What the Federal Reserve Has Cost You Personally

This article will help you estimate the (%#@!) huge number

by H. Michael Sweeney

Copyright©2012, all rights reserved. permissions to reproduce by request only to proparanoid at century link net

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Note: If you oppose the FED, you may wish to review the 24 Presidential Campaign Planks proposed to specifically cure the problem with respect to the FED, the National Debt, Tax, and how money should be printed.

Beginning of the End

The Federal Reserve Bank System (the FED) was established in 1913 by some serious international con artists who used deceit, lies, and disinformation to trick Congress into approving it. The FED is indeed a privately held corporation run for the significant benefit of the banks as well as some ‘tricky-dicky’ (a bribery, of sorts) benefits to legislators and the President, also at citizen expense. When I say ‘banks,’ I mean three kinds.

1) The big New York banks and big European International banks reap huge reward, as they were the ones who established the FED and thus get to be the first to feed at the trough. They control it, not Congress. Like any private corporation, they have a Board of Directors and a functional CEO. Sure, they listen to the President and Congress for input on what they are might SHOULD do, but in the end, they DICTATE what they will do and sell it to government as a ‘cure’ for whatever sparked their input.

2) Next comes the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which are creations of these same bankers, in partnership with other globalist interests from the likes of the Bilderbergers, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, modern Illuminati all say some (me included). Despite their flowery and sugar coated statements about what they do, they work no differently than the FED member banks to profit at the expense of everyone else.

They get a goodly go at the trough because Congress now allows the FED to print US currency for their exclusive and seemingly limitless use in addition to all the money Congress asks them to print. So, in effect, the U.S. Currency has become a de facto ‘world currency,’ but not to make the dollar stronger, because it actually weakens it through inflation over which Congress has little to say. And you and I pay the interest on it all. It’s called The National Debt, and your IRS tax payments largely go directly to the bankers to help repay it (but it will never be paid in full, as it is impossible to keep it from growing larger).

3) Finally comes all other American Banks, who get minimal benefit but who get all the regulation and dictates the FED chooses to supply, policies designed to stifle small bank growth while encouraging the New York/International banks of the first group to grow even bigger. THIS, by the way, is exactly the OPPOSITE of what the FED was originally created to do, the opposite of what they claimed it would do in order to gain Congressional approval. In short, they lied, and this post will tell you all about that.

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Undue Banking Fees:

Because it is a Monopoly controlled by the heads of the various key banks who sit on the Board of the Federal Reserve, they make it less profitable for the lesser banks; forcing them to charge more for banking services, which in turn allows the big New York and International banks to do the same, the difference being the Fed banks enjoy a greater boost in profits under FED policy. But this is a mere annoying pittance compared to other costs, and we will not include it in your personal cost calculations. That said, there is this one instance I’d really like you to take a look at, because it is quite symptomatic of banking abuse, and because I’m hoping you will contribute to a fund to provide relief to the family the article discusses.

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Usury Interest:

It is neither Federal, nor a Bank

Even when the FED sets extremely low interest rates, it translates to Usury (excessive) interest costs to those who borrow from the bank. Why? Under the same laws which set up the FED, banks were allowed to loan out more money than they had in the vaults, at a ratio of ten loaned dollars for every dollar they had. You deposit $100, and they loan $1000. The payment on that being $100 a month, lets say, meaning they then loan out yet another $1000 each month. But where did that extra $900 in money come from, and the $900 after that, and so forth?

This money, which keeps going like some grand pyramid scheme as long as borrowers keep coming forward and payments keep coming in… DOES NOT EXIST. It never existed, and will not exist until you pay it back over time from your income. It was created out of thin air out of nothing and becomes real only by the sweat of your brow (you are a ‘debt’ slave producing money for the banks). But it even gets better than that for the banks.

When you get the loan, they credit their books with the fake money, and debit your account with a charge of the value of the loan, and give you a check. You can’t easily use that check to buy a car or house, so you deposit back into the bank so you can write your own check for the purchase. The deposit of the loan money shows as a credit to both your account and theirs, at least until your check for the purchase clears, at which time they are effectively reversed. In the meantime, they can loan $10,000 more on your $1,000 loan, and yet again every time you make a payment, they can loan yet more to create another slave and a whole new pyramid of loans that will result. Pyramid upon pyramid.

