Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Clipping Coins

YEARS AGO in a graduate seminar I perceptively remarked that monetary inflation seems to be an inherent feture of all economic systems. The professor, an older lady, seemed to agree. "Yes, they always clipped coins", she said, which I took to mean that she agreed. When I was a kid, gas cost about twenty cents a gallon, and we had "gas wars", in which a filling station would lower the price by a penny per, teh one down the street would go one better, and the war was on. People were ecstatic, and lined up to fill up. In those days families went for evening "rides", and teenagers "dragged main". I always rode with a friend in a car filled with classmartes, and never pitched in for gas, because I wasn't asked to. My parents paid three and a half dollars apiece for reserved seats at major league baseball games, and the seats were quite good. "Box" seats, behind the dugout close to the field went for four and a half, out of reach for us. The tickets had to be expensive to pay those fifty thousand dollar salaries paid to the players. During the nineteen seventies, as I matured into early adulthood, inflation seemd a way of life, then it disappeared sometime in the nineteen eighties, never to be heard from again. I do not think Ronald Reagan had anything to do with it; monetary policy might have. Our sudden, current epidemic of inflation almost but not quite makes me feel young again. Its cause, the cause of everything nowadays, is of course Covid 19. It is also a gift wrapped silver platter for the Republicans, who can dishonestly claim that Joe Biden and the politicies of those socialistic Democrats are to blame, all tht spending on infrastructure and sinlge mothers and poor people and such; no conservative has ever been known to allow reality to infringe on ideological fervor. The fact that Biden's approval ratings are no beter than Trump's were even after Trump had been impeached twice, had told more than twenty thousand lies in public, and had organized a violent mob to attempt to overthrow the government because he lost an election and falsely claimed that it was stolen from him, attests to the old P.T. Barnum quote that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. The very notion that the current wave of inflation could assist the traitorous Republicans in regaining power in Congress, or even the White House, is too depressing for any reasonably sane person to even contemplate. Yet, it may happen.

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