What prompted me to run this piece was I keep seeing more examples of "shrinkflation." One example: I ran out of checks and so I ordered some more from the bank. I get just two little checkbooks (maybe 50 checks). And I think I get charged more than $20 for those. When I used to re-order checks, I received two boxes and hundreds of checks - for less fees.
They get you with the "fees." Driver's license renewal fees, etc. And you have to "re-new" more often.
The "Hidden" inflation is everywhere. Governments and companies are very good at camouflaging the hidden fees. CPI isn't picking up much of this.
I think if inflation was calculated the same way it was in 1980, we'd be at 15 percent annual inflation - maybe higher. It would certainly be all-time "record" inflation. So the deception works.
I thought of another possible workaround. I think people go to church less often than they used to. One reason for this might be that it saves families from having to make a donation in the collection plate. Also, whenever we go to church, we often go out for Sunday dinner afterwords - so church leads to a $90 lunch bill! No church, we eat at home.
Feb 9, 2023·edited Feb 9, 2023Liked by Bill Rice, Jr.
My dad had a "Mammie". He LOVED her. She came everyday to help care for the children, who seemed to arrive every year or so. My grandfather wasn't flush with cash, in fact, he lost the family farm during the depression, one that had been paid for since before the Civil War.
The woman that came counted on that income. Her children were raised. The situation wasn't one of discrimination, but I am sure in the late 20s, early 30s the jobs open to her were few. And according to my dad, she was THE BEST. Some of the baby care tips he shared with me and his ease with babies came from her. He was the second oldest, so mom was busy with the younger seven and with the cooking.
My grandfather's dollars he made as a mechanic for John Deere sure went farther than they do today. He lost everything, but made a come back, bought a house, filled it with children, sent them to Parochial School. He grew a big garden and everything on the table was made from scratch. They had a car. They paid for the long term hospitalization of the third child when he was seriously injured in a hunting accident.
Grandma went to the beauty shop once a week, lol, but I am sure that was after the kids were grown. I can't even imagine today where any woman gets the money to have her nails done. I grew up doing my own and when they get done, rarely, it's by me.
Watch Downton Abbey. Those people who worked there were thrilled to get the jobs.
We've progressed people out of real work, meaningful work ,to jobs that are difficult to explain to someone of my generation, jobs where you make sure your chair is comfortable because that's how you spend your day. Those things listed above that people have given up, many of us have never or rarely been able to afford or allowed ourselves to afford.
I have found a perfect way for me to cut down my overall food costs. I'm 71, retired, fixed income,and have a different diet from my wife. I don't have all the allergies she suffers from. So, I shop at a local family owned supermarket that also sells store cooked ready to eat meals. Before you think it's just BS cooking, they have Salmon, Pot Roast, Meatballs, baked Chicken and Turkey, spare ribs, soups, etc.. ALL containers are PACKED and will give me 2 full size meals (sometimes 3) each. Prices range from 7.99 to 15.99/container (Salmon). A much better deal for me than buying the individual ingredients, cooking, and dishwashing involved. They created an additional income stream for their soon to be "expired" food, and I'm happy to oblige. We haven't gone to a restaurant since COVID started. Thanks for the article.
You glossed right over the biggest work around available to couples with kids.
The more kids you have the more dollar sense it makes.
Downsize.
One parent stays home with the kids.
It can be done.
One "good" car, one "crap car"
Generally you want the woman driving the good car. Put all the commuting miles on the crap car..
The one that keeps working will see their income increase with more available time to work and to focus on work.
There are too many benefits of this to list
For those that don't feel it can be done, I will just say my wife and I did it. Starting with a single income of only 72k a year in 96, while living in Irvine CA.
Mayberry is still out there if you make it happen.
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, people had workarounds called "gardens" and kept chickens, goats, and even pigs in the shed or garage. And this is in densely populated NJ. Back then in the stone ages, people also had several or even dozens of fruit trees in every yard. In the following decades, people ripped out the productive fruit trees in favor of useless green lawns. And zoning laws took care of the livestock and gardens.
I remember when I brought my Taiwanese wife back in the Nineties and my dad drove us around the area, which is a pretty green one with nice old houses. He proudly asked my wife what she thought, and she answered, "What a waste! Why all the useless grass? Why weren't they growing gardens, fruit trees, and keeping livestock?"
