This Picture Is Worth a (few) Trillion Words

This article tells a sobering, important tale in pleasantly plain English and in not very many words.

Here's my adaptation of its story:

• If Samuel Adams (in 1800), Robert E. Lee (in 1860), or Wilbur Wright (in 1910) wanted a loaf of bread, each had to pay approximately the same amount of money. In other words, a loaf of bread cost about the same in 1910 as it did in 1800.

AND

• If my great-grandparents (in 1913) or I (in 2005) wanted to buy a loaf of bread, it's a different story. Now I have to come up with almost twenty times as much money as my great-grandparents. In other words, a loaf of bread costs about TWENTY TIMES as much in 2005 as it did in 1913.

Here's a chart showing this in VERY graphic form:

Look how fast that red line is going up. That's how fast the purchasing power of our United States dollars is disappearing. We've already lost 95% of it. Yuck.

I encourage you to think about this chart every time you hear Ben Bernanke (or anyone else) say that the Federal Reserve has to stay "independent" because it's the Fed's job to protect the stability of the U.S. dollar or to prevent inflation or any of that sort of palaver.

They lie.

If you're against the government stealing your wealth by inflating the money supply, the most effective step I think you can take at this point is to let your elected representatives know that you want them to push for a vote on H.R. 1207 (Audit the Fed) or S. 604 (same bill, but in the U.S. Senate), and that you want them to vote in favor of those bills.

First we need to see just what horrible things the Federal Reserve has done to us.

Then, we can shut them down, forgive them, and send them on their merry way. (Even though they're probably guilty of criminal acts against us, I don't recommend imprisoning them, because then we'd just have to pay more money to keep them locked up, and we've wasted enough resources on those scoundrels.)