Inflation is a Tax – on Poor People (Transcript)

By Bob Barney

In today’s broadcast, Bob Barney discusses how Ronald Reagan called inflation the most regressive tax for the poorest amongst us. He also said, ” Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” This broadcast also explores who likes inflation and who it hurts the most.

Ronald Reagan said inflation is just a tax, in fact, inflation is the cruelest tax because poor people are the ones who pay for it.

And that is so true and that is the subject of today’s broadcast. I want to get into the lies about inflation from the government and some of the secrets you should know about it as well. You may not know some of this so I will explain why billionaires love inflation and why they love the democratic party. I also will explain why rich people tend to be democrats. A lot of poor people are democrats, hardworking middle-class people tend to be republicans but that is for another time.

Are we living back in 1973? We had an oil crisis and record oil prices. Oil actually tripled in price in one year. A stock market crash happened then as well which has not happened yet, but it is stagnant, and it will happen. There was jaw dropping inflation, like no American at the time could even remember, it was worse than any time in anybody’s memory. I remember buying a car in 1977 with good credit, the rate of interest was 21%. To buy a house was around 11 or 12%. People were literally buying houses at 16% interest rates in the mid to late 70’s because of this runaway inflation which actually on this crisis of inflation alone, it is what got Ronald Reagan the presidential s2021 when He called it stagflation which we are in today. So, does all of this sound familiar from the 70s? Maybe it is time to get your bell bottoms again and women should go braless because the federal reserve plays a shell game with numbers.  Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics, and statistics are the darndest lies of all”. The dems have had a loose monetary system for years to prop up a bad economy since Obama. Do you realize that the entire 8 years of Obama, interest rates turned to almost zero percent by the feds which caused inflation. Cornflation is the index that you hear the inflation number. I get a laugh when I hear inflation is down almost to 2% right now. Do you believe that you go and buy your own stuff, do you believe what you hear on the economy programs that it is about 3.2%? Well, the true inflation with all of my research is really 12% and if you really want to know something, real inflation since 2021 when Joe Biden took office, if you had from January from 2021 to today, the real inflamation number is 23.53%!

Who does that benefit?

Well, if you are in the 1%, inflation has actually made you much richer and I will explain why. According to economist Milton Freedman who is one of the smartest economists in our lifetime, he has been researching the inequality of money between the classes for over 40 years. He claims, which I believe is true, rich people really do not add to the economy, they cannot make money by building things. I am talking about your billionaires, they are not owning factories, they are not building things nor are they the fords or the Rockefellers of the past. The way they make their money is based on inflation.

I will tell you a story that shocked me. I was a poli sci major and I thought I knew a lot of stuff…it was in 1988 in the election between Bush and Dukakis. We were selling bottom paint, I was working for a bottom paint, antifouling bottom paint. He was probably the richest person I had ever known and met personally.  He was a dentist, and a book was written about him, Blue Eyed Cheeks, he was a Canadian dentist and he and some partners struck it big in what was called the Bonanza Oil Discovery in Canada in the 1970’s. We went on his 85 foot aluminum yacht, my  wife and I and the children….he had a push button telephone and one of them was LA Apartment, ONE WAS NY PENTHOUSE, one was WYOMING RANCH, one was the Canadian Home, and then there was the Penthouse that he had in palm beach Florida/ So we go on this boat and we were talking about different things and we get to politics and he says to me, “you are probably for Bush and Reagan, right?” And I thought to myself, well this is a rich man, of course he is too, so I replied, “yes”. He said, “Yeah because you are middle class. Rich people never vote republican. We don’t get rich on republicans. I lost my butt with the republicans. I produce all the private label orange Juice for Publix in Florida, and this is what Ronald Reagan did for me. OJ was 40 cents a pound and through his deflationary programs bringing oil prices down to record low to three dollars a barrel in 1984, he said orange juicers went from 40 cents a pound to 10 and I lost a fortune. No, we are democrats because when we take control, they are inflation masters. So, then you buy OJ at 10 cents and sell it for 75 cents. THAT is how you get rich.

I said, “Well you are getting rich with inflated dollars, but you then have to pay more for everything you buy!. He says, “The kind of money we are talking about Bob, we don’t pay that much more, we have a fixed life. If our costs doubled, our profits would quadruple 20 times more. No, rich people make money with runaway inflation”. Isn’t it amazing Biden takes office and the first thing he does is he stops all oil production basically in America.  I got news for you, like I said in an earlier broadcast, the world’s blood supply is oil. Blood goes through your veins and heart, kidneys, etc., but in the world’s circulatory system, it is OIL. Don’t let anyone ever fool you that it is electricity or sun or any other thing. The modern man is where he is today because of the discovery of oil and how to process oil into the different Petroleums needed to run boats and cars, machinery, basically everything.

