By Esther Ramos
Did you know, there’s a government office that decides if your dollars will be worth 15 cents each or 37 cents each? Silly me! I thought the worth of our money was going down as a result of naturally occurring economic variants. But, behold!
This is also the group who decided to shove an extra $600 billion into the banking industry, to make sure that each of your particular dollars would be worth, suddenly, slightly less. They can call it quantitative easing if they enjoy doing that, but it still ends in the fact that every one of my individual dollars is now worth less than it was the day before this was done.
All the while, a great deal of this money is red ink that we borrowed from China.
The name of this office? It’s the Federal Open Market Committee or the FOMC. Who is it among us, who has the wherewithal, or the education mixed with wisdom, to make these decisions for us? Who appointed them? Did any of you hear about these people being assigned? I put in a reasonable amount of time with my ear to the ground and my eye on the ball, yet most of this got by me.
I want to know what part of making my money worth less is supposed to encourage me to invest or to save or possibly to even go back into business and put a couple of people to work? Anything I invest, into whichever venue I choose, will profit me nothing as long as interest rates are so low, and my invested dollars will only be propping up somebody’s debt load.
The next question, for which I’m still seeking an answer, is this: Why aren’t the most volatile and fluid costs figured into the inflation rate?
Oh. You didn’t know? Food and oil, (or fuel as we know it), and the prices assigned to them, are considered too unreliable to be included. That’s right. Too slippery. This is one way in which inflation is truly a tax that one cannot avoid nor evade. And the worst news is this: the less money you make, a bigger percentage of your income will be necessarily pre-spent for food and fuel, because your bag of potatoes costs the same as does the bag bought by a person making six-figures. And what will your 401K mean to you if these guys decide to make all of your dollars worth only 22 pennies each? They have this much power. Look it up.
I don’t know how long we believe, as a nation, that we can continue in this vein. I will close for now with a quote from the French Finance Minister, as a footnote, of sorts. “China saves and exports. Europe consumes. The U.S. borrows and consumes. Is this a balanced model? Probably not.”