As everyone knows, food is getting unaffordable. With that in mind, seems to me the best workaround is growing some food. Even in the city, using permaculture, one can get quite a bit of food out of a balcony if it has some sun. Here in Taiwan, there are virtually no empty lots--there are stealth garden beds planted by squatters everywhere. Those gardens aren't pretty, in fact, they are quite an eye sore. But they sure are productive. Moreover, as we have flat roofs here, lots of food is grown on rooftop greenhouses. In the States with a quarter acre lot, one could be self-sufficient in food in a few years. Now that's a workaround!
Feb 16, 2023·edited Feb 16, 2023Liked by Bill Rice, Jr.
I think about these things all the time and also listen and read a lot. Just some of my thoughts on this.
Based on the amount of money the federal government was spending starting in 2001, we should have had massive inflation in the past 2 decades but didn't. Peter Schiff made a statement in an interview several months ago, and it made sense. He said that the inflation of the money supply for the past 2 decades was offset by productivity and technological advancements among other things. If you think about all of the outsourcing, cheap immigrant labor, price transparency, competition, etc since the mid 90s, the US should have experienced massive disinflation - the CPI should have gone down, but we never saw that happen.
I saw a talk given by Roy Casagranda given at the recent World Government Summit on youtube last night. I didn't agree with much of what he said, but it was very thought provoking. One thing he said was that the peak of American economic prosperity occurred between 1948 and 1973. He didn't mention why this happened and his thoughts on why it ended were wrong imho. Why did we become a superpower and have so much prosperity in those decades? Well, WW2 resulted in the complete obliteration of the industrial capacity of the world with the exception of the United States. It literally took 2 decades to replace it. One other reason for those prosperous decades was the adoption of the Bretton Woods system. Another reason was the shift from agriculture to manufacturing during those decades. What caused the beginning of the decline of that prosperity? Ron Paul would probably say the end of the Gold backed dollar. But there were other things as well specifically beginning to open up trade with China. That prosperity was not natural - the world blew itself up and we benefitted from that.
You've mentioned a lot of the ways people avoid inflation, but you're also leaving out a lot of the things modern day parents spend their money on. I was born in 1974 and my parents were frugal. They also benefitted from the simple fact that none of us kids had chronic health issues. My older brothers both had jobs before they'd turned 16 and my sister and I got jobs as soon as we could drive. That was considered normal. What % of kids get jobs today when they turn 16? My guess is it's a lot less than what was common in the 70s and 80s. What % have autism or other debilitating chronic disease/condition? How much are parents spending on prescription drugs, doctor's visits, and specialists today compared to what they spent back then? How much are they spending on video games, computers, cellphones, and tablets? When I was growing up, a bicycle was a necessity, but aside from that we had few toys. There was also only 1 TV in the house for much of my childhood until late 80s. I think there are a lot of things that aren't even captured in the CPI because we didn't use to buy them at all 2 decades ago.
Tired of a shrinking packaging. It's just stupid. It's putting more paper and plastic into landfills. The 12oz. pound, the 11.5oz. pound. It would be smarter to supply bulk quantities of foods without the packaging costs and try to move Americans that way. Instead, we get bs--more sawdust in the bread and fewer pickles in the same size jar.
Very few people could have predicted the speed with which the current administration brought the current chaos and other related uncertainties to our door.
I saw it coming after 9/11, and I moved us away from the entanglements of big cities and population zones. Even so, what has transpired in the last 3 years is profound, and leaves a good many of us out here at the end of this long county road in a disturbed state of mind; to put it mildly.
I maintain hope that we can recover and reverse much of this. One also needs a very strong faith.
Most people want peace and prosperity. These people need to culture the healthy attitude of self reliance, and not the attitude of government entitlements. Yes, most peace loving people do not quite understand what is needed for true peace in the heart. No ideology can provide this heart process.
The immigration issue and the erosion of criminal justice issue are very serious wild cards to consider and study.
The Empire can immerse us in any one of a number of manufactured crises: war, economic crisis, environmental crisis, pandemic crisis, manufactured civil war here-and-there crisis, other forms of social unrest crisis, food crisis, water crisis, need for martial law to manage-any-of-these crisis, and so on.
Hopefully, large elements of the military and law enforcement service will wake up to patriotism, if and when the time comes. Hopefully, they will say no to tyranny and take up the patriotism banner. The Constitution and Bill of Rights is a very clear guide to what it means to have and promote patriotism.
