The "New" Economy...

If an entry-level job pays $20.00 an hour here in Taxifornia, but the price of the Happy Meal they're serving now costs $15.99.  Isn't everything pretty much back to normal?  

Aren't we going to be back to where we were before the Chinese tried to kill us with a manufactured bat virus?  And to where our Gubmint shut down the economy and sent us home?  Apparently yes.  So much so that our BoyGuv decided that people who ask, "Would you like fries with that?" deserve to be paid more.  More than entry-level Army soldiers?  More than any other Minimum Wage anywhere in America?  Much more!  So they'd owe him their vote when he runs for higher office, no doubt.

(Which could be as early as the Democrat National Convention, me thinks...)

So I propose that everything's pretty much back to normal, except for the 50,000,000 folks like me who retired on "yesterday's financial reality" and now find themselves in "today's financial reality."  Today's "new" economy.

As in, those retired folks like me have lost 20% of their retirement $Cash.  20% just up and gone in a puff of smoke while the bozos in Washington, D. C. played with themselves.  While our "Rome" burns.

So now the hourly workers are making mucho more per hour!  That's good!  So they can now afford to buy the stuff that's gone up in price due to the exorbitant spending of the O'Biden Administration, right?  RIGHT?  It took in $4.655 Trillion in 2022, and spent $6.134 Trillion in 2022.  The Government, YOUR Government, flooded our economy with  $1.5+ Trillion extra dollars.  To buy stuff that it wanted.  Lots of windmills and solar panels.  And Chevrolets and lumber and computers and casaba melons and bacon and clothing and rope and pencils and Every Other Damn Thing You Can Imagine.  Putting us in competition with those we put in office.  And that produces inflation.  And the definition of inflation remains the same:

"Inflation results when too many dollars are chasing too few goods and services."

You may not know it, but I, The Chuckmeister, am also a graduate economist.  Degree and everything.  Hanging on the wall right over there.  So I know a bit about this whole inflation thing and what causes it.  And I can tell you these periodic bouts of exuberance by Left-leaning governments only result in the ratcheting-up of prices.  Followed rapidly by upticks in the cost of labor, even if strikes prove necessary to accomplish that goal.  Everything just moves up a notch.  

And the public grudgingly gets used to $15.00 burgers.  Bacon extra.  Not counting fries and a drink.  

You used to work an hour for a burger, now you'll still work an hour for a burger.  Except now you'll be in a higher tax bracket.  And have to pay union dues to SEIU.  The folks who got you there.  And BoyGuv up in Sacrascrewyou and the Thieves in The Swamp will love you more.  

Not the "you" you.  Just the "your wallet," you.

And the pendulum will swing to the Right someday, just like it did after Wilson.  And Hoover.  And Roosevelt.  And Johnson.  And especially Carter, under whom I bought my first house.  At 11.5% interest.  And Clinton.  And Obama.  And the future will tell following the exit of our current White House occupant.  

The excesses will all be corrected, most likely by executive orders, causing the economy to settle down.  It will take a few years of restored freedom, and the claw-back of legislative-excesses, and a period of increased profits, and heightened tax collections, before everything will really settle down.  And we'll be back to normal.  

Normal-"ish."

But that will take the pendulum swinging back to the Right.  If it doesn't come swinging back in November, if "The People" choose not to redirect the Ship of State, back to a safer and more productive course, then I predict Alexis de Toqueville will prove prescient in his predictions.

And our Ship-of-State will hit the rocks.

de Toqueville was the 18th Century French philosopher and economist and historian, and big America supporter, who predicted that if we ever failed, if we, America, were ever to be defeated, then it would come as a result of our politicians learning how to buy our votes with our own money.  

Unfortunately, America, that's yesterday's news.

America has outlasted Rome in the length of its small "d" democracy.  We've now become the longest lasting democracy - our Representative Republic - in world history.  So I guess November will tell us how much longer we have to go.

In closing, I'd like to say:

I love my Country.  My Government, not so much...