So in essence, you and tens to hundreds or even thousands of other persons are paying interest on the same original $900 worth of money created out of nothing, and the money loaned, and the money paid back. The bank was never at risk of their own money (it was your $100), and yet will be earning tons of interest for nothing and nothing on nothing and nothing on nothing on nothing, again and again, and yet again. THAT is Usury, and some State Laws which forbid Usury have been successfully used to stop foreclosures because the banks were unable to prove they had any risk for which to justify interest charges or harm as defined by breach of agreement to pay. It is a hard case to win, but it has been done.

The upshot on Usury? For most folks about 17% of their income goes to such interest charges. We will be using that information later. No need to calculate anything, yet. S

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Unemployment Costs:

1964 Scranton Jobless Protests

In my case, I’ve been unemployed because of financial chaos due to FED control (inflation/recession cycle, one begets the other) for a total of 8 years in my life. The use of the formulae herein compensates for that in terms of ‘would have beens,’ but the actual earnings computed thereby are in error by an incalculable sum due to the simplified methods employed.

If you are like me, you may therefore wish to add in an estimated ‘unemployment cost,’ at the end based on some other, arbitrary sum. There are two ways unemployment impacts the number you will wish to reflect upon. The obvious is lost wages, but if you use the math suggested, that will be compensated for automatically. But while unemployed, both you and your would-be employer were not paying into your retirement funds as required by the Social Security Act, and any special employer provisions for other retirement programs. You may wish to consider that when we get to the section on lost retirement income.

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Inflation (a hidden tax):

The sneaky benefit to government of the FED is that they can print money anytime they want to fund anything they want without actually having to pay for it with a new Tax Bill. That’s why the same rats tend to get reelected, because unless they vote to raise a tax, voters tend to give them little mind and presume them doing their job. Of course of late, a lot of voters are realizing that the other reason to get upset is when Rats don’t read Bills and vote them in only to find them unconstitutional, taking away our freedoms, and bringing us closer to (fill in the blank and please review these links, here: communism, socialism, fascism, police state, martial law, armed revolution, etc.).

Start with the first year you were an independent citizen wage earner living on your own. Hopefully you remember your hourly wage or how much you made a year. Multiply your hourly wage by 2,200 (hrs. in a typical work year) to approximate a year’s earnings, or just jot down your annual wages. We won’t even bother with overtime wages, unless you wish to fudge on the 2,200 figure because you have always had a lot of overtime. An annual figure would naturally include it already.

Go to the inflation calculator and see what that wage equates to, today.  Example: in 1971 I earned $3.25 hr., or $7150 a year, which equates to $38,056, today. Get your answers, and then continue…

But wait. In my most recent pay hike I earned $14.25 an hour, or $31,350 a year. For most of us, we are earning less today than we should compared to the information at the calculator. This is our clue something beyond mere inflation is afoot, and we need to compute and identify what it is.

So subtract the two and we get $6,706 — income lost this year in wages over what the inflation calculation indicates we should have been making. Multiply that times the number of intervening years and divide by two and you end up with the (approximate) total cost of inflation to your earnings capacity — because all those pay increases you got over the years were increasingly worth less and less than their face value. In my example, its $137,473, which I’ll refer to later as ‘lost income.’

Now if you were lucky, you managed to earn a heck of a lot more in pay hikes over the year, so you may end up with a negative number. Great for you, at least until we figure the rest of it out… because the more you earn, it seems, the more it costs you in the end. So run the calculation, anyway, and jot down the resulting negative number so you get an accurate final answer.

Next go to the gasoline historical price chart and see how much gas cost that first year you worked (use the blue line). In 1971 it was 36 cents a gallon(!) Now gasoline is not a true indicator of inflation because it is also subject to forces of supply and demand, and some of you may be protesting my wishing to use it. I have a reason:

Many things we purchase such as the real estate sector also do not see their pricing held to the inflation standard, either, and are less determined by supply and demand than they are by control of interest by the FED. Real Estate, especially, which is a major portion of one’s budget even if a renter, is a so impacted. As it happens, most sectors’ price fluctuations tend to follow that of the price of gasoline in at least a general way. So bear with me please, as gasoline is the only easy-to-use baseline indicator that allows us to address all inter-related phenomenon across multiple sectors. It is at least going to get us into the ballpark.

