Turn on the TV and you’ll find a bipartisan chorus of politicians pledging to make life in America more affordable. Ask any of them for the prescription, and the silence is deafening. Nobody has one. What they have is a slogan.
Every so often, inflation stops being an abstraction on a chyron and grabs you by the collar. Mine happened in a Walgreens. The deodorant I used to buy for $2.99 rang up at $8.99. Not a typo. Not a fluke. Triple the price, same stick, same shelf.
Then I got home and checked the “official” number: CPI running 3.4% year-over-year as of the July report. Three point four percent. So either I hallucinated a $6 price hike, or the number being read to me on the news isn’t measuring the thing I actually experienced in that store.
It’s the second one.
Here’s what the headline number conveniently buries: real wages have now been shrinking for four consecutive months, because wage growth is limping along at 3.2% while prices — even by the government’s own generous math — are rising faster than that. That’s not my framing. That’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own numbers, reported the same week the politicians were on stage talking “affordability.”
And that’s before you get to how CPI is actually built. It doesn’t track your basket of goods. It tracks a hypothetical, constantly-shifting basket, adjusted for “substitution” (if steak gets too expensive, the model assumes you buy chicken, and prices your inflation experience accordingly) and “hedonics” (if a product supposedly gets “better,” the price increase gets partially written off in the math, whether or not you feel better off). A deodorant stick going from $2.99 to $8.99 isn’t a hedonic improvement. It’s not a substitution story. It’s just money that used to buy something and now doesn’t.
This is the trick,. The CPI isn’t lying exactly — it’s measuring a controlled, massaged, statistically flattened version of reality. Meanwhile you’re living in the actual version, at the actual register, holding the actual $9 stick of Old Spice, wondering why nobody in Washington seems to have noticed.
Nobody in Washington has a fix, because the fix isn’t in their toolkit.
The politicians pledging “affordability” aren’t offering to stop the currency debasement that’s driving this. They’re offering targeted subsidies, temporary tax credits, maybe a gas tax holiday — band-aids on a structural wound. None of them are going to stand on a stage and say the words that actually explain what’s happening: the dollar in your pocket buys less than it used to, on purpose, by design, because that’s the mechanism by which a government carrying this much debt quietly manages it — by inflating it away at your expense.
Listen to their actual prescription and it sounds exactly like a doctor who can’t be bothered to diagnose you: take two and call me in the morning. A subsidy here, a credit there, a jawboning session with the Fed — symptomatic relief with zero interest in the underlying disease. And then blame it on high oil prices. Here’s the dirty little secret, even if oil dropped by 50 percent overnight, it would have little or no effect on affordability. Nobody wants to write the real prescription, because the real prescription requires them to give something up.
The real prescription is a dramatic contraction of government at all levels. Not a trim. Not a “efficiency review.” A contraction — federal, state, and local — because government spending is the disease, and every dollar of deficit spending, every regulatory empire, every bloated agency budget is new currency sloshing into the system chasing the same stick of deodorant. You cannot inflate the money supply to paper over the spending and then act baffled when the register tells the truth. Shrink the spending, shrink the money creation, and the price of that deodorant stops being a referendum on the currency.
That’s the prescription nobody running for office in either party is willing to write, because it doesn’t poll well and it doesn’t come with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It’s much easier to promise “affordability” while quietly protecting the very apparatus that’s causing the unaffordability in the first place.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just what a 3.4% “tame” CPI print sitting on top of 3.2% wage growth is. It’s four months running of Americans getting poorer in real terms while being told things are getting better.
I don’t need a politician to explain this to me anymore. I needed a $9 stick of deodorant.
If you want the numbers behind the headlines — the ones that actually explain why your dollar keeps shrinking, and what to do about it — that’s exactly what Insider Advantage members get every week.
