Inflation is the most insidious tax because most people don’t even realize their pockets are being picked. From Brian McGlinchey at starkrealities.substack.com:
The Federal Reserve’s printing press enables reckless DC spending, and now we’re all paying the price
All across the economic dashboard, inflation indicators are blinking red. Most recently, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index, calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, rose 5.7% from November 2020 to November 2021. That’s the biggest year-over-year surge since September 1983.
Many mistakenly attribute today’s rising prices solely to supply chain woes, and government officials are happy to fertilize that mythology—as Kamala Harris reflexively did last week in her rambling, didn’t-do-the-reading response to a question from Margaret Brennan:
[see linked story for video]
The truth is, in the words of economist Milton Friedman, “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” In other words, today’s rising prices are primarily the result of the Federal Reserve’s relentless creation of new money, which serves to facilitate the government’s multi-trillion dollar deficit-spending addiction.
Note, the Fed’s rampant money creation facilitates deficit spending, but, in the end, it doesn’t actually pay for it. Instead, it functions as a massive scam that hides the price of deficit spending by ultimately passing it on to all of us via inflation.
While the new-money effect on prices is compounded by supply chain failures, those failures are themselves driven in part by higher demand fueled by the extra cash in circulation.
Manipulating Markets, Burying a Tax
When the government spends more than it takes in, the difference is funded by issuing Treasury bonds, bills, and notes.
In a rational, un-manipulated market, a profligate spender that’s already more than $29 trillion in debt would have to pay high interest rates to issue a new set of IOUs. Today’s 10-year Treasury rate, however, is just 1.5%. That utterly irrational rate is the direct result of the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the Treasury debt market.
