In 1913, Woodrow Wilson and his progressives promised that the Federal Reserve would avert both depressions and inflation, while preventing the wealthy from controlling America’s financial markets at the expense of the poor.
More than a century later, it’s clear that was all a lie, and the Fed has helped create a permanent American underclass.
The Fed was designed to transfer wealth from the American people to the government, mostly through the hidden tax of inflation. But this process has prevented countless American families from being able to save and get ahead, because their savings are constantly losing value.
For two decades, the Fed kept interest rates artificially low to help finance massive government spending. When that spending reached unprecedented heights in 2020, the Fed intervened more drastically than ever, creating trillions of dollars and devaluing the currency.
Thus began an unparalleled transfer of wealth that continues to this day, and which has driven a wedge between different groups of Americans.
The painful inflation of the last three years has increased prices throughout the economy, distorting the signals that prices are supposed to convey to buyers and sellers. For example, the cost to own a median-price home today has doubled since January 2021, but it’s still the same house.
This phenomenon represents the monetization of housing, where a dwelling becomes a much better store of value than the currency, even if the real value of the house hasn’t improved.
Likewise, Americans’ earnings have increased substantially over the last three years, but not in the most meaningful sense—that is, what they can buy. Instead, the opposite has happened, and today’s larger incomes buy less.
What would have been a decent salary in 2019 is no longer enough to even get by in many places, and it’s certainly not enough to ever fulfill the American dream of homeownership.
A family earning the median household income can afford a median-price home in only a handful of major metropolitan areas in the entire country. In many cities, the cost to own a median price home exceeds the take-home pay from the median household income. Even if you didn’t spend a dime on other necessities such as food, you still wouldn’t have enough for your mortgage payment.
By E.J. Antoni
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