Thread

While some recent government spending was costs tied to Covid (the virus itself), the majority was tied to bad policy, lockdowns, propping up their broken economy (due to lockdowns), paying for vaccines, and funding military conflicts. This is all taken out of the countries GDP - possible financial growth. It’s not paid for and it’s debt that that will last decades and inflation that hides who is paying for everything. Taxes aren’t funding this. They were already spent and allocated in budgets. A decrease in your wealth is funding these bad decisions, mismanagement, and the consequences they had. The same story is happening (largely) globally.

At the time I naively expected this global government spending to balance out - if all countries roughly spend the same GDP to pay for these Covid-made decisions. What I didn’t appreciate then, that I do now, is that while some countries fair better post Covid than others relatively, but in a negligible way (ultimately there were no clear winners,) is just how much they would kick off true runaway inflation. I find it hard to see how this isn’t a state that persists for the next years, perhaps beyond, and ultimately the final straw for ‘controlling’ fiat.

The secondary reason is timing. And it aligns how funny things happen when the value of $1/1£/1€ in a currency drops below a certain threshold. A $1 cheeseburger becomes $2. Then $3.50, followed by $5.50. Instead of the population doing math in fractions of a whole unit - a dollar/euro/etc, suddenly they are doing math without decimals to interpret somethings cost/cheapness. It’s a huge shock to the brain when this happens as the difference between $0.25 and $.50, and then $1 and $2 are the same %, yet perceived as different. The USD, Euro, Pound, AUD, NZD, etc are all recently breakaway from decimals (cents) mattering. Cents have become rounding units and insignificant.