OIL IS THE VERY CORNERSTONE OF KEEPING INFLATION IN ORDER.

As long as oil is cheap, inflation will tend to be lower. So, by doing the first thing that you do which is to stop and cap American oil production, you double the price of oil. Oil is 38- 40 dollars a barrel and now it is 80 to 90. It will go to 120 to 150 a barrel if we have a world war which I do believe is coming.

You will see 13 to 16 dollars a gallon of gas and see the total collapse of the middle class and the poor.

Getting back to this idea of the poor and the middle class….as Ronald Reagan said, “the middle class and the poor especially is what makes inflation such a cruel tax.”.

The Fed lies also in their inflation numbers in a way that you will not believe.

They go by what is called core inflation. Core inflation does not include food or energy. So, when they say that the inflation is only up 3 percent this year and their goal is to get it to 2 percent and then we are great, 2 percent in fifty years is 100 percent inflation, think about that….if you are not going to count food and you are not going to count energy, what is probably the four biggest things you spend your paycheck on? I bet you, 1) Housing, rent or mortgage payment is number one, 2) Car payment, MAYBE, it depends. A lot of people are driving older vehicles today, but I guarantee you, your housing, heating, cooling, and car energy consumption are the next biggest bills that you pay for.  Then after that it is food, maybe even before the energy it is food. Food is up anywhere between 30 and 35 percent this year alone. Anybody going to a grocery store knows what I am saying is true. But it is what’s happening. The CPI that you see touted about inflation is a joke and every American knows that there is a reality of inflation and that it is a lot higher than what the government says. My research again, that I have done over the last few weeks for this show and for some other things I am doing, shows that real inflation for people, it runs between 9 and 12% this year and there has been at least a blank inflation since 2021. There are economists out there that believe the true inflation from 2021 is 34 percent if you count people who make under 100 thousand dollars a year. That would account for a tax burden of 35 to 45 percent of their income. Ronald Reagan was right; the worst tax is inflation on poor people and it’s not that bad of a tax on rich people. So, again, go to the store…look at the prices and you will see inflation is not under control. 

I am in business. I own a paint company, my wife and me. I could borrow money, if we had to buy raw materials, and several years ago I could borrow it all day long from 3.9 to 4.9%, so if you are going to buy a  half million dollars of raw materials and you don’t want to spend your own money or maybe you don’t even have that on hand to spend…then you go to a lender that will give you that 4 or 500 thousand dollars in a line of credit to buy what you need to make your product.  This does get put into the cost of things, you have maybe a 3.9% increase in the cost of what you take to manufacture a product but often in good economies you couldn’t even pass off that 3.9% you would have to eat it. NOW, if I want, and I have as I think our business has pretty good credit, if I want to get a loan now and get raw material, the best that I have seen is 9.99% and that is only for a year. You have to pay it off in a year. A lot of businesses like to borrow over a period of 3 to 4 years as they like after the supply chain issue, wanting to stock more raw materials then they really need because they are afraid of running out of things. when you run out of raw materials you run out of products to make and thus you run out of business. People like to have an eighteen to a twenty-four-month line of credit. I haven’t found one under 15.9 %.

So, what do you have to do to stay in business. You have to at least have that 15 % added to the cost, that is the truth. That is why you are paying more for food. That is why what you are paying for includes deliveries. In the last few years, we have not used the post office because we sell hazardous and flammable material. So, you have to use the shipping companies or their ground companies to ship your product. Your basic shipping cost to us has gone up almost 50% since 2019. In 2020, the last year Trump was in office and because there was an election going on, the trucking companies realized what would maybe happen if he didn’t win and they started building in…there was a driver shortage too, so they were building in what is called   They give you a rate, let’s say it is 300 dollars to ship a pallet to Florida, then there is a fuel adjusted rate. You get a quote on how much it will cost to send x pallet to Florida, okay 322 dollars. Then you get the bill, and it is another 147 dollars in access fuel charge. That used to be reasonable.

Who is going to pay that! YOU ARE.

Your food, the average miles your food travels to get to your table because we don’t buy from local farmers anymore, the average item that you eat on your dinner table has traveled over a thousand miles and in many cases, 1800 to 3000 miles.  So, the price of fuel radically increases what you are going to pay for your food. Guess what else food needs that comes from fuel, or comes from oil? FERTILIZER, PESTICIDEs. Food today, unless you are buying all organic and even that can be a scam. Most people eat regular foods today and they have to fertilize, kill the weeds, they have to kill the bugs. That all comes from oil-based insecticides and pesticides and fertilizers. 

if that price triples and quadruples which it has for the farmers, guess who pays the difference? 

