Left Behind
The Decline of the American Middle Class
We don’t often find ourselves citing the CEOs of America’s biggest banks. Between the bankster bailouts and the way the Fed has stovepiped wealth to the canyons of Wall Street, it’s clear that their influence peddling and cronyism has helped them at the expense of the people. Their every pronouncement should be viewed skeptically.
But the problem of the overlooked and declining American middle class is too big to be ignored, even by them. So today I will cite a comment from J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (whose bank had a $25 billion bailout windfall) about those who are being left behind:
“Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids” annually.
“If you travel around to most neighborhoods where companies live, they’re doing fine.”
“So we’ve kind of bifurcated the economy.”
Bifurcated. Well, that’s one word for it.
In the 1960s, America’s growing middle class was the envy of the world. Its prosperity and reach haven’t been equaled since. No one should be surprised that with the end of the gold exchange standard (itself a corruption of a real gold standard) in 1971, the expansion of the middle-class ground to a halt.
The Income Gap
The wealth and income gap have been widening ever since. But the situation has gotten critical today with the frenzied wealth redistribution of today’s monetary cronyism. Quantitative Easing saw trillions of dollars made up out of thin air and pumped right into the financial sector.
In the interest of candor, we may call this Federal Reserve activity of creating money counterfeiting. It may be legalized by the state, but it is monetary counterfeiting none the less. Murray Rothbard pulled back the curtain on the practice long ago:
“It would be difficult to see the point of counterfeiting if each person is to receive the new money proportionally. In real life, then, the very point of counterfeiting is to constitute a process, a process of transmitting new money from one pocket to another, and not the result of a magical and proportionate expansion of money in everyone’s pocket simultaneously.”
Little wonder that the state and its cronies resist the discipline that an honest gold standard imposes on them. The alchemists of old couldn’t create gold out of lead, and today’s Washington wizards can’t create gold out of thin air.
The growing divide between the rich and poor that results from Washington’s monetary sleight of hand are, incidentally, a surefire recipe for social breakdown and violence. Even Dimon acknowledges the danger, saying, “We made a mistake by ignoring some of these things. If we don’t [act], society is going to get worse, because these problems aren’t aging well.”
We’ll go one step further and assure our readers that the problems will not get fixed. Living through a monetary collapse is not a pleasant thing, but get ready for it. If you know that it is coming you can protect yourself and your family with gold and silver.
Don’t be left behind.
