Inflation Feels Like a Flood, but the President Says, Nothing to Worry about; it's Just a Trickle
Shoppers are strongly complaining about how much they struggling under inflation this Christmas season as they try to buy gifts. The Trump Administration, on the other hand, keeps insisting it is all a Democrat hoax, and conveniently, hasn’t gotten an actual inflation report out in months for us to see whether we have a flood of inflation or not.
So, you can believe the work-deluged (due to DOGE firings), long-shutdown Bureau of Belabored Statistics with its much belated and beleaguered reports, or you can believe the cries of shoppers like yourself in more than one recent poll. The various articles and the merchants quoted blame the Grinched-out shopper’s feelings on the Trump Tariffs.
I’m going to spell that all out in the weekend Deeper Dive, but there are a number of articles highlighted below, which I will be delving into, as well as some videos of the floods I mentioned that are happening in my general area. I live about half a mile from one of the badly flooding rivers, and was surprised to see water flowing over the top of the dike for about mile-long stretch. I’ve seen flooding here many times before, but never seen it go over the dike in this area. It usually floods through the back-channels of streams that have to penetrate the dike.
I was impressed by the engineering. The top of the dike was so perfectly matched to the slope of the top of the river that the water overflowed evenly over a long stretch, making for a thin sheet of muddy water flattening down the grass that covers the dike. The grass worked almost like a thatched roof, and the perfectly even slope kept the dike from eroding by spreading the flow across a large distance. Had the water found a low point, a more concentrated flow could easily have achieved enough force to cut through the clay dike.
Since rivers slope gradually downhill, you cannot just make the top of the dike level. That would be easy. You have to know what slope of the top of the river will be at flood stage as it makes its slightly downhill journey in order to set the dike exactly parallel with that slope so that the entire dike tops with an thin even flow at the same time. It worked beautifully. Yesterday, the rains largely stopped, and today the fields are already drained down to mere puddles. Sometimes government does us a great service with quality work.
That does not mean, however, that it worked that perfectly everywhere. Our area was well controlled but a dike did break in another nearby county where the river reached a record far above anything ever experienced there in recorded history, and even some parts or the county where I live saw major flooding with lots of rescues.
So, it goes with money, too. When too much is printed and too much flows, it can cause a flood of inflation throughout the economy. When well regulated, it does not. Tariffs, though, are like a gaping hole in the dike. To the extent that Trump now boasts he is helping farmers with bailouts, the farmers have retorted today that his is plugging a hole in the dike that he made. For businesses, and now with a spreading flow downstream to consumers, tariffs forced a huge increase in rising prices by government mandate. For farmers, so the farmers say, they caused counter tariffs that destroyed their trade. We’ll look into all of that this weekend.
On a personal note
Our own home sits on high gravelly ground, so never has any flooding issues. It’s a Dutch community, and I’m not Dutch (so I’m not much around here), but the Dutch do know how to do dikes. That must be why so many are named Van Dyke and Van Dyken or just Dyke. I’m surrounded by Dykes, most of whom are not the masculine female type.
Anyway, the flood waters have already just about vanished, and the community has joined rescues of nearby towns that were not so well engineered. Now that things are settling down, I’ll be putting together the Deeper Dive for this weekend, which strikes me as a particularly suitable name for it at present. I’ll be covering the numerous articles on high inflation that is being reported from non-government sources.
I have a used car I was selling, but I’ve decided I’m just going to give it to a flood victim, as a number of people lost their cars in nearby communities, and some only had liability insurance because they could not afford full coverage. My wife and I have decided we’ll get more joy out of putting a bow on the little, red Honda SUV and giving it as a Christmas car than out of selling it.