, because of their age and/or due to the fact that they are in the ‘ignore’ class of people in this country….which is White males, especially if they are over 50.
For sure, I agree 100%. I was wondering how the dollar could have ever accommodated ever growing global trade using our dollar. Here at home, again, I totally agree. I’m just not sure what the answer was for a world using our currency – without printing wouldn’t the dollar have to absolutely soar? I guess a penny would really mean something in that world!!
The USD didn’t deserve to be the world’s reserve currency in 1971. The guns and butter policies resulted in deficits and the gold was leaving the country. The solution was to get our fiscal house in order, not de-link from gold.
Ok, admin.
Show me how we are living more impoverished lives than we were in 1971.
Start with how many ,more people then had cell phones, computers, internet connections, cars that last over a hundred thousand miles, so much food that overweight is the biggest health problem among the lower classes, air conditioning as a standard instead of a luxury even for the poor, and on and on and on and on.
Show me how even the lowest class people could afford things like joint replacements and even heart. liver and kidney transplants then but can’t now.
But you won’t because you can’t, you’ll drop to ad hominem and insults and other diversions instead, (you already did this in your opening post, in fact that is all it contained)
You know we live better and more abundantly now than we did in 1971, but you could always prove we don’t by foregoing those things that are commonly available to everyone today that weren’t available to anyone but the rich then, and often not available to anyone at any price.
anon
Nothing but verbal diarrhea. The facts obliterate your fantasy world of luxury. You evidently are math challenged and don’t understand the concept of debt. Maybe a chart will help you understand.
You also don’t seem to grasp the concept of inflation. Even using the highly manipulated CPI, real household income has barely risen since 1971. So how can you make the idiotic argument that everyone is much better off?
I expect a response based upon data and facts, not anecdotal bullshit. Or is that too ad hominem for your dainty self.
Let’s look at a few more FACTS.
US population in 1971 – 208 million
Total credit card debt 1971 – $8.5 billion ($41 per capita)
Total auto loan debt 1971 – $40.5 billion ($195 per capita)
US population in 2015 – 320 million
Total credit card debt 2015 – $890 billion ($2,781 per capita)
Total auto loan debt 2015 – $1.03 trillion ($3,219 per capita)
So the population of the US has grown by 54% since 1971, but the amount of credit card debt per person has grown by 6,782%, and the amount of auto loan debt has grown by 1,650%.
Unless anon is as math challenged as a West Philly public school graduate, even he might be able to grasp the fact that the average person’s life is far worse in 2015 than 1971 and his delusionary rhetoric is based on nothing but anecdotal nonsense.
Observe the cliff dive in 1971. Things have gone swimmingly since 1971. Don’t you think?
Forget it, I get it – that’s just it. Yesterday’s dollar would have just been worth a shit ton of any other currency. Its just hard to imagine.
I’m going for popcorn……………gonna have to watch this smackdown from work!
Anon, I fear you are beyond hope, but I always like to gently sway people like you towards reason before Admin and the other monkeys start tearing new assholes in all sorts of places where they are neither wanted nor needed.
The technology argument is a massive Straw Man (or is the ad hominem the only logical fallacy you know?). One might just as well argue that the musket industry has fallen off a cliff from where it was 200 years ago. It is silly.
The point, which you obviously missed, is DEBT. Money, in any form, is just a receipt for labor (time and effort). Debt is just a construct—a vague promise upon future labor/production. Throughout the centuries debt has killed empire and civilizations without pride nor prejudice and it will end the American Empire in the not too distant future.
Sure, we have more sparkly distractions that did the people of ’71 and we DO have some technological marvels that both save lives and improve their quality. BUT, the vast majority of people are able to keep less of the fruits of their own labor that in ’71, are paid less (in real terms) for that labor than in ’71. And are reliant upon debt to continue living those technologically marvelous lives…even if they don’t have a single credit card. The very money they use is itself a debt…the taxes they pay are a debt….the house they live in owned by the State who charge those taxes under threat of violence.
’71 and the decades which preceded was far from a perfect time…there has NEVER been and never will be a perfect time…but we were certainly less under the thumb of government, bankers and Deep State oligarchs than now.
