(Double) Weekly Roundup: Yellin' For Yellen Edition

Hello again, readers. Haven't seen you for fifteen days. What can I say? Sometimes I'm awfully busy. To reward you for your patience, let's find the hot-water tap in this joint and twist it until some scalding crimethink pours out. You know, the kind that makes you pull your hands out from under the faucet and rub them on your arms in panic.

Let us, for just ten long seconds, examine the idea that the Presidential election was, in fact, stolen, and that Joe Biden will join "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes in the list of Presidents whose ascension is tainted in retrospect. Now, to even consider this notion is to flirt with danger -- and it cannot possibly be true, can it? The recent election, according to a hastily formed coalition of the (presumably) willing, was the most secure in history! Exactly how this could be so is difficult to understand; wasn't it just like the last Presidential election, only with millions of additional and entirely unverified mail-in ballots? And why were all those people so eager to form a coalition and reassure us before a single audit or examination had even begun? Did they receive their marching orders from the same Star Chamber that, ahem, saved the election in the first place? It's best not to look too closely at that, lest you be forcibly unpersoned for even having a public thought about it.

Anyway, let's wave our hands at all of this and say, for a moment, that the election was in fact stolen. Why? Cui bono? If you take a dispassionate look at what President Trump actually did, rather than what Rachel Maddow said he was gonna do, he wasn't exactly Benito Mussolini or anything like that. He didn't actually do much to stop illegal immigration or restrain corporate profiteering. His programs to return manufacturing jobs to America, admirable though they were, didn't do much besides slow the rate at which factories are leaving the country. There's no evidence that the Uniparty agenda of lower labor costs and higher asset prices suffered any significant damage during his Presidency. Oh, and America is about to go perma-Democrat anyway, thanks to a thorough and irreversible series of demographic changes. Why bother to steal the election at all? Why take the risk?

As of July 2021, it appears we at least have the answer to that question.

The United States has entered what can only be described as a hellish inflationary spiral of Weimar-esque proportions. The official numbers are frightening --- five percent since Biden's election, 0.9 percent in the past thirty days! --- but they are also obviously false. Only a fool would think we've had just five percent inflation in the past six months. Fuel is up thirty-five percent. New and used car prices are through the roof. Commodities have gone insane, with most prices doubling in twelve months. Housing has skyrocketed, with a lot of $350k homes in my neck of the rural Ohio woods becoming $450k homes almost overnight.

Those of us old enough to remember the Jimmy Carter years, where a 12.9% auto loan over 36 months was considered so insanely generous that General Motors took out prime-time TV ads to tell us about it, didn't see anything to compare with what's happening right now. We've had the equivalent of a whole Carter presidency since January. I would conservatively guess that the dollar has lost thirty-five percent of its real-world purchasing power in the past 180 days.

And there is no end in sight to this. Trillions of dollars will be printed and given away in the next year. That's "trillions" with a "T". The big banks and investment firms are handing out massive year-over-year raises to their people. Virtually every company with which I do any consistent or substantial business, from Sheptone pickups to Guerilla Gravity, is announcing higher prices. My rep at Sweetwater Music tells me that he is hearing about 40% or more increases across the board.

Would this have happened in a Trump presidency? It seems unlikely, to be honest. Much of this is a knock-on effect of the Biden Administration's decision to put the brakes on American oil production (and Canadian oil imports). When you raise the price of petroleum, you raise the price of everything, with fertilizer-dependent food at the top of the list. Nor would Trump have advanced trillion-dollar additional spending packages. The price of labor is also sinking, thanks to a reopened southern border and a renewal of outsourcing/importing/vulture-capitalism incentives for American corporations.

Cui bono?

Curtis Yarvin, in a long but comprehensible post on the subject, explains that the one-two punch of monetary inflation and lower labor costs amounts to a massive, multi-trillion-dollar giveaway to the richest among us. The asset-holding class is protected against inflation, while the go-to-work class suffers permanent and crippling effects. You know it's terrible now and getting worse in the future because Vox, CNN, et al are falling over themselves trying to reassure you about it, often with staggeringly stupid videos explicitly targeted at idiots.

To understand why this is so, consider this very simple non-fish-related example: I own a home and you don't. (Or maybe it's the other way around). Every year we have substantial inflation, my mortgage payment essentially shrinks, because at some point I get a cost-of-living increase but my mortgage payment stays the same. You, on the other hand, get a rent increase, one that probably exceeds your cost-of-living increase from your job. Your landlord takes that higher rent and uses it to pay his mortgage, which has not increased. Therefore, the homeowner profits, the landlord profits, and the renter takes it in the (choose your orifice here).

After twenty years of inflation, my mortgage is laughably trivial, but your rent is insane. I go to sell my house, and it has appreciated at the rate of inflation, so I get a lot of money. You, the renter, share in none of that.

Now, for "house" substitute: investments, assets, real estate, air-cooled Porsche, firearm, gold, silver, Rolex.

For "rent payment" substitute: food, fuel, car payment, airplane ticket, medical bill, university tuition.

Inflation transfers financial power from people who consume things to people who own things. During the past six months, we have seen a massive amount of this transfer. It is trillions of dollars? Maybe. It's certainly billions and billions. Therefore, it is obvious that the wealthiest people and institutions in America have seen a radical change in their fortunes since Inauguration Day --- and for the better. You and I? We're not doing so well.

Now, we all know (and we must all publicly affirm, as often and loudly as possible) that the election was, in fact, the safest and most secure election in American history. But you can also see how the incentives to steal the election, for an entire class of American super-citizens, verged on the incalculably attractive. Would you steal an election for a trillion dollars? Of course you would. Thankfully, our Investor Class would never do such a thing, because unlike you and I they would never sell their integrity for a mere trillion dollars.

One final thing. You no doubt are having some kind of ignorant and primitive thought like, "Jack, didn't a wealth transfer like the one you're describing above also happen during the COVID-19 pandemic? In fact, didn't COVID-19 increase the net worth of the world's billionaires by $1.2 trillion?" Well, yes, you silly reader, that did in fact happen, but it's not very appropriate of you to notice it in public. Why, someone who isn't perfectly in tune with the prevailing narrative might wonder if we will be forced, as a country, to engage in one of these trillion-dollar wealth transfers every year: COVID-19 in 2020, the Biden inflation in 2021, and who knows what for 2022?

It's best not to think about that sort of thing at all, but rather to consume some appropriate media and let your thoughts be guided by that. Might I suggest a Springsteen and Obama podcast? Maybe a new Marvel Cinematic Universe movie on DisneyPlus? Citizen, the right thoughts are all around you. Just pick up on them and repeat, please. The election was safe. Trillion-dollar wealth transfers are normal. The greatest problem facing this country is either climate change or white supremacy, depending on whether you are looking at a twelve-year timeline or a twelve-month timeline. The right people are in charge. It's all going to work out.

For someone.

* * *

I wrote a totally-fictional story about a Neon hatchback. And I had a few observations about Sob Rock.

Oh, and my Silver Sky Lunar Ice never arrived, because the store sent it FedEx Ground despite my explicit requests to them in the past to, ah, never do that. So now I don't have a guitar. Instead, I have a problem. Oh well.