So the Anti-Lock Brake computer/pump (module) in my Buick has been glitching out and apparently needs replacing.
Of course, it wasn’t kind enough to just fail, disable itself, and light up the ABS/Traction lights. Instead, it’s been going in and out, occasionally realizing it has a problem, disabling itself, and then forgetting there was a problem and re-enabling itself the next time I turn on the car.
I started having similar problems with the 2003 Impala in 2019 before I gave it back to mom 4 years later.
I went through a number of issues, just like with the Buick. Bad wheel hub bearing (not spinning freely), then the module, then the hub bearing on the other side a couple of years later.
When I got the Buick, it needed a hub bearing replaced, so I just had them both replaced as it was getting a full brake overhaul done anyway and the shop said if I wanted to just replace the one on the passenger front as well as the driver front, they’d just charge me for the hub, which isn’t expensive on these cars.
Anyway, the module….
The module on the Impala cost under $500 to replace and reprogram with a new one.
The part and programming procedure in the Buick is similar, but since inflation is dragging everything up, it made the part, the labor, and the taxes more expensive, so I’m looking at $790 to fix this ($760 with a coupon).
Which brings me to my next point. Richard Stallman is not an economist.
I might have said something like this before. He quotes leftist quacks who got an Economics degree out of a box of Cracker Jacks, who are mostly published by Gates-funded media.
Stallman has been led to parrot the lie that the Fed Funds rate hikes are a bad thing, because “inflation helps the poor by reducing their debts”.
This is absurd. I already posted that our rent is set to increase by $200 a month, starting November, and that our grocery bill is up by well over 20%. (Coffee up 20%, eggs up 40%, the rest is quite bad too, but well over 20% on average!)
Worker wages are not rising, and I even read an article about people putting groceries and diapers on buy now, pay later “apps” because they can’t afford them and this is like a payday loan that tosses the problem into next week at higher than credit card interest rates.
Stallman seems to think that there will be more jobs if the Fed Funds Rate stays at zero, and that may or may not be true. I haven’t seen any credible studies. However, that’s a crappy way to do it.
The layoffs that have been picking up are mostly in speculative investments (gambling) which include fake currencies like Bitcoins, which I posted previously are the “return of Flooz”. Just as you read this, many people plead with bankruptcy judges to force Celsius to give them their savings back. Money Celsius doesn’t have. It’s bankruptcy fraud to buy the people operating it time to run.
The result of the low Fed Funds Rate and borrowed money entering the economy is hyperinflation. This percolates to the top and steals your savings and makes your wages go down.
Sure, Illinois might have given you a minimum wage raise from $8.75 an hour to $15, but it’s staggered that in through 2025.
So when you think about it, You’re just back down to around $9 an hour in the end, anyway, thanks to our friend, hyperinflation.
The local Walmart, here in Waukegan, Illinois, started workers at $12.90 an hour in 2019, and the starting wage at the store today is $17.30. However, in the past year the real cost of living has gone way up.
Past what the government will admit. However, even if you accept what the government figures suggest, in the same time, inflation has taken the value of that money and lopped off 18%, leaving the real value of the wage at Walmart at $14.
But that’s if you believe the headline inflation numbers. They’re rigged. They’re not weighted for what “the working poor” spend most of their money on, which is rent and food. By that measure, we’re back down to about $12 an hour again. If that.
Plus, they now make “so much money” that “they don’t need government assistance” with their heat this winter, or food stamps, because the income limits for those didn’t go up.
The winners of high inflation are the government, of course, because it makes its own debts cheaper by making your savings and earnings power decay, and the people that the money goes to, who make their money by running companies that don’t produce anything, and just borrow more cheap money and pay their executives with it.
Inflation is evil and it is pernicious. Imagine if you had a counterfeiting machine, and every time your bills came due, you could run down to the basement and fire it up. You never had to stop spending because the more bills came due, the more times you would run down to the basement and fire up the counterfeiting machine and run yourself off some more $100s to deal with it.
Sure, you know you’re screwing your neighbors every time you do it, but you just can’t help yourself because they’re too stupid to notice.
This is essentially what the federal government does to pay its bills, on a large scale, with the victims being everyone who has US Dollars.
