The Buckets by Greg Cravens for February 17, 2016

Been there, done that.

Yep, that’s an eye opener, alright.

Salaries change too. At the time I retired, over 65, one hour of overtime was well more than my first paycheck. Both before deductions.

I babysat for 35 cents an hour when I was a teenager.

Is anything going to get better as man ventures further into the 21st century?

My first job was sacking groceries for forty cents per hour.

And I used to think “Man, if I could just make a hundred dollars a week I would be set for life.”

When I graduated from high school in 1962. my husband and I bought a three bedroom two bath house and two pretty good cars within the next three years, and paid for them with a job that he got right out of high school. I didn’t work, few married women did, and those that did did so by choice. Now it isn’t a choice for most women, unless they don’t mind living in poverty.

………..Since that time, the productivity of the American worker has skyrocketed, and we are generally acknowledged to be the best in the world. And, we are producing goods that we can’t afford to buy…………………..……….Most of the value that we are producing is going to the 1%, who use that money to buy politicians who make laws that insure that they keep making most of the money, which they can use to buy more politicians, who will write more laws so they can make more money to buy more politicians and etc etc etc. …………. If this is Democracy, somewhere the whole thing has gone seriously off the tracks.

I see now.

Here’s the scary stuff. My grandfather paid for my father’s education, my father paid for my education. I will never be able to afford to pay for my daughter’s education. Housing and healthcare have also become prohibitively expensive. This isn’t offset by deflationary sectors like clothes and electronics.

Where I live, we paid eleven times the original 1955 price of our house in the ’80’s. Now it’s worth eleven times what we paid, and it’s just an ordinary post-WWII tract house. The only way our kids could afford to live here is if they inherit the place.

Prices don’t go up; the value of your money goes down. The people to blame are not the ones with no choice but to raise prices; the people to blame are the ones in charge of the money supply. The history of dozens of countries shows that it can end only in economic catastrophe.