Dr. Adrian Krieg 2007
|
Last week my wife was a bit under the weather so she asked me to go shopping and gave me a list of what we required. Sticker shock would be a mild comment on my experience in the super market. Naturally I am well aware of real estate, taxes and fuel prices along with their meteoric rise, while our government lies incessantly about our 1.5% inflation. I am also familiar with the fact that by omission of the inflation statistics in Housing, Food, Fuel, and Taxes, the government is able to further manipulate the real numbers, and naturally cheat Social Security recipients, federal employees, and the military. Brother, if you believe government statistics I have this bridge in Brooklyn...
A little retrospect might prove interesting. When I came to America in 1952 I was 12 years old, and spoke barley one word of English. My father had liquidated all our assets in Switzerland and we immigrated to America. While my mother spoke fluent English because she had been a governess in Manchester England for two years my father and I did not speak English. My father did speak 14 other languages many better than indigenous populations, so in short order he learned English, as did I. By 1954 I worked part time earning a big $10. per week for about ten hours, in summer and during vacations I worked full time, 45 hours in those days, and earned $40. a week. My father purchased a three-bedroom house in Larchmont NY for $14,000. The same house without improvements sold in 1998 for $275,000. who even knows what it would sell for today. Later in '57 we moved to another house in the same town that my father purchased for $35,000. Taxes on that house rose from $980. in '57 to $ 14,000. by 1989. My mother sold that house in 1989 for $ 350,000. and I have been told by realtors that houses of that type and in that location were selling for over one million in 2005. By the time I got out of high school I had saved enough money to purchased a Chevrolet Corvette for what my father told me was an unconscionable price of $ 3,400. It was an eight cylinder, which I modified to make it faster; fuel was 0.32 cents per gallon. I smoked an off brand cigarette, which cost 0.14 cents per pac. After a short stint in college I was drafted into the army and upon discharge in 1961 I started my own business. I lived on the lower East Side in Manhattan for a couple of years my rent for a cold water walk up was $32 per month. Rent for the same apartment today is $ 1,800. per mo but they got hot water still a walk up though. About that time I purchased a Porsche for $3,200. 365 type 4 cylinders with four Webber carburetors. Later I purchased a Ferrari California that had body damage and needed to be rebuilt My friend did all the body work and I rebuilt the drive train. The car cost me $ 3,000. and I put another $5,000. in parts into it, plus about 200 hours of labor. I traded it to an Alfa Romero dealer about three years later, even, for a new Alfa Spider Supper Liggera. I eventually gave that car to my wife. I am certain you can see where I am going with this. As we now all know the government lies like a proverbial rug when it comes to reporting statistics of our economy and matters relating to labor. In the last 18 years while Alan Greenspan was at the helm of the FRS the dollar was inflated by 71% but if we go back to 1985 inflation is 81%. In perspective what an American was able to purchase in 1950 for $ 1. now costs about $ 19.00. Now, that's inflation! Put another way a 1950-dollar purchased four ½ Swiss Franks and today is worth one frank sixty. The EURO was introduced a few years ago and has in that time of just five years risen from 0.87 cents to $ 1.30. more proof of dollar inflation! In the mean time gold in the last 14 months has gone from $320. to just over $550.0 a rise of $230 indicating a devaluation of the dollar of 24%. In fact hard assets have risen astronomically since 2000. gold 139%, Platinum 92% Silver 202%. As I purchased items in the supermarket in every case I was astounded. Washing liquid $ 5.35, steak at $9.99 on sale for $7.99 I would not buy it, and now know why we so rarely eat steak. The only people who did not even bother to look at the prices were those on welfare with food stamps and wick program tickets, who had been transported to the market in a cab, you and I paid for. Reality can sometimes be difficult to deal with, particularly when the government has been lying to you for years. We just received an increase of my wife's Blue Cross Blue shield medical coverage; the monthly cost has been increased to $441. her Social Security check is $530. She is 64 but we have to pay this outrageous amount until she turns 65 in December. The morons in DC expect her to live on $ 81. per month for the next ten months. In the mean time our congresswoman Katherine Harris pays $300. per year for healthcare from A to Z for herself and any family she might have to age 25. They gave us a Social Security increase in 2005 it was a hefty $ 24. for me, but they then deducted $12. for an increase in Medicare taxes. Then they changed the tax rate for income taxes on Social Security from taxing the first 50% to taxing the first 85%. In the mean time congress has given themselves a $3,000 pay increase in 2002.2003, 2004. and in 2005 $ 3.500. Put another way their salary increases from '02 to '05 that hey voted themselves, are more than I get in social security in a year, and I paid in for over 37 years, while they paid in nothing. While our elected bums and the FRS are destroying our currency, our incomes are declining due to free trade, and mismanagement. America is rapidly turning into a two-class society, as exist in South America, consisting of the plutocrat wealthy and the poor. Policies of our Democrats as well as Republicans that comprise "The System" are the engineers behind it all. An example is the federal Department of Education that collects enough money from our federal tax base to fund every student from kindergarten through 12th grade with $ 10,000. Average student cost per year is $6,400. and the Department of Education spends 5.7% of our national budget, or $132,458,000,000. but the fed pays only about 14% of the total cost. Thus we can extrapolate that out of the $ 6,400. we spend per student the fed contributes about $ 450. of total educational cost. Who the hell knows where the other $5,995. went? Unfortunately that is how bureaucracies work. * Another good example is fuel costs. Yes, I am well aware of the unconscionable profits made by the Seven Sisters, however the take by the taxman is nothing to sneeze at. In fact by percentage the taxman makes more on fuel costs than anyone else. In my State of Florida there is a $0.14.5 cents state tax on all fuel and added to it is an 18.5% federal tax. and then a 0.12 cent county tax. At a selling price of $ 2.50 per gallon that works out to $0.95.4 cents per gallon of tax. A 15 Gal fill up results in $14,31 in taxes on a total cost of $37.50. That my friends is 26.2% of tax. I will avoid going into the telephone taxes that are over 37%. And just by the way fuel is not considered in the inflation statistics as reported by Disneyland on the Potomac. The fact of the matter is that we as a society are being taxed to death without any discernable benefit to anyone but the bureaucrats and politicians that might best be characterized as parasites. One of the secretly hidden taxes is the benefit government derives from inflation. As inflation rises so does income, but the taxable income earned functions on an accelerated tax basis. The more you make the higher your tax bracket. As a consequence you earn more and then move up to another tax bracket and pay more while actually lowering your spendable income. Consider that serfs in the Middle Ages were allowed to keep 50% of what they produced, and we pay on average 49.20% in taxes, we are in fact not a bit better off than slaves of the Roman empire. One comes to think of who benefits from this situation? There are a very limited number of beneficiaries of all this. First the bureaucracy who gains more members thus growing in numbers resulting in more impute to the system. And politicians who are able to increase their position at the troughs of government largess. The bankers who are able to increase their bottom line as currency is inflated. And lastly the multinational corporations who are able to increase their customer base while at the same time reducing their production costs by off-shoring their production. Everyone but you wins, you loose!
|