Subtract from that first year’s gas price from today’s price at the pump ($3.50 here) to get the inflated price of gas. Next, in order to use gas prices as an indicator and factor we can use to compute its impact, we need to normalize that figure based on $1 worth of gas in the starring year, which means we need to compute a multiplier, a ‘factor.’

To do that, divide the original price into one dollar to get your factor (.36 into 1.00 = 2.78 – you could have bought 2.78 gallons). If the original was greater than $1, your factor will be a fractional part (e.g., 1.75 into 1.00 = .57 gallons). Now, THAT figure is the cost in inflation for a single dollar spent on gas, at today’s price. I’m saying it also is generally representative of all money’s spent for anything. Since it also impacts the value of money in savings, it applies to pretty much everything you’ve ever earned, because every cent you’ve earned has been spent on something, even if just savings (you were buying future money).

So finish calculating how much you’ve earned, which generally will be quite well approximated by going back to our earlier calculations and adding the first years earnings to the last years earnings, multiplying by the number if years between, and dividing by two. For me that’s $7,150 + $31,350 = $38,500 x 41 = $1,578,500 divided by two = $789,250. Never made millionaire, did I? Few of us did, or will.

To this figure we should now add back in the ‘lost income’ figure from the earlier section. $789,250 + $137,473 = $926,723 in ‘inflation adjusted income.’ Damn. Still not a millionaire!

Now multiply that times the computed gasoline factor to see the inflation cost for goods and services (and savings) over the lifetime. $926,723  x 2.78 factor = $2,576,290.  Well, looks like, thanks to the FED, that I SHOULD have been not just a millionaire, but a multi-millionaire!

Yes, I know… that figure is  more than we earned, isn’t it? Don’t worry, it will make sense when we sum it all up, which follows our final calculations:

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Back to Usury

Yes!

Now its time to add in the Usury figure (17% of our income); we multiply the above total by 1.17 to get $3,014,259.  That difference between that number and your actual income of record is how much the banks have indirectly benefited by your gleeful participation in their little credit scam put over on the Federal government, and citizens, alike. That is what it actually cost you for your share of their profiteering.

In my case, I subtract the $789,250 (my actual life’s earnings), for a cost of $2,225,009. And 80 cents, but who’s counting. The FED certainly hopes YOU aren’t counting, and Congress, too, for the matter. Because if you did, you might feel like sparking some sort of major reform that started with getting rid of everyone in D.C., as well as the Fed. Occupy might end up being who sits in Congress, at least until the National Guard showed up.

Problems with my math?

If you were sharp, you probably have come up with an objection to my reasoning regarding the 17%. Sure you can argue that some of that money (interest on debt) did NOT go to banks at all, but went to other sources like oil companies, manufacturers and retailers who extended us credit, and even to taxes… but don’t forget each one of them in almost every case, to earn your purchases, borrowed from the bank to build their product, factories, and finance doing business.

Like you, they had to pay it back. Which is exactly what the taxes are for.

Regarding taxes, bear in mind that the bulk of all tax revenue goes directly back to the Federal Reserve to pay them interest on the money they print, which is nothing more than an I.O.U. from government to the FED. All of it remains Usury, and your 17% went to cover that one way or the other, as did that of businesses. Oh, excuse me. I forgot. The BIG corporations, the ones who tend to be run by Boards with financial officers who come from the banking industry… tend not to pay ANY taxes. So that’s another way you and I get the shaft by the FED, I suppose. But it does not change the equations or reasoning used herein, it simply makes it less possible to ever repay the National Debt.

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Lost Purchase Power:

And, as stated, this huge total is not how much money you ‘spent,’ because it equals far greater than you even earned. But IT IS HOW MUCH VALUE IN TODAYS DOLLARS YOU’VE LOST IN PURCHASE POWER. If there had been no inflation, no Usury (and you did not borrow, but paid cash) and you continued to get those pay raises in an economy largely free of inflation and recession, your income would be the same as we adjusted for, and possibly higher (one can so argue, because in a healthy economy, raises are more frequent and tend to be bigger).

We need to restate that, because it can be confusing.

