Would you rather have cheap, subsidized - illegally subsidized - goods dumped into the Wal-Mart and not have a job and not have your wages go up in 15 years, or would you like to pay a little bit more - not much - a little bit more, have a job, and have your wages going up? I think the American people are going to make that choice.
The consumer knows that his prices are made for him by those who control the avenues of trade and the highways of commerce.
Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way - both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.
I think the inflation prospects for the U.S. over the next five or six, seven years, are quite serious. You cannot have a bumper crop in apples without the value or the price of each apple falling. The Fed has had the largest increase in the monetary base in the history of the U.S., from colonial times to the present, times ten.
Almost all taxes on production fall finally on the consumer.
Inflation is the crabgrass in your savings.
We simply cannot check inflation by keeping people out of work.
The history of the twentieth century - America's century! - has been pretty much a history of rising prices.
Middle men are paying farmers less, charging consumers more and pocketing the difference.... For the first time in history consumers have gotten soaked by a drought.
Referring to the economic effects of the drought of 1988:
You know, when you go into the store and buy a box of laundry detergent, and the price has gone up - you know, 50 cents because of regulations....And everything is costing more money, and we are killing our people like this....It's the evil government that is putting all these regulations on us so that we can't survive.
Food and energy account for a significant portion of household budgets, so the Federal Reserve's inflation objective is defined in terms of the overall change in consumer prices.
If you threw a barbecue yesterday for the Memorial weekend, it was 29 percent more expensive than last year because Barack Obama's policies have led to groceries going up 29 percent.
And, in the past, it has been all too easy for legislators to load costs onto business in order to meet broader social goals. And costs for business means costs for consumers.
It is plain that we don't care about our poor people except to exploit them as cheap labor and victimize them through excessive rents and consumer prices.
Listening to Democrats complain about inflation is like listening to germs complain about disease.
Research has shown that middle-income wage earners would benefit most from a large reduction in corporate tax rates. The corporate tax is not a rich-man's tax. Corporations don't even pay it. They just pass the tax on in terms of lower wages and benefits, higher consumer prices, and less stockholder value.
Things are expensive, very expensive in Israel for many reasons. One of the reasons is our ports. It's a monopoly. They run very poorly. And we have ships that are stuck in the ocean for three or four days or a week, and all that cost is transferred to the products and the consumer.
Control freak politicians never rest, and a few of the more dedicated ones are working relentlessly to slap chains on the world's most unfettered market. The Marketplace Fairness Act will end up forcing consumers to pay higher prices for the goods they desire.
Hours wasted in traffic represent not only lost wages but enormous amounts of economic activity that might have happened. Congestion indirectly increases consumer prices, makes travel times unreliable for commuters and truckers, and precludes many people from accessing jobs in urban hubs.
I hope that more Canadians will become interested in in how the inflation rate target affects our purchasing power, our standard of living and therefore our life.
Despite massive evidence to the contrary, libertarians hold tight to their romantic concept of capitalism, which, freed from government interference, serves the consumer with the best products at the lowest prices.
Because food and energy prices are volatile, it is often helpful to look at inflation excluding those two categories - known as core inflation - which is typically a better indicator of future overall inflation than recent readings of headline inflation.
Whip Inflation Now
It's crucial to keep in mind that the hundreds of millions of dollars now spent on prescription drug advertisements are ultimately paid for by consumers in the form a higher drug prices.
I would be uncomfortable raising the federal funds rate if readings on wage growth, core consumer prices, and other indicators of underlying inflation pressures were to weaken, if market-based measures of inflation compensation were to fall appreciably further, or if survey-based measures were to begin to decline noticeably.