When the year 2000 dawned, a dollar bought 1 260th of an ounce of gold.
And let's never forget that even though we left the gold standard in 1971, it never stopped existing as a measure, as a market signal of government's mismanagement of money.
And so $266 in the year 2000, roughly.
By the time George W. Bush left office in 2009, gold was up to roughly $1,000.
During President Obama's presidency, the price of gold rose all the way to $1,900.
Now it's at $1,700.
That's a fairly substantial devaluation of the dollar.
We didn't register and quote inflation in CPI because they've stripped out most of the market goods that Signal the inflation the most.
If they'd measured it the way they did in the 1970s, we would have registered a major inflation in the 21st century.
Are Republicans fighting this?
Not enough.
Republicans buy into it too.
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but it's stuff you already know.
Let's never forget that Donald Trump routinely said that other countries were beating us because their currencies were cheaper than ours.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Implicit there is that Mexico is rich and has gotten rich by devaluing the peso.
That so is Argentina by devaluing their peso.
No, rich countries protect the value of their money simply because in protecting the value of their money, they're protecting the wealth of their citizenry.
The worth of their work.
They're also protecting the investors who commit capital to new ideas.
When you devalue money, what you're saying to the investors who drive all economic growth is that if you commit capital to a new idea and you actually get a return, you succeed, you create a new Google or a Microsoft or an Amazon, any money you get back will come back and devalue dollars.
So currency devaluation is anti-progress.
It's a tax on growth, yet it's hard to find a politician who understands this nowadays.
Well, it seems it's hard to find a businessman who understands this.
Every big business sides with the left.
Yep, yes, certainly some do.
Certainly some make that statement as a way of just making nice with the other side.
But I think businessmen, in a sense, broadly understand it.
Phil Knight of Nike, in his wonderful book Shoe Dog, made the point that when the U.S. left the stability of the dollar as 1 35th of an ounce of gold in the 1970s, suddenly his ability to run Nike became extraordinarily difficult because he was importing most of his shoes from Japan.
And so these floating exchange rates that no one had ever seen before.
It made the ability to do business a much more difficult concept because it rewrote contracts overnight.
It's the robbing of people who want certainty.
Yeah, Nike.
And then look at what it ended up doing.
Well, listen, you wrote a very important book.
When Politicians Panic, folks, is up at the DennisPrager.com.