This is their way of increasing prices. They want to pump up inflation. Rising prices are easily confused with rising prosperity.
Government-sponsored inflation is theft. Theft from savings accounts, investments and homes.
Rising prices expose salaries to “bracket creep” enabling the government to take more money and to say that they didn’t.
Sadly...Well said.
Not necessarily in this situation...rising prices in our current state of high unemployment and even higher under-employment will not necessarily result in higher salaries. What rising prices will do is put pressure on those frozen or non-existant paychecks - more money will be drained for basic necessities and less will be available for discretionary spending. For the mass of people in America with high debt to pay off, those rising prices also mean that there will be less available to pay down or service that debt.
What this does is provide very short term help to the government's balance sheet...at a high price later on. Kick the can down the road to the next election. Just keep the lid on the boiling pot...but it may well be a fool's bet for them because they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
The financial pressure put on an already battered public straining to just make ends meet could create a bigger explosion than the government not being able to keep it's departments operating for lack of ability to borrow more funds.
You called that exactly right!
I don’t have a fancy doctorate in economics like Ben Bernanke but isn’t cause and effect being reversed here? Inflation is usually thought of as an *effect* of economic expansion not as its *cause*. But whatever, Bernanke is apparently smarter than the rest of us, so I guess we have to trust him...