One worries about paramilitary mercenaries, as well as further Chinese intrusions into the fabric of what is left of our nation.
Pray for the strong hearted to hold the line. Pray for the weak hearted to heal their long lived fears and add their spirit and presence to our truth movement.
In my long journey helping the lives of people I have observed a collection of cascading fears:
1) fear of scarcity, or lack,
2) fear of not being good enough
3) fear of rejection
4) fear of loss of control.
They flow out of each other. Eventually, after a lifetime of running these fear programs, people are left with the fear of death, which is a magnificent and erosive illusion. Death is a very important part of life...as important as being born in the first place!
We have to help people with their fear constructs.
T.S. Eliot had some good words to help us with this kind of Alpha and Omega conundrum: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Many of these have already been implemented by a lot of people including myself. Some of us have been doing some of these things for a long time already.
Eventually you get to the point where you can cut back only so much before some get to the actual suffering point, however. Then you have to ask, What's next?
We have to keep bearing witness to the truth, in all its forms.
We have to understand our fears and help others understand their fears also.
Normal fear is but an inner messenger that boundary formation is needed. That is what we are trying to do.
Too many of us live with anxiety, an abnormal and unmanaged form of fear, which has disabled the many who suffer this. Because they do not know how to manage it, they want to numb it.
A strong heart with the strength and courage to live according to our beliefs must be cultured.
A strong will and a settled purpose can accomplish almost anything. It will gather. People will join up when they accept their own hearts. The heart is the hub of everything sacred. It's not just a mechanical blood pump.
At this point in the curve I am willing to accept the Constitution and Bill of Rights as an operating earthly spiritual treatise worthy of a spiritual effort. I have not been a precise and devout student of the particular Bible. The people that wrote these documents were not cluttered up as we have become. They had clarity of vision and expressed it well.
Teach the children well for they will carry heavier burdens over the course of time. The state of our schools has become decrepit. More is needed here. This is a good place for many of us to contribute.
What prompted me to run this piece was I keep seeing more examples of "shrinkflation." One example: I ran out of checks and so I ordered some more from the bank. I get just two little checkbooks (maybe 50 checks). And I think I get charged more than $20 for those. When I used to re-order checks, I received two boxes and hundreds of checks - for less fees.
They get you with the "fees." Driver's license renewal fees, etc. And you have to "re-new" more often.
The "Hidden" inflation is everywhere. Governments and companies are very good at camouflaging the hidden fees. CPI isn't picking up much of this.
I think if inflation was calculated the same way it was in 1980, we'd be at 15 percent annual inflation - maybe higher. It would certainly be all-time "record" inflation. So the deception works.
I thought of another possible workaround. I think people go to church less often than they used to. One reason for this might be that it saves families from having to make a donation in the collection plate. Also, whenever we go to church, we often go out for Sunday dinner afterwords - so church leads to a $90 lunch bill! No church, we eat at home.
My dad had a "Mammie". He LOVED her. She came everyday to help care for the children, who seemed to arrive every year or so. My grandfather wasn't flush with cash, in fact, he lost the family farm during the depression, one that had been paid for since before the Civil War.
The woman that came counted on that income. Her children were raised. The situation wasn't one of discrimination, but I am sure in the late 20s, early 30s the jobs open to her were few. And according to my dad, she was THE BEST. Some of the baby care tips he shared with me and his ease with babies came from her. He was the second oldest, so mom was busy with the younger seven and with the cooking.
My grandfather's dollars he made as a mechanic for John Deere sure went farther than they do today. He lost everything, but made a come back, bought a house, filled it with children, sent them to Parochial School. He grew a big garden and everything on the table was made from scratch. They had a car. They paid for the long term hospitalization of the third child when he was seriously injured in a hunting accident.
Grandma went to the beauty shop once a week, lol, but I am sure that was after the kids were grown. I can't even imagine today where any woman gets the money to have her nails done. I grew up doing my own and when they get done, rarely, it's by me.
Watch Downton Abbey. Those people who worked there were thrilled to get the jobs.
We've progressed people out of real work, meaningful work ,to jobs that are difficult to explain to someone of my generation, jobs where you make sure your chair is comfortable because that's how you spend your day. Those things listed above that people have given up, many of us have never or rarely been able to afford or allowed ourselves to afford.
What's left to give up?
I have found a perfect way for me to cut down my overall food costs. I'm 71, retired, fixed income,and have a different diet from my wife. I don't have all the allergies she suffers from. So, I shop at a local family owned supermarket that also sells store cooked ready to eat meals. Before you think it's just BS cooking, they have Salmon, Pot Roast, Meatballs, baked Chicken and Turkey, spare ribs, soups, etc.. ALL containers are PACKED and will give me 2 full size meals (sometimes 3) each. Prices range from 7.99 to 15.99/container (Salmon). A much better deal for me than buying the individual ingredients, cooking, and dishwashing involved. They created an additional income stream for their soon to be "expired" food, and I'm happy to oblige. We haven't gone to a restaurant since COVID started. Thanks for the article.
You glossed right over the biggest work around available to couples with kids.
The more kids you have the more dollar sense it makes.
Downsize.
One parent stays home with the kids.
It can be done.
One "good" car, one "crap car"
Generally you want the woman driving the good car. Put all the commuting miles on the crap car..
The one that keeps working will see their income increase with more available time to work and to focus on work.
There are too many benefits of this to list
For those that don't feel it can be done, I will just say my wife and I did it. Starting with a single income of only 72k a year in 96, while living in Irvine CA.
Mayberry is still out there if you make it happen.
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, people had workarounds called "gardens" and kept chickens, goats, and even pigs in the shed or garage. And this is in densely populated NJ. Back then in the stone ages, people also had several or even dozens of fruit trees in every yard. In the following decades, people ripped out the productive fruit trees in favor of useless green lawns. And zoning laws took care of the livestock and gardens.
I remember when I brought my Taiwanese wife back in the Nineties and my dad drove us around the area, which is a pretty green one with nice old houses. He proudly asked my wife what she thought, and she answered, "What a waste! Why all the useless grass? Why weren't they growing gardens, fruit trees, and keeping livestock?"
As everyone knows, food is getting unaffordable. With that in mind, seems to me the best workaround is growing some food. Even in the city, using permaculture, one can get quite a bit of food out of a balcony if it has some sun. Here in Taiwan, there are virtually no empty lots--there are stealth garden beds planted by squatters everywhere. Those gardens aren't pretty, in fact, they are quite an eye sore. But they sure are productive. Moreover, as we have flat roofs here, lots of food is grown on rooftop greenhouses. In the States with a quarter acre lot, one could be self-sufficient in food in a few years. Now that's a workaround!
Take a look at what CPI does NOT track and then tell me if it is believable.
I think about these things all the time and also listen and read a lot. Just some of my thoughts on this.
Based on the amount of money the federal government was spending starting in 2001, we should have had massive inflation in the past 2 decades but didn't. Peter Schiff made a statement in an interview several months ago, and it made sense. He said that the inflation of the money supply for the past 2 decades was offset by productivity and technological advancements among other things. If you think about all of the outsourcing, cheap immigrant labor, price transparency, competition, etc since the mid 90s, the US should have experienced massive disinflation - the CPI should have gone down, but we never saw that happen.
I saw a talk given by Roy Casagranda given at the recent World Government Summit on youtube last night. I didn't agree with much of what he said, but it was very thought provoking. One thing he said was that the peak of American economic prosperity occurred between 1948 and 1973. He didn't mention why this happened and his thoughts on why it ended were wrong imho. Why did we become a superpower and have so much prosperity in those decades? Well, WW2 resulted in the complete obliteration of the industrial capacity of the world with the exception of the United States. It literally took 2 decades to replace it. One other reason for those prosperous decades was the adoption of the Bretton Woods system. Another reason was the shift from agriculture to manufacturing during those decades. What caused the beginning of the decline of that prosperity? Ron Paul would probably say the end of the Gold backed dollar. But there were other things as well specifically beginning to open up trade with China. That prosperity was not natural - the world blew itself up and we benefitted from that.