They don’t teach history in school anymore. Maybe Stallman didn’t even learn this.
During the American Revolution, the United States had a different currency system. It was a disaster. We had another Constitution as well, called the Articles of Confederation.
Under the Articles, the States were essentially their own miniature countries in a very loose political union with the federal government. The States and the federal government both issued currencies, because the Articles didn’t disallow it.
Some States issued “Pounds and Shillings”, others issued “State Dollars”, and the federal government of course had “Continental Dollars”. The federal government couldn’t tax. It could only request money from the States, and print new money.
Since the States had their own problems and didn’t feel like forking over money whenever the federal government came calling, the federal government simply hyperinflated the Continental, until it ceased to pass for money.
Along the way, the British harassed us by counterfeiting, but that hardly made a difference at the scale the federal government was hyperinflating the money already.
Eventually, the Articles were scrapped, the federal government developed more and more powers to tax and spend (especially with the Income Tax authorized by the Sixteenth Amendment), and today of course, everyone knows that the US federal government is a monster that spend well in excess of $7.5 trillion a year.
Everyone knows it has a power to tax. Between the various taxes, most people have to work for free from January through the end of May to carry the government, and it’s still not enough. So they _also_ hyperinflate the currency to levy an “inflation tax”.
Richard Stallman, and much of the left, thinks the government should spend even more.
Constantly, they find more and more things that the government “should be doing”, even though that would cost money too.
Their answer? “Well, just raise taxes again!”
Except, what’s left to tax?
Biden even passed the so-called “American Rescue Plan Act” and the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” which means a bigger meaner IRS will go rummaging through your taxes looking for that $5 you made on Paypal walking someone’s dogs so you could afford some $5 Biden Gas to get to your 3 other jobs, so you can buy eggs and pay the landlord. Then they spent the money immediately.
On deficit reduction? No. On Inflation Reduction? No. To give idiots who went to college and didn’t come out with any marketable skills “loan forgiveneess”.
If the Democrats had any plans to tax the rich, they haven’t enacted them. So I allege that there never was a plan, and there never will be. The left (voters) got rolled again.
Biden “re-defines” recession.
Biden has spent the entire Summer floundering about the state of the economy.
Finally, this culminated in his “It’s all about how you feel, Jack!” definition, and then he went off and, I don’t know, ate another ice cream cone.
(He probably didn’t even know what that cost. Rich people and politicians, the same thing really, have spent so many years disconnected from reality and throwing around trillions of dollars in other people’s money that they stole that they tend to guess orders of magnitude wrong about average wages and what common items cost.)
But even by Biden’s “Does it feel like a recession?” test, he walked onto another rake, because now even CNN isn’t trying to hide the fact that the Consumer Sentiment Index has hit its lowest level since Jimmy Carter was in the White House.
The Consumer Sentiment Index basically is a “How do you feel?” survey. People are losing their jobs now that interest rates are rising, even though they’re still very low, but it has less to do with that (sorry, Mr. Stallman) than it does with the fact that people are so broke from Bidenflation that they have to stop discretionary spending to redirect funds to buying eggs, butter, milk, bread, rent, and transportation to work. If Mr. Stallman were an economist, he’d know that one does not simply hyperinflate their way to prosperity.
Some people who are still in denial about hyperinflation and whether it’s caused by Biden and Democrats printing up another trillion dollars every week and stating that it’s an attempt to control the weather using battery cars, point to other badly-managed economies where hyperinflation rages. In Europe, they print, tax, and spend even worse than the US does, and this comes on top of years spent building up their energy markets on the assumption that Vladimir Putin would continue being the Santa Claus of cheap natural gas.
Germany announced yesterday that it would “invest” in the energy company that imports Russian gas by spending $8 billion to nationalize it. Some investment. Putin has turned off the gas, so one does wonder how one frames this as an investment. It’s even worse than that time the US federal government “invested” in failing bank shares and General Motors.
But back to American issues, I think that what really stings, really hurts, about the inflation we’re experiencing now is that, although inflation and benchmark rates have been much higher (in 1980, inflation was double digits and the Fed Funds Rate was 20%, compared to less than 4% even with yesterday’s “huge” rate hike) is that in 1980, there was still an actual economy underneath it all, and today it’s a bunch of dead end service jobs, healthcare funded by government indebtedness, and Imaginary Property.
