All fiat currencies have failed but long before they fail they progressively loose value.
Many nations that previously relied on the US dollar have chosen to stop using the US dollar as their currency or reserve currency.
Most of the currency in use in the USA or United States of America exists at bits on digital networks, namely those bank servers that host credit and debit card functionality.
The dominate nature of digital currency systems means that a global power outages would render most modern economies frozen, or cause rapid sudden economic collapse as people become unable to use their credit or debit cards to pay.
Many people in developing nations use android phone apps to transfer money as a payments for goods or services. Android because the affordable smartphones all use the android operating system, and citizens of these nations are operating on shoe-string budgets compared to the average American.
Estimating Our Current Early 2024 Monthly Expenses
We rent the basement of a home in Issaquah Washington and the rent is $1,800 per month, our storage unit housing assets and other goods from our previous homes costs $570 per month, and we spent about $600 per month on food. Our vehicle insurance costs $203 per month. I have a car payment of $248. I think we spend about $150 per month on gasoline. We throw out another $250 per month for going out to eat, random clothing or shoes, or similar. Then another ~$300 per month on Amazon purchases. All said thats $3851 per month, and thats almost what we make as income. These are averages, not absolute.
Inflation Calculation https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
If we go back with the linked inflation calculator to 1964 when the United States of America delinked the US dollar from the Gold Standard, pegged at $35USD/ ounce gold, that same $3,851 USD2024 would be worth $378.13 in USD1964, thus illustrating a 10X or ten fold reduction in the value of the buying power of the US dollar over the last 60 years. That about 900% inflation looked at another way.
Home Prices Compared to Wages
My mother & her first husband the police officer purchase a single family home in west Seattle, Wa in 1962 for $6,000. Today in 2024 thats like paying $61,000, but that same home today sells for over $800,000.
Let's think about this in terms of wages. In 1962 a non-white family in the USA averaged about $3300 per year, while white families earned about $6200 per year. In this example my mother's first home was similar to their annual income in terms of price. Today few people locally make $800,000 per year. I know a surgeon who gets paid $650,000 per year, but his home also cost $5 million.
Most people today do not make as much annually as the cost of a single family home. I would argue that most people locally do not make as much in income as the cost of a condominium unit. So we can that home costs have increased much faster than wages. Lets continue. The low income in 1962 USA was $1700 per year for house hold workers, while the higher income professionals of that time were earning $9,100 annually.
$1/ gal Gasoline When I Graduated High School
It was while I was in college studying environmental science, toxicology, physics, chemistry and the history of science & technology that gasoline prices for regular unleaded gasoline surged from $0.99 cents per gallon to over $2.63/gal in just a few years. Now gasoline sells for over $4/gallon locally. Meanwhile airlines only pay $1/gal for jet fuel and argue with congress that any fuel price increase beyond 1 dollar per gallon would make the airlines unprofitable and cause them to go out of business or become financial insolvent.
Covid19 Food Price Spikes
Many processed foods are the same price, but the contains are half the size now or contain half the amount. At one point crab meat was selling for over $100 per pound, while I saw a 2X4 at Home Depot selling for $52 during the covid supply chain shortages. I sold a single role of toilet paper to drunk neighbor for $20 at her suggested price when she said "can I buy a role of toilet paper from you?" and I said "sure, how much are you willing to pay" and she said "how about $20" so I agreed.
Purchasing Power Eroded
Many foods are now 4X more expensive when you consider the decreasing buying power or marginalization of purchasing power of working people in America. Saying this another way, the Middle Class of American has been shrinking since the 1960's. I believe the US economy peaked in 1967 based on a variety of factors like what was or was not Made in America back then, long before we started trading with China for things Made in China.
Runaway Climate Change
If you talk with the progress or liberal minded Americans today about their #1 concern for the future, they will often say that "Climate Change" or "Global Warming" or "Runaway Greenhouse Gas Effect" is the major existential threat to the ability of their children to thrive as adults in the future. Many of the worlds scientists have been raising alarm bells about air pollutions negative effects on public health & how many kinds of air pollutants are making climate change accelerate, since the early 2000's. Volcanic eruptions, natural coal seem fires, and agriculture waste degradation methane emissions, there are many sources of atmospheric gas composition change that are significantly worse their the exhaust emissions of vehicles operating in the United States.
Solar & Wind Power Eco-Toxic
Many people think that renewables like wind power turbines or solar panels are eco-friendly, but thats ignoring the manufacturing & long term recycling issues for both. The reality is that nuclear power is the cleanest safest way of making heat & electricity long term, especially with fuel breeding reactors that make more fuel than they consume, with automatic walk away safety shutdown, fault tolerant intrinsically safe designs, and abundantly fuel cycles making use of thorium which is 3X more abundant than uranium near the surface of Earth's crust where nuclear fuel elements can be feasibly mined at an industrial scale.
How to Create an Economy
With stabile infrastructure, honest low corruption government, extensive high value education, social services that take good care of the citizens, stabile electric power grids, stabile water and natural gas distribution systems and sewers and waste sewer treatments plants, robust recycling capacity, and trash dumps, with enhanced e-waste recovery since e-waste the most toxic kind of waste, and e-waste also contains copper and gold & other valuable elements like rare earths neodymium in the speakers & microphone magnets.
When people feel comfortable taking business risks they are more willing to spend money on non-essential products and services. Thus some intellectuals in such societies will be motivated to become entrepreneurs in order to capitalize profit generation income by applying what they know, or in what some crooked politicians call "exercising their franchise as individuals" referring to how a person can generate profit by applying what they know to make appealing products and services that sell well to many other people in what effectively generates a huge stream of ongoing revenue or good profits or high profit margins or some combination.
Avoiding Risk & Information Ignorance
Many people are prone to risk avoidance because of FUD or fear, uncertainty or doubt that surely helps to sell many insurance policies of many kinds, which are very profitable for insurance companies who work to keep the premium payments and minimize pay outs using a variety of legal tricks that most people would reasonably consider immoral or unethical if they understood what was going on. Sadly many people today do not even realize were are further along than 3rd Industrial Revolution and their minds are effectively operating in 1950's American ideological paradigms.
This means that when I told my boss about electric vehicles, namely the Tesla Model S in 2012 he immediately rejected their idea that a battery electric vehicle even existed, even though Tesla had been high volume manufacturing and selling large quantizes of Tesla Model S for many years. This means that information diffusion is limited in scope and extent such that not everyone gets all the updates about what is actually happening at the same time.
There is a phrase used to describe people left behind as "living under a rock" since they must not be online following what's happening. Some people hate online news, though the News's Papers are made using internet articles on computers where editors of the paper glean the information to assembly into compute instructions that are laser etched into large flexible nickel metal sheets for the high volume offset printers used to print news papers very early in the morning.
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