Welcome to Episode 2!
I’m going to go a little more into what has been motivating me to do this, and then pivot into interviews on how we can start to fix things. We can’t fix everything, but there are things that we can do other than complain and give our opinions online.
I want to know how things work so that we can fix them. That’s one thing my dad told me, is that as a kid I was curious and always wanted to know how things worked. As I grew up, I got scared of breaking things, because it felt like the only things around me were breaking or broken. Relationships, vehicles, society, dreams. My parents split up when I was 14, and the 2 things I wanted to do more than anything else were experience combat, and get married, if for no other reason than to show my parents how things worked. So, I’m an idealist and sometimes I need to think things through a little bit better than I do. But the good thing is that I love learning.
The problems we’re facing are all stacked haphazardly on the rotten moral foundation of our country. Abortion for ‘convenience’, how we handle mental health concerns, how we handle mental health treatment. In the last 40 years, we’ve reduced mental health capacity by 95%, which keeps people who need the help from getting it.
We have some major issues with our education system right now, and the government has been trying to take actions against parents for speaking up about it. We have big social problems that have been boiling over for decades that have very high fiscal and societal costs. We have wanton violence that gets blamed on inanimate objects (unless they can demonize a group of people).
To say that things aren’t going well in America today would be an understatement. We have huge economic problems that everyone is feeling will likely be around for a few years, and unfortunately, might depend on future elections. It sucks to think that we’re screwed until we get a new president, but we’re ideologically divided as a nation. This administration wants the ‘great reset’, and it’s not a conspiracy. They don’t care how many eggs get broken, as long as they get the result they want. We want scrambled eggs, they don’t care if they get a pile of fecal matter, as long as it’s controlled by the government.
Inflation. Recession. They’re some pretty heavy words right now. Depression might start being thrown around, if things get bad enough. The annual inflation is about 8.6%, and that doesn’t tell the whole story. Things that I bought from Walmart 2 months ago are up 50 cents an item, that’s 12.5% in 2 months.
From last year:
* ground beef is up 70-80 cents per pound from last year (20%)
* pork is actually only up a little, 20 cents a pound for most things. Bacon’s up about a dollar a pound from last year (15%)
* eggs are up $1.20 per dozen over last year (almost doubling)
* Chicken breasts are up almost a dollar a pound from last year
* Milk is up 80 cents a gallon
* cheese is up a quarter to 50 cents a pound (and like a dollar for a half pound of Kraft)
The first week of June, the average price of gas went up 44 cents per gallon… in one week. And it’s gone up 10-20 cents per gallon in the 2 weeks since then. Overall, gas prices are up 80 cents since the beginning of May, 6 weeks ago. That doesn’t just hurt you when you go to fill up your gas tank. That effects the price of every good we buy that’s shipped across the country.
We have a roadmap we could take to ease these problems, at least economically. The early 80s were a big turnaround, because economic sanity returned. Just with gas, there are plenty of people who are giving us economic roadmaps to lower gas prices, no matter what Russia does.
Lowering gas prices won’t solve monetary inflation, but it would significantly stem the inflation of goods delivered by trucks, which are most things. Getting rid of DEF for vehicles might also lower costs, and it would keep trucks on the road.
The next video, I’m going to do a deeper dive on oil, gas production, and why environmentalists don’t have a clue about why they really don’t want to get rid of drilling for oil.
China bought Smithfield in 2013, one of the largest pork producers in the US. This week, they shut down a plant in California because ‘costs were too high’. Just 3 months ago, in March, they were reporting that profits were up 7%, to $1 billion, and that revenues were up almost 7%, to $27.29 billion. So, either it’s a problem with Californa’s insanity driving out another business, or China just deciding that they’d like to exacerbate food problems in the US, and abroad.