YOUR PURCHASE POWER for a given dollar would have remained more steady and be more like what it was way back when, which in TODAYS dollars, would buy you that larger figure in purchasing power. You would truly have an improved standard of living based on wealth (not merely improvements in technology), instead of what you really have, which is an illusion of a better standard wrought only by technological benefits, but dampened by a diminutive purchasing power.

Put yet another more pictorial way, you would be driving a sports car, a motor home, an SUV, and a pickup truck, have a nice boat and mooring, and a luxury home AND retirement home, both well furnished – instead of an apartment and a three-year-old family car. Everything would be paid for and you would have significant cash in the bank. There would be extremely low taxes by comparison, as well, because there would be no National Debt and therefore no interest for government to repay. There would be elected officials in government responsive to the people, not slaves under control of banks and corporations.

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Lost Retirement Income

If you are currently retired, the math herein points to many ways you are likely enjoying a smaller monthly retirement income than you would be enjoying otherwise. If not yet retired, you have that to look forward to with displeasure. The topic is far too complex to include in the formulation as there are too many kinds of retirement incomes, but the two which deserve our dialog.

are Social Security and Stock investment plans as part of a corporate retirement package over and above Social Security  (IRA and Investment Funds, etc.).

Investment funds because, in the FED induced cycles of inflation/recession, all these forms of investment have suffered significant stock valuation losses. In a way, these in turn actually drive the cycle to wilder extremes and amplify the problem (e.g., a large institutional investor in the education sector may be forced to raise tuition, or a manufacturer to lay off employees and close a plant). So this form of investment is significantly impacted, especially in this last financial meltdown and the FED’s response to print trillions to give to banks ‘too big to fail.’

As for SS, had not the FED increased the National Debt so much beyond any hope of repayment, Congress would never have had need to dip into the SS reserves you and I paid into the fund for our retirement, and it would therefore now actually have money sitting there WITH EARNED INTEREST, and our checks would be significantly larger than they are now. As it stands, we will already earn less than we put in, unless we live well beyond the expected lifetime and they don’t pull the plug on payments altogether, as they keep discussing as a ‘viable option.’ Yeah, do that and find out how many senior citizens own guns, me thinks.

So feel free to compute a number by whatever means you wish for your losses to retirement income, if you like, and add it in, as well.

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Add it all up

THAT is your cost for the FED. The only think perhaps missing is the medical bills you will pay from the Coronary you have reading this, or the repairs to your car and your body from the bullet holes gathered trying to crash into the nearest Federal Reserve Bank to get your money back. Uh… don’t try that unless perhaps filming for the next Jackass movie.

You now work nearly half the year to pay your fair share in taxes. It won’t be long before you work year ‘round’ and still lose ground. Tennessee Ernie Ford, a famous Country star of decades gone by had a number one hit song about financial slavery born of the early coal industry in the Appalachians. It seems like the best way to end this piece; Sixteen Tons:

                                                       You load sixteen tons what do you get

                                                       Another day older and deeper in debt

                                                       Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go

                                                       I owe my soul to the company store

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Oops! One last cost, not financial

If, like me, you choose to go public with your protest of the Fed, you will be joining the ranks of an elite group of troublemakers who pay yet another price: You will get on a list of people to be watched by the FED Cyber Police. They don’t really have a ‘Police,’ but they apparently feel themselves above the Law and have sought to establish a Cyber unit to track the doings on line of people who criticize the Fed. Here is their actual Request for Proposals on how to do this.

Presumably, at some point, they will have Congress deem us terrorists (too late, actually… they’ve already done that). So perhaps instead they will expand the NDAA powers and allow not only the Military to vanish or assassinate us, but also the FED. Come on, Obama, your banking friends need just a little more of your (unlawful, tyrannical, fascist police state) power.

But what am I saying? The FED has more money than… well, even exists, it seems. They don’t need Congressional empowerment. They can afford to pay contract hit men, cyber thugs or gun totting variety. The Mafia does it and gets away with it, mostly. The CIA does it and gets away with it, entirely. The Military now does it and gets away with it, Obamaly. I’ve even heard accusations that the FBI has, empirically.

All I have to say is (expletive deleted) FED, your days are numbered shorter than mine. Take your best shot.

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