Looks like the Corrente Collective is on an economics kick today, so here's mine. Stirling Newberry has a terrific post over at TPM Cafe today which he calls "If You Hate The Boom You Are Going to Positively Loathe The Recession." Have you been wondering why "the economy" is allegedly so great on paper when it is steadily getting worse in your personal pocketbook? Listen my children and you shall hear:

Inflation, to the extent that a government benefits from it, is a kind of tax. Americans have been trained to point the shotgun of their vote squarely at their own foot on the tax issue. They have been trained to hate visible taxes like the income tax, and love stealth taxes. Inflation is a stealth tax, in that you can't tell who is collecting it, how it falls on people, or what its overall effects are. It simply eats away at your living standard and savings, and the benefits flow to those who have the power to spend that taxed standard of living.

Currently that is George W. Bush. In effect, Bush has borrowed money to pay for the war, and a massive series of bribes to buy support. The people lending the money haven't taken the hit from their standard of living, instead they have kept prices high or raised them on a variety of goods, even in an era when globalization should have been cutting the costs. Look at it this way, moving to China cuts 30% off of labor costs. Labor costs represent 50% of the final product costs. That means that anything that is off shored to china should drop by 15% in cost. Other than in a few catagories of clothing, apparel in econo speak, that hasn't happened. The difference between what you should be paying, and what you are paying is, more or less, the tax that you are paying for Bush's war.

Now think about something, Remember when gasoline was $1.50 a gallon and people hosed John Kerry for having voted for a .50 cent a gallon increase in gasoline taxes? Couldn't you go for some $2 a gallon gasoline right now? Wouldn't it feel good not to have to cough up a Franklin to fill up your car? That's what consistently voting for stealth taxes gets you - higher taxes, not lower taxes, and less control over how the money is spent.

Go read the whole thing when you have time. It's not all that terribly long, and Newberry is a good writer on these things (although he is one of the many of us who cannot for the life of him proofread his own stuff) but you--yes, you there--are very likely one of the almost all of us who are convinced that economics is a vasty and terrible arcane thing that you are incapable of understanding in any significant way. Bosh and piffle. You can understand this. It is desperately important that you understand it, both for yourself and so you can explain it to those you get talking to IRL who are, I guarantee you, just as terrified as you are of what's happening, and what's coming next.