by Jesse Colombo
Silver Seek
You’d have to be hiding under a rock to be unaware that inflation is one of the most pressing issues of our time. After a shocking 23% increase in the cost of living since 2019, all but the wealthiest of Americans are getting squeezed and seeing their living standards plummet at an alarming rate. Grinding inflation is causing once-affluent people to become merely middle class, former middle-class people to become working class, while working class people are being forced into the ranks of the working poor and even the destitute. According to the most recent Gallup Poll, inflation was America’s number one worry with 55% of people polled saying that they worried about inflation “a great deal,” while the latest Fed survey showed that two-thirds of Americans believe that inflation has made their financial situation worse.
The sad truth is that inflation is not an inevitable fact of life or an inherent flaw of capitalism; it is a direct byproduct of unbacked paper money and central banking. The United States experienced virtually no inflation for over a century until the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913 and the U.S. dollar was progressively downgraded from a gold-backed currency to a paper currency that could be — and has been — printed to oblivion.