More Inflation Remedies
In addition to my recent argument against the Fed raising interest rates that only serve to penalize working families and small business owners and for systemic economic reforms needed in America to reduce the big ticket living and operating expenses of families and small business owners that makes the rate of inflation itself pale in comparison are the following additional and long overdue inflation remedies: There is a need for a clean energy and domestic natural gas economy in the U.S. to substantially reduce the cost of living and the cost of operating a small business. The cost of investing in such clean energy economy in the U.S. could be quickly paid for in the short term by ending the huge annual funding of the free security of international oil companies in the Middle East by U.S. taxpayers (e.g., the $7 trillion cost of the needless Iraqi War II). Those annual savings would enable U.S. taxpayer investment in public research and development in areas that the private sector will not risk (e.g. pandemic vaccines, the internet, weather and communication satellites, clean and efficient energy production, and hydraulic fracturing and how to environmentally control its harmful elements and public education, especially pre-K education that is essential for a economically disadvantaged child’s later success in life.)
Another substantial benefit of a clean energy economy would be to lessen the huge external costs of man-made carbon emissions which cause not only death and suffering to humans and loss of productivity but also record heat and droughts, floods, and super tornadoes and storm surging hurricanes that drive up the cost of construction and insurance to home owners and which, if not addressed soon, will lead to a warming of the planet causing even more widespread famine, war, and repeated pandemics and where inflation will be worse than the 700% inflation rate of Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s.
The cost of college education is another big ticket item in the budgets of far too many families and young people. For decades, college tuition was regulated. When deregulated in Texas, college tuition doubled in less than 4 years while the salaries of major college football coaches and wasteful building programs increased exponentially. Decades ago now, low interest government loans were available to students instead of today’s high interest private lender loans often guaranteed by the government and nondischargeable in consumer bankruptcy even when the often for profit college or trade school fails to adequately educate or train their students for a good paying job and deceives them into high interest borrowing (e.g. Trump University.) Those high cost long term private college loans often prevent young families for years from buying a home with a mortgage payment that is often half the cost of their renting a small apartment and delaying the start of a family of future American citizens and deny workers good paying home construction jobs.
In addition to the above solutions, another far better way to fight these grave systemic causes of inflation is to break up the monopolies of Big Oil, Big Pharma (who obstructs Americans from the price advantage of volume drug purchasing power enjoyed by Europeans), Big Insurance (at least 25 cents of every health insurance premium dollar is used to deny one necessary health care and to needlessly fatten the profits of their CEOs and shareholders), Big Banks, and Big Agri- Business (the latter so concentrated in some market areas that, for example, for each $100 per unit paid to a rancher, the packing house often charges $500 per unit to the grocery stores).
JohnW. Mikus Houston