Back When People Used Fuel And Ate Food....
A tidbit from Ford's 1974 "Whip Inflation Now" speech that I forgot to mention in this post: "Food prices and petroleum prices in the United States are primary inflationary factors."
Can you imagine a Fed chairman saying that today, much less a president in a prime-time national address?
Can you imagine a Fed chairman saying that today, much less a president in a prime-time national address?
posted by The Cunning Realist at Friday, October 19, 2007
4 Comments:
It just seems like there is little upside to being candid these days. The news media jump on anything that seems to deviate from the conventional wisdom. And the American people seem to prefer having sunshine blown up their collective ass.
It often seems like no one is interested in having a serious conversation about the challenges we face. The few that do are forced to jump through Wolf Blitzer and Tim Russert's hoops. The "discourse" in the popular media that affect people's opinions is so vapid and childish, it can't support any sober discussion. It is all artifice at this point.
This post ties in directly with this article I read yesterday, Living Paycheck to Paycheck Gets Harder, by By Anne D'Innocenzio, AP Business Writer.
"The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.
Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc."
(added bolding mine)
This is just the end game of neo-conservative politics. I wouldn't be surprised if we hit another depression.
Thom Hartmann wrote about exactly this stuff happening in his booked, Screwed, The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class-and What We Can Do
About It. I'd love to hear TCR's thoughts on this book. So much of what he writes jives with what Thom writes yet TCR is a conservative and Thom is a progressive.
Spider: Thanks for the links!
I still have the Ford, "Whip Inflation Now” WIN button
We wore it upside down back then: NIW “No Immediate Miracles”
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