Why the cost increase?

For instance, 50% of those who frequent this site have illusions that they are one percenters….or they would be if the gubment would just get out of the way.

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What constitutes a 1% and who said the government was in the way?
I say money grubbin' greedy people and ZERO interest from the a government to not call a thief a thief a pretty serious issue.

If you look at fuel for an example. In ONE weekend a gouging gas station can and DOES make 40k for 3 days an someone else is pumping fuel into their own car. NOT a word said.  That's 20,000 gallons if he pumped 40,000 double that again.. 

I ask you WHO owns the gas stations? These people don't just get buy in America the become multi millionaires building brand new gas stations and mini marts. The only clean food in the store are the daily deliveries of milk. They offer ZERO in real world. They might have a car wash that cost another million or so to install. BUT LABOR.. ZERO. I can't get most of them off the phone to take the money. If you aren't family or indentured (and most of the workers are) YOU or ME CAN'T get hired..

Try to get hired to work in a gas station.

I'm tell everyone. Pay attention to the little thing that are really REALLY big. Like who owns you local fuel stations? NOT rents the land OWNS the land.. Who do you think is buying up huge lots of land in Canada, USA and any one who will sell in the Americas?

Why do you think Cuba is all in an uproar?

There are land grabs going on all over the world BECAUSE, Trump lost, not because of Biden WINNING.. One of sweetest deals on the planet right now is CUBA..

So when all the "Philosophers, lawyers, economist, politicians, (most) actors, and all nonprofit organizations are seen as the problem they are verses the problems they cause vs who actually profits from their actual existence. THEN do something about it.  Things will change.

I think it's time to have a voice that is held accountable. 

Giving away money and people getting paid to say "WE'RE CLOSED" would stop Monday morning.. Report to work and work. Or stay home and not get paid..

If manual labor is a problem in this country, then lets pull together and do the work, get the mills back up and running and PAY the workers.
Set up OUR 100 year plan..  I'm not as worried about workers from the Americas I'm very concerned about the other 3/4 of the worlds population buying AMERICA. From the top of Canada to the bottom of Brazil.

How do you think the world EATS.. Eastern blocks have reindeer. When was the last time you ate Reindeer. I know NEVER. When was the last time they ate BEEF.. Yesterday.. Do you understand..

Again gold and silver will not feed a town or a family, BUT an acre of land will. Who owns the land? Who controls the fuel? Who controls the food?
Who controls the medications, vaccines and the medical tech? Who manufactures and maintain enough Rare Earth supplies for computer gear? Who has the most satellite in orbit? GUESS who has control of the UPPER, mid and lower orbit skies? A flip of a switch.. the world is turned OFF

Think Toilet paper for just one minute. Again WE as a nation have a very short sided view.. Like two weeks if most are that SMART.. Not lucky, that smart.. I mean I read the whole thread..

Who is suspiciously absent from this conversation?

People who are in the KNOW? I think so... The bunker crowd is what all of America need to move towards. 6-10 weeks will outlast this lazy world.

You'd have to hold your nose for the next 2 years. Pigs and dogs would be a problem.. Who is hunting who?

Crank up the Victrola.. We're on the mend...

Time to feed the chickens..

This hypothetical lays the issue out pretty clearly:

"Consider a hypothetical world where the pandemic had never happened, and instead the economy kept growing as forecasters in January 2020 had expected it would, with the various segments of G.D.P. retaining a steady share of the economic pie.

Services consumption in the second quarter remained 7.4 percent below the level it would have maintained in that alternate universe, while spending on durable goods remained 34 percent higher.

Those are extraordinary shifts in what the economy is being asked to produce, and it is hardly shocking that the physical goods side of the economy would be straining at capacity in light of such an epic reallocation of demand."

None of this surprising. I'm not even going to get into micro economic analysis. Crazy pricing within individual markets is likely to be the new norm going into future.

I believe we are now in the beginning days of a new realization of increasingly scarce resources. We will see a coming devaluation of equity the world has never seen. Panic and reactionary thinking taking hold, division and angst clearly seen. The glass is no longer half full, better see the glass with reality eyes. Of course, there will still be winners, but many more losers. Limited short term vision always puts us in worse positions than enlightened self interest would take us. Sorry for the bad news. If someone has a reality based positive future lets hear it,  will take innovations not yet produced.

You're lucky.  The last 2x4 I saw here was $12.50.   Were you aware that there was a pandemic?  And not all those you apparently consider flunkies (loggers, saw-mill operators, truck-drivers) were able to work full-time?   Or that others, like yourself, who sadly were not able to travel overseas (O woe!) put their money into home construction?   Stop whining.

oldhvymec

You didn’t go deep enough on your research. What the government does when it appears to take money from Social Security is skim off earnings of the surplus that is invested in bond funds. Money that comes in today goes right back out tomorrow to pay benefits. Any remaining surplus is invested in bond funds. Those bond funds generate earnings and only those earnings are used by Congress on other projects. So they don’t actually "raid" the Social Security fund, they use the earnings from invested surplus. But maybe most telling in your reply was that you didn’t show even slightly how Clinton’s budgets weren’t balanced, regardless of what was done with Social Security. Instead you went off on some unrelated and pointless topics which will disappear anyway when this entire thread is deleted by the moderators.