Some say 90% of the valuation of companies like Apple is Imaginary Property. Why not? It’s hard to put a dollar value on the value of Imaginaaaaaaaaaaation, but if you try really hard, by attempting to foist treaties making the US definitions of copyrights, patents, and trademarks “international law”, you “get what you need”. Unfortunately, this does nothing for workers living paycheck to paycheck. At best, they get some of the money when patent lawyers go get coffee.
The US economy today is not the envy of the world based upon people getting up every morning and going to a good union job to produce widgets to sell, so most of the public was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy even before illegal “COVID” lockdowns and dictators such as Illinois Governor Pritzker (Democrat) who pretty much just usurped the legislative power by claiming that the Illinois Emergency Management Act lets him rewrite any law he wants as long as he remembers to hit the SNOOZ button and reset the “emergency” for another 30 days by executive order.
In reality, the IEMA says that he can only do some of what he says he can for 30 days, and then the legislature must renew the “emergency”, which means that his actions have been illegal since May of 2020, but nobody will stop him.
We live in a country where half the states are “governed” by such people (Democrats) who have such open contempt for all of the people that work for a living that they’ve ruined millions of lives simply to claw Donald Trump out of office, then found that they like the powers that they gave themselves and won’t be terminating the “emergency”.
From my perspective, even with two incomes, no kids, and the cheapest apartment we can find in the whole damned city, life is getting hard.
I feel like there’s no way to gain ground. Even buying a goddamned gas station breakfast sandwich and coffee this morning on the way back from taking my spouse to work cost me $9.70. Under Biden, this has gone up by roughly $4 vs just the last year.
Countries operated like this end up like Nigeria, Weimar Germany, or even the US Continental Dollar, where next thing you know, there are trillion dollar bills and you need to hurry up and spend them before a breakfast sandwich and a coffee are two trillion dollars, and then the currency fails because nobody will accept it anymore.
Hyperinflation also contributes to political instability. In Germany, people became so sick of their ruined economy that they felt they had nothing to lose, personally, and elected Hitler.
For the next month or so, in the US, it will continue to be possible for people like Nate Silver to bury their heads in the sand, fake the polls, nudge the fake polls even further to the left so it appears that Biden and Democrats are not near-universally hated, and like it’s possible that they emerge from this election unharmed.
But people are going to radicalize and accept anyone that claims that they know how to get us back to where things were when at least they had a job and the food and rent weren’t going up more than 25% a year.
All people want is to support themselves, for the government to stay out of their home, and to not watch all of their hopes and dreams die under tax-and-spend dictators who, in fact, could not care less about them and wouldn’t know how to fix things even if they wanted to.
In fact, we get a worse living standard and higher poverty levels every year, even as the government perpetually expands welfare programs.
The thing that really scares the living shit out of Democrats, and keeps them up at night, is that their voters will find work and not need them anymore.
This is why it’s vitally important to keep people one notch above starving next week, and you do this with hyperinflation and job loss.
If things get “too good”, we’re just another “pandemic” away from more lockdowns, more “emergency powers”.
Who knows?
Governor Pritzker already had his “I am the Senate!” moment. Perhaps next he’ll officially dissolve the Senate. They are kind of pesky.
His own party has over 75% of the seats and he still has to go around them. His nominee to the parole board was recently rejected because the Democrats were panicking about more murderers and child rapists being let loose on Chicago during an election year, and decided to leave the seat empty so the board couldn’t get a quorum.
Maybe that law needs “suspended” as well, “due to COVID”.
The “digital natives” are getting restless.
Polling has shown that even young voters are finished with Biden and the Democrats.
He’s resorted to a “vote buying” program of bailing them out of their student loans, which left them with a head full of liberal college mush (you have to go to college and pay $60,000 to learn that white people are responsible, collectively, through corruption of blood, for everything bad that’s ever happened or which will happen at some future date).
Liberal college mush that gets them nowhere instead of a job.
Will the “forgiveness” win any of them back into the fold or will any of them remember that they need to eat and that there’s something even worse than their student loans going on in this country?
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