Mom and Dad, Joe and Sue America. This is where your inflation comes from. It isn’t hard to figure out how your food prices are what they are.

Now it goes even to everything else. Everything you buy from Amazon for example, online, EBAY, etc… look how far it is being shipped from. Look up the prices of fuel and that is your shipping cost. The number one thing you have to get control of is fuel. That is the first thing the Biden administration did, they put an executive order together to make sure your fuel price will double. Why would you do that?? Why would you want to wreck the economy?? Because your supporters are billionaires and multi-millionaires. The donors of the republican party are not the same as the democrats. The dems are Warren Buffet’s, George Soro’s, who give more money than they should from democrats. What they are looking for in return is runaway inflation to get richer. Never forget that.

If you learn anything from this show, realize that there are winners and losers in inflation as there are winners and losers in deflation. The losers in deflation are the rich. The losers in inflation are the poor.  Well, who owns your politicians? The poor or the rich? You know the answer. You know what most of the time, politicians especially the democratic view politicians will be looking for…to make inflation a runaway thing.

There have been quite a few stories on the plain truth, and I want to get into that and will have more over the next two or three days, maybe Sunday’s edition, more about inflation, the lies of the core price index, and other things that are driving the average American out there, poor and middle class into poverty.  People cannot afford their cost of living. You know what they are living off of? Their credit cards and by God that is going to come to an end. Again, I have very good credit and pay my credit cards every friday, I dont even go a whole month. We pay all business and personal ones off on Friday because it is good to get the points if you are going to buy something anyway, however, if I decided not to pay one month, my rates are 24.9% and like I said, we have very good credit.  You look at some credit cards and I have seen some, some of them are 33-39% interest. Meaning if you owe 1000 dollars you are going to pay back 4000 dollars. It will never happen. People make minimum payments.

Have you ever read that if you make the min payment on your card how long it will take to pay it off? They give you a schedule on the printout. It is robbing you of your future, of your chance of getting ahead in life, you cannot beat it, we have to stop it. I am very concerned about America, more than I ever have been, I have to be frank with you. I almost think we have gone too far with our debt and everything but if we do not get inflation under control and your vote is going to be very important in 2024. We do not get inflation under control we are done for as a country. It is as simple as that, like I said if you go to the plain truth every day, I think you will find more and more stories about this, this is why I am recording this show today because it is probably the biggest news the second biggest news in your life going on right now, the biggest news is the fear of WWIII.

That would be just a disaster. I had that in a previous broadcast, but the second biggest threat for you personally right now is not WWIII even though it should be but what you are paying for things and how you are going broke. How you are putting Christians gifts on your credit card that you cannot pay off. This is the biggest problem right now and it is going to destroy this country if we do not do something about it. if you go to the plain truth we give you good advice, where should you put your money, what is a good hedge against inflation? Gold. Silver. In fact, silver is a better hedge against inflation than gold, in the Roman times 13 ounces of silver could buy one ounce of gold. Most of the time in my life I think the ratio is about 40 ounces of silver equal to an ounce of gold. Right now, as of last Friday, the ratio was 87. Means it took 87 ounces of silver to equal an ounce of gold. That tells me gold is undervalued at 2000 an ounce and probably should be 3500. It tells me that silver is actually way undervalued. That is maybe where you should be putting your money. you can buy it for a few dollars, 29 to 30 dollars an ounce. Delivered to your door. buy as much as you possibly can and store it in your own house. Don’t put it where someone can steal it, get a little good safe, a really heavy one and put it somewhere safe, even bury it somewhere. Start saving some silver, it is going to go up in value. It is the hedge against inflation.

Read the Plain Truth every day, look at the Message Board, listen to these podcasts and I do hope that you tell your friends about these podcasts. We are getting more and more people however I will be honest; we don’t have a ton of people listening to me. I will tell you in a future podcast what I think about that, but I really do not expect to ever have a large audience because I am telling you things you do not want to hear. I did not want to hear this back in the 70s. I did not want to admit what was going on in the 70s and thought everything I was told was a lie. I was a believer like many of you are and then I realized I was being lied to and so are you. But if you go to The Plain Truth, you will not be lied to. You will not be misled. we do not take donations, don’t take advertising, don’t take anything from anyone, it is free.  This is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening and I hope that you come back again.