Quote:
Originally Posted by Bucketlist2012
When food has in some case doubled in the store over the last few years, a reasonable person would understand the facts of reality.
Inflation is the hidden tax, and it is here..Costs are up. The printing and spending cause the dollar to be devalued, so that it takes more dollars to buy a product..
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Could there be other reasons why food costs have gone up? Certainly gas prices contributed to some of the recent (5-10 year) increases, but while they vary now, it's still in a somewhat consistent range and I think 4$ gas has been priced in.
Could it be the weather? Droughts in China and now the United states along with other similar disruptions around the world probably have the largest impact. When supply drops and demand doesn't (if anything it goes up), the obvious effect is rising prices.
Could it be Ethanol? The CBO estimated that 10-15% of the increase in food prices in 2007-2008 was related to Ethanol. The number is likely higher now, and here's an article talking about it from the wall street journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj
The mandate was awesome for corn farmers, but affects the price of so many things that everyone else pays the price. The government is to blame on this part.
Combine all of these factors and you'd be hard pressed to find out where all of our printed money actually contributed much towards the price increase. For example, steel costs have gone down what looks like 10%+ in the last year:
http://www.worldsteelprices.com/
If our money was being devalued at such a rapid pace that you point towards food as an example, why would steel be any different? The answer is they are two completely different things and while inflation would affect both, they have many other far more powerful things at play. In the case of food, the above contributed virtually all of the price increase while in the case of steel, decreased demand because of the economic situations around the world probably account for most of the drop in prices.
We all buy food so it seems like things cost more, and while on lat-g we tend to buy more steel than most people, we probably don't see the decrease in cost in our prices because AMD and Goodmark and so forth are likely afraid that prices could go back up, and really they are businesses so as long as the market will bear it, they will keep prices where they are.