21 car century insurance: Most terrifying stat of the year

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A post on X hit me like a bolt of lightning this morning, even though I guess it's something I should have known.

It's this:

The U.S. dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power over the past six years.

I had to know if that was really true, so I looked into it myself. Sure enough, the dollar has lost 29 percent of its purchasing power -- so indeed "nearly a third" -- over those six years. It's true, all right.

How are you supposed to accumulate savings if every six years a third of it is going to be taken away from you (and that doesn't include the taxes you're also paying)?

There's something weirdly unreal about our politics, too, because there seem to be no constraints on anything. If our overlords want to go to war, or launch whatever the next Great Leap Forward is, they magically find the money. Citizens, in turn, support policies I doubt they would favor if they got an explicit bill in the mail.

This statistic today reminds us that we do get a bill, but it's not explicit, and it's not labeled. Even worse, nobody understands where it came from, or makes the connection.

There are real costs to wild spending, and they will be paid one way or another.

Yet remember when Ron Paul had the gall to mention gold in public? Why, this is a crazy person, citizen! Pay no attention to him! Trust your overlords to manage our new and improved, "flexible" money!

Nearly a third in just six years. I keep coming back to that.

It also made me think this morning: in order to get by in inflationary America, I have to engage in all kinds of self-defense: CrowdHealth (use code TOM for a discount), an outstanding options trading training program to keep my money from being inflated away, another service to earn cash back on my major purchases -- I really should make a list of everything I do, because all of it is intended to keep and grow the money the bad guys are trying to siphon off from me.

I do own some Bitcoin and some gold, too, and I have my reasons for both. I am not giving out financial advice, but I will say that gold is a long-term play. It is not get rich quick. It's something I own for the long haul, because it has a track record extending back thousands of years that appeals to me.

But because nearly a third of my cash savings can be siphoned off in six years -- and the United States is considered a low-inflation country! -- I need to exhaust every avenue available to me.

So instead of just buying gold and letting it sit there like a lazy bum, I earn a yield on it with Monetary Metals, where my friends Jeff Deist (former Mises Institute president, and groomsman at my wedding) and Addison Quale have been doing something truly extraordinary for years for people like you and me.

With their gold lease program, I earn about four percent a year on my gold, paid in gold.

Sure beats the 0% that 99% of mankind is earning on gold.

I look at it this way: I do not have the luxury of not doing this. I am living in a society in which terrible people are trying to screw me at every turn. When our friends (like Jeff and Addison, both sterling human beings) build something to help us, we should let them help us.

Check it out: