Middle Class Has Been Getting Clobbered Since the 70’s

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – The great tragedy of the last 40 years has been the nonstop orchestrated destruction of the basis of the currency.  That’s the story here.  It’s that the currency is still being debased.  Because it’s being debased, unless you’re earning more of those debased dollars every time they become debased, then you’re not keeping up.  The way the American public has kept its “standard of living” at pace with the debasement of the currency and inflation is through the process of ringing up and racking up debt.  You see the debt accumulated in those figures on the national debt clock, $16 trillion there.  That’s part of your share of your standard of living that has been delayed for some future generation to actually pay for.  Check out today’s audio and transcript for more…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  We have a report today that basically puts on the paper what we and our guests on this program have been telling you for three solid years, that is that the middle class has been getting clobbered since the late 1970’s.  You know, what’s interesting about this story that you sent me, AG, and I think I had seen this somewhere else.  I was very busy doing production work yesterday on the What Lincoln Killed feature.  So I didn’t get to this until late last night, and I didn’t read the whole thing until early this morning, “Americans saw wealth plummet 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says.”

If you look at the charts and graphs that are associated with this, there are charts and graphs that go back to the 1970’s, or you can find similar charts and graphs that go back to the 1970’s that would paint the picture that not only did you see your wealth eviscerated since 2007, since the great crash — this is the interesting thing to me.  This is the point that no one on CNBC or Fox Business News or anyone else, other than someone like Anthony Sanders, is going to point out.  The wealth that you allegedly had in 2007 did not exist.  It only existed on paper, in fiat currency.  It was a bubble.  When the housing market crashed and your home price, your ATM machine known as your house fell back down to the Earth, it didn’t crash in value per se.  It started to work its way towards being valued at what it actually cost, sans the inflation and sans devaluation of the currency attendant in it.

The great tragedy of the last 40 years has been the nonstop orchestrated destruction of the basis of the currency.  That’s the story here.  It’s that the currency is still being debased.  Because it’s being debased, unless you’re earning more of those debased dollars every time they become debased, then you’re not keeping up.  The way the American public has kept its “standard of living” at pace with the debasement of the currency and inflation is through the process of ringing up and racking up debt.  You see the debt accumulated in those figures on the national debt clock, $16 trillion there.  That’s part of your share of your standard of living that has been delayed for some future generation to actually pay for.

It really is a sad state of affairs, ladies and gentlemen, and it doesn’t have to be this way.  The downside to this is that when you stop ringing the debt up and start getting back in line to using sound money instead of a fiat currency that’s backed by nothing other than future promises for slave labor to pay the debt back, when you get back to this, then things that today are throw-away or are casually dismissed are a lot less easy to just part ways with.

I was reading this morning an essay written by French economist, philosopher Cantillon.  In one of Cantillon’s essays, he was writing about how the value of something is determined by the amount of land that it takes to produce it, plus the amount of labor it takes to work the land.  There was something very interesting and very instructive, I think, for our time today in what Cantillon had written.  Cantillon had written that you could take the same amount of wool and produce really coarse fabric with it that would take you a week to produce, a couple square yards of it, or you could take the same amount of wool and you could produce a very fine fabric with it, which would take ten times the amount of time to loom it together and make it that much more fine.  You started with basically the same raw materials, but because it took so much extra labor and expertise to turn one into the other, or to differentiate between the two, that someone would also have to pay ten weeks’ worth of that craftsman’s salary to obtain the fabric that was made that was more fine and was less coarse, more desirable.

It just reminded me, and I think I’ve talked about this a couple times on the program in the last year or so, we don’t have those calculations anymore.  It’s rare that we have that calculation.  We have mastered the natural world, or we think we have mastered the natural world.  We think we have mastered the gathering of food, the gathering of resources.  We don’t have to worry about any of those things.  There seems to be, in other words, an endless supply of plastic, for example.

How many of you have thrown something in the garbage in the last 24 hours that at some point in time used to be petroleum?  In other words, it was made of plastic.  The harder the plastic, you would think, the more durable the item should be, and therefore it makes you think is there something I could do with this instead of just chucking it in the garbage?  Have you two at the DC command center committed something to the landfills in Maryland that was made of plastic in the last day?

AG:  Absolutely.

Mike:  You have.  Did you think about it before you threw it away or did you just chuck it?

AG:  Didn’t really spend too much time thinking about it.

Mike:  Have you ever had to part ways with something like a cell phone, an old one, and just throw it in the trash and go, “Man, I don’t want to do this, but all right.  I don’t need it”?

AG:  I’ve done it with an old laptop, yeah.

Mike:  You’ve never upgraded your phone and just taken your phone and thrown it into the garbage?

AG:  I don’t think so.  I think I turn them in for —

Mike:  Where do you turn them in at?  You can turn your phone in?  I have all of mine.

AG:  You can turn them in.  I think they give like repurposed and become 911-only phones for disabled vets or disadvantaged people, that sort of thing.

Mike:  There’s no one that’s disadvantaged that doesn’t have a phone anymore, right?  Not in the Obama economy.  Come on!

End Mike Church Show Transcript