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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (144015)	7/2/2014 8:36:21 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Those are good metrics, and yes, the trend is the key. However, I wouldn't dismiss the very real inflation that consumers, the 99%, are experiencing. Remember that in the US, 70% of GDP comes from consumer spending. If the prices on goods and services that the 99% spend most of their money on are increasing, then they will have less money to spend on other things that help the economy grow. We know that price inflation across housing, health care, student loans, food staples, energy are all increasing very rapidly. Those goods are 80-90% of budgets for most Americans. For the Fed to dismiss that is the height of folly. Of course, to the 1%, it doesn't make any difference. Let me tell you my own story. I just did my semi-annual budget and portfolio checkups. My portfolio increased 30% from last year, while my baseline budgetary expenses, non-discretionary, increased 10%. I don't even feel the 10% increase in my monthly budgetary expenses. It doesn't matter to me, because the Fed is gifting me so much new wealth that I don't care about the underlying inflation. However, my mother is on a fixed income. She is hurting really badly, because inflation in food and healthcare is destroying her ability to live a decent life. It got so bad that her discretionary budget (Entertainment and the like) was wiped out by the increases in the non-discretionary part. She's a proud woman. I have been offering to supplement her monthly income out of my own pocket for a couple years now, but she won't take it. Finally, I begged her and told her that this was ridiculous when my family earns so much money. So she let us help. I'm the 1% and she's the 99%. It's a big difference. The 99% is getting crucified and most of them don't have a 1%er trying to help them. At the end of the day, I think many folks on this thread, like yourself, live in an ivory tower of political debate. You won the vote and your ivory tower thinking is now being implemented to the very great detriment of ordinary people in the 99%. I live in the real world and see those impacts. I want to go back to solutions that work for the 99%, which is why I complain so loudly and persistently on these threads, in the faint hope that someone with a little bit of open mindedness and education will understand that common sense solutions are best: free, but effectively regulated markets, executing the Laws of the land, sound monetary and fiscal policies, freely floating interest rates and no Fed intervention in free markets. These aren't ivory tower concepts. They are tried and true methods for long term economic prosperity. QE and ZIRP are recipes for long term disaster and have done nothing by enrich people like me, while further impoverishing the 99%. That is fundamentally NOT fair and will destroy our economy and ultimately our Democracy, as inequality becomes ever more egregious.