We were also 44 years farther away from the precipice we are currently staring into.
@Tomy: The time for an alternative is long past. If the dollar goes down, so goes down every currency and gold, well, gold imho won’t prove to be a viable alternative in a world thrown into chaos, a situation I seriously doubt will arise given the passivity of a vast majority of the populations of nearly everyplace that has nearly all of its population dependent upon fiat currency. Return to the Dark Ages? Yeah, well, it could happen, but it’s not likely imho. Next to no one wants it and most everyone in the pussified West will accept any option that prevents it. The BRICS are desperately trying to position themselves to avoid it by bowing to the IMF, a collectivist organization well.positioned to impose the “new world order” that the gold bugs believe can be avoided: good luck!
The “alternative” has gone the way of hetrerosexuality as a norm. What you’re “missing” is that the world as you knew it is a gone goose and you’d best be fast on your feet when crunch time rolls around.
Homeowner’s equity in 1971 – 68%
Homeowner’s equity in 2015 after a new 3 year Fed induced bubble increase in prices – 57%
Nothing says progress like owing more on your house. Right Anon?
anon,
You’re also not taking into account what Hazlitt called the unseen consequences of inflation. The question is not whether the average person is better off in some ways than in 1971; technology has improved hugely since then and has brought many benefits. The question to be asked is whether the average person is better off than he would have been without the elites skimming off large parts of his wealth through fiat money inflation. This chart may help explain:
I think Drud describes what we have pretty well. Most of what people have, which is more than they had on average in 1971 is debt based. When the system ceases to function, when enough people/governments cannot pay of the debt in dollars that people trust as redeemable the short period of owning more than you could really afford will end, and may end badly for many.
I have paid cash for my children’s college education, house will be paid off in a little over a year, I have one modest car payment etc. I am not rich by any standard, but working hard and not spending more than you make is not the lifestyle most Americans choose. They have been led to the trough of debt based avarice with Berneysian stealth and have chosen to eat from the trough because it was too hard to resist. So be it. I often wonder if I should have maxed out all of my debt as I have seen others do, but it is not in my DNA. I have skills, a shop full of tools I know how to use, and have done well by my family. I feel I have done the right thing, the only thing that keeps me up at night is how the government will react when this paradigm shifts and it may not be in their favor.
Bob.
Montefrio
I do not agree with your opinion of gold in a crunch/crash situation. When in history has gold ever failed to be the thing to have when the rug has been pulled out from under everyone.
If you want to keep your property, make sure you have gold to pay the property tax or otherwise you are screwed. I’m from the south, we learned that hard lesson from the CW. You don’t want to let the carpetbaggers buy your house on the cheap on the courthouse steps.
The US ha been looted.No bid gov contracts ensures a twelve thousand dollar screwdriver not only goes to line pockets without prison time but hands the whole bill in mockery to taxpayers.Ask Michelle Obama and Val Jarrett with Obamacare were the missing hundreds of thousands of dollars went.The radicalized w h is a rats nest of corruption.I am shocked its still has a wobbly leg of lies to stand on
Unfortunately the masses do not see the most of our technological advancements were acquired on the back of debt. Without fiat currency and debt, most things that made us “better off” would simply not exist today, because wealth goes to the most productive ventures by design. Debt can and does go anywhere, and be of no productive value, due to manipulation. eg the industrial war machine as a good example.
Most if not all advancements were done with the unbridled “printing” of currency, brought into existence by the FED.
It is an illusion that we believe that we are better off than in 1972, because in 1972 our currency was backed by gold, and bought much more in goods and services than it does today.
Rising prices is the RESULT, and not the cause of inflation. You simply have shifted what little wealth you may have had back in 72, and exchanged it for debt, which got you an illusion that you have a better lifestyle than you actually have, and that’s why we have a deficit of $18 Trillion dollars.
Of course it’s much more complicated than this, but Anon simply won’t listen
Admin, with all due respect…really, after reading your last after mine, there’s more to it than that. You’re pissed, I get it.
The FED will own almost all the debt in years to come,They don’t give a shit if US can’t pay.It is only about controlling the currency and the productive resources.
I think Chowderhead said it the most succinctly.