If you like looking at lots of graphs and plots (and no words or explanations — e.g. all DATA and no Narrative), just spend a couple of minutes looking at the website https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/.1
Certainly there was an inflection point in our country on about 1971. 1971 was the year that Nixon temporally2 closed the “Gold Window”, where foreign nations could return their printed dollars for gold at 35$/oz. Today gold is about 2700$/oz, corresponding to a 98.7% devaluation of the dollar as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. For the first 200 years of this country, 30$ or so could buy an ounce of gold.
1971 was the year that the dollar officially became a fiat3 currency; our silver dollars and silver quarters were replaced with copper coins, and our copper penny was replace with a zinc coin. But hey, in God (i.e., the Dollar) we Trust! However, Nixon’s action did not cause this inflection point in our economy, rather his action was a result of the U.S. going bankrupt fighting the Vietnam War, or the American War as it is called in Vietnam, using printed dollars.
Thus began the era of Fake Money, which, in my opinion4, leads to a Fake Economy, Fake Democracy, Fake News, etc., even Fake Science.
For 200 years the U.S. money supply perhaps grew slowly as more gold was mined and added to our money supply. People exchanged this honest money for honest labor. Then we began printing money out of thin air and all of our money (dollars) became worthless5. Today all the new money we need comes from the government who borrows this money, at interest, from the private bank called the Federal Reserve (as Federal as is Federal Express) which was created in 1913.
To “get ahead” today, you position yourself at the outlet of this money firehose. Those at the outlet, first in line at the trough, include the Banks, the Military Industrial Complex, the Medical Industrial Complex and favored “Special Interests” such as University Global Warming “Researchers” and NGO’s involved in “Fact-Checking”, i.e., the Censorship Industrial Complex. A few recent examples:
During the MSM Hyped-Hysteria CoVid-1984 Mass-Psychosis Fear-Pandemic, the U.S. government printed 4.66 to 11.77 Trillion Dollars for “relief”. As a U.S. Taxpayer, did you get your $30,000 - $90,000 share of this? I suspect not; rather you got an additional 10 - 20% inflation which taxed both your income and total wealth by 10 - 20%8.
The first version of the 1500+ page 3-month Continuing Resolution (December 2024) contained 65$ of pork for Special Interests (e.g., government censorship programs) for every necessary 100$.
In our country today, we have replaced real engineering with financial “engineering”9 and real science with the “Follow-the-Science” Religion. And, they would like you to think this “progress” should not only be accepted10, but celebrated11.
And if you think that our government which caused this century of Fake-Everything can fix this in the next 4 years (Trump and Musk), I’d like to get some of those really good drugs (mainline Hopium?) from you!
I’ll end with this quote from Chris Hedges:
"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."
Happy New Year!
Look for example the change in number of doctors compared to number of Administrators in the Medical Industrial Complex. Or you can see the tripling in the number of lawyers to 1.2 million, and see that the number of new U.S. physics Ph.D.s has been reduced by a third to a mere 800 per year (a mere 16 per state); we physicists are a rare dying breed!
I love the old Russian saying, “There’s nothing more permanent than temporary”.
Fiat or Fake currency is printed money that is not backed by any physical commodity, e.g. gold and silver (or oil). Kissinger then arranged the “petro-dollar”, where the U.S. offered Oil-Producing countries “protection”, much as the Mafia offers “protection”, in return for these countries agreeing to only selling their oil in dollars, and depositing their dollars in the U.S. to buy U.S. Treasuries. The dollar was then backed by black gold, oil (and the U.S. military with our “protection” racket). For short summary see:
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/the-petrodollar-system-and-the-petrodollar-wars-explained/
As an Old Curmudgeon, I’ve seen these changes over the last half century, e.g.:
Inflation is nothing but a result of money-printing, see, e.g., The M2 Money Supply, the Economy, and the National Debt: A Mathematical Approach (Applied Mathematics, 2021, 12, 835-865; https://www.scirp.org/pdf/am_2021092914275047.pdf)
The GOA admits to $4.6 Trillion: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106647, but (see next footnote) …
… perhaps the CoVid-1984 “relief” spending was 3 times this amount:
As my father used to say, “Inflation is the cruelest form of taxation”.
e.g., taken from https://timellison.substack.com/p/progress :
Building the Boeing 737:
1965: Decision by Board to begin development
1967: First Flight and FAA Certification
1968: Entered commercial service AND mass production (105 planes produced).
Fast forward to today, over a half a century later. We have the 737-Max that crashes.
Back in 1965, 55 years ago, when people were using pencil and paper, the company was run by aeronautical engineers and the managers were also engineers (I’m of course talking about REAL engineers that could design amazing things and even do Math). Today it is run by very smart MBA’s from Ivy League Schools who may not know how to design or build airplanes, but they know how to “make money” (i.e., with huge loans that they use for stock-buy-back programs, and they get the very best MBA’s by offering them huge stock option packages). Progress ???
e.g., MMT (Modern Monetary Theory, which espouses that we can create wealth by creating money in unlimited quantities). Yes, we can print money, but we can’t print wealth.
See the modern philosophy of “The End of History”: the U.S. has reached the pinnacle of social-cultural governmental-economic evolution. See e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history.
The Fed are in charge of price stability.
Expect hyperinflation then digital currency.
1969-71 was an inflection point for Western Civilization in every way imaginable.
Thank you for providing detail on this vital (theft) aspect of it.