You've mentioned a lot of the ways people avoid inflation, but you're also leaving out a lot of the things modern day parents spend their money on. I was born in 1974 and my parents were frugal. They also benefitted from the simple fact that none of us kids had chronic health issues. My older brothers both had jobs before they'd turned 16 and my sister and I got jobs as soon as we could drive. That was considered normal. What % of kids get jobs today when they turn 16? My guess is it's a lot less than what was common in the 70s and 80s. What % have autism or other debilitating chronic disease/condition? How much are parents spending on prescription drugs, doctor's visits, and specialists today compared to what they spent back then? How much are they spending on video games, computers, cellphones, and tablets? When I was growing up, a bicycle was a necessity, but aside from that we had few toys. There was also only 1 TV in the house for much of my childhood until late 80s. I think there are a lot of things that aren't even captured in the CPI because we didn't use to buy them at all 2 decades ago.
Great article.
Tired of a shrinking packaging. It's just stupid. It's putting more paper and plastic into landfills. The 12oz. pound, the 11.5oz. pound. It would be smarter to supply bulk quantities of foods without the packaging costs and try to move Americans that way. Instead, we get bs--more sawdust in the bread and fewer pickles in the same size jar.
Shrinkflation: The Big Mac when it first came out to what it is now. Now it's more a "Tall Mac" than a "Big Mac."
Very few people could have predicted the speed with which the current administration brought the current chaos and other related uncertainties to our door.
I saw it coming after 9/11, and I moved us away from the entanglements of big cities and population zones. Even so, what has transpired in the last 3 years is profound, and leaves a good many of us out here at the end of this long county road in a disturbed state of mind; to put it mildly.
I maintain hope that we can recover and reverse much of this. One also needs a very strong faith.
Most people want peace and prosperity. These people need to culture the healthy attitude of self reliance, and not the attitude of government entitlements. Yes, most peace loving people do not quite understand what is needed for true peace in the heart. No ideology can provide this heart process.
The immigration issue and the erosion of criminal justice issue are very serious wild cards to consider and study.
The Empire can immerse us in any one of a number of manufactured crises: war, economic crisis, environmental crisis, pandemic crisis, manufactured civil war here-and-there crisis, other forms of social unrest crisis, food crisis, water crisis, need for martial law to manage-any-of-these crisis, and so on.
Hopefully, large elements of the military and law enforcement service will wake up to patriotism, if and when the time comes. Hopefully, they will say no to tyranny and take up the patriotism banner. The Constitution and Bill of Rights is a very clear guide to what it means to have and promote patriotism.
One worries about paramilitary mercenaries, as well as further Chinese intrusions into the fabric of what is left of our nation.
Pray for the strong hearted to hold the line. Pray for the weak hearted to heal their long lived fears and add their spirit and presence to our truth movement.
In my long journey helping the lives of people I have observed a collection of cascading fears:
1) fear of scarcity, or lack,
2) fear of not being good enough
3) fear of rejection
4) fear of loss of control.
They flow out of each other. Eventually, after a lifetime of running these fear programs, people are left with the fear of death, which is a magnificent and erosive illusion. Death is a very important part of life...as important as being born in the first place!
We have to help people with their fear constructs.
T.S. Eliot had some good words to help us with this kind of Alpha and Omega conundrum: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Thank you for this space to think it through.
God Bless
Great article and awesome follow up comments. 🤔
RON PAUL 2024!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some good ideas and suggestions here, Bill, and will be linking this article today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Many of these have already been implemented by a lot of people including myself. Some of us have been doing some of these things for a long time already.
Eventually you get to the point where you can cut back only so much before some get to the actual suffering point, however. Then you have to ask, What's next?
We have to keep bearing witness to the truth, in all its forms.
We have to understand our fears and help others understand their fears also.
Normal fear is but an inner messenger that boundary formation is needed. That is what we are trying to do.
Too many of us live with anxiety, an abnormal and unmanaged form of fear, which has disabled the many who suffer this. Because they do not know how to manage it, they want to numb it.
A strong heart with the strength and courage to live according to our beliefs must be cultured.
A strong will and a settled purpose can accomplish almost anything. It will gather. People will join up when they accept their own hearts. The heart is the hub of everything sacred. It's not just a mechanical blood pump.
At this point in the curve I am willing to accept the Constitution and Bill of Rights as an operating earthly spiritual treatise worthy of a spiritual effort. I have not been a precise and devout student of the particular Bible. The people that wrote these documents were not cluttered up as we have become. They had clarity of vision and expressed it well.
Teach the children well for they will carry heavier burdens over the course of time. The state of our schools has become decrepit. More is needed here. This is a good place for many of us to contribute.
Thanks again.
Onward