The price of silver is over $35 today, which is about $10 above the price it was when I started accepting silver coins for various subscriptions a few months ago.

The following charts are from the American Precious Metals Exchange. From top to bottom they track the price of silver for one, five, ten, and twenty-year periods.

I’ve long thought that inflation, possibly hyperinflation, was in America’s future as a way of both paying off its debt and solving the Social Security and Medicare problems. I’m beginning to think the future may be arriving. I was hoping serious inflation would hold off for another year or so, but this is a bad sign.

Of course we’re already experiencing inflation in food prices. Yesterday my wife paid $4.55 for a loaf of whole wheat bread.

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Notice the government cancelled the social security “cost of living adjustment” for next year.  I said they would do this in my Issue No. 117 editorial. The government says cancellation of the automatic increase, which is the first time they’ve done so in 34 years, is justified because of falling consumer prices. I doubt old folks will agree that their costs have gone down. They spend a disproportionate amount of their limited incomes on food and medicine.

Old folks are going to be in for a rough decade or two or three with social security. There’s not enough money! I’ve been saying it for 40 years. This is how it will be payed for: Cut the social security cost of living increases and let inflation (it might be a year off) do its work.

“Screw the old folks,” a lot of people will say. “They set the social security system up for eventual failure and now they will reap what they have sown.”

It’s a cruel world!

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