US gdp up 4.9 %. Well done Mr Biden

Casey Jones wrote:

Daily Bread wrote:

And these prices are here to stay  . Producers may offer incentives to grocers to run a buy one get one sale or a dollar sale when the supply backs up because no one is buying and the stock is getting close to the expiration date but the high price is the new benchmark . They can produce with less effort and payroll and they maintain that profit they made last quarter for products that are less in weight and quality . There's no customer allegiance because they've given that following the middle finger .

Yeah.  The New Normal.  Get used to it.

One measure of how prosperous a society is, is how much the average person spends, of his income, on food.  In chaos, such as the aftermath of WWII, people spent every penny they had on food.  And that wasn't enough.

As time went on, even with assistance in rebuilding...even in the early 1970s, in France, housewives were spending about half the total budget on food.  For that reason, and others, a private car was out of the question for most French families, which meant the less-efficient local grocery stands and milk-wagons, selling fruits and other food as well.

It's a hard hole to climb out of; it took 60 years for Europe to get to true prosperity.  And now they, and we, are going to go take a dive again.

We're moving from a high-trust society to a low-trust situation...another indication of social collapse.  When it ends, there will be greater trust - and if we're fortunate, we'll emerge with some Western values, such as hard work and cleanliness, intact.  Italy and France were poor places; but they were clean places.  Displaced-people settling in the US in the 1940s were more poor than any inner-city trash, black or white; but the Italian housewives, with no money, would still scrub their front stoops every morning.

We can live well in poverty - IF we keep the values that made us great, the values that, when lost, led us to collapse.