How would you like to earn a minimum wage of $36 per hour? I’m not talking about that measly $15/hour minimum wage that Alaska voters approved in last November’s election. I’m talking about an honest-to-goodness minimum wage of $36 per hour in today’s dollars, with no strings attached. Do you think you might like that?

Well, the truth is that Americans used to make the equivalent of that wage back in 1964, but thanks to government overspending and the inflation that results, real wages have been declining for 60 years. Fortunately, that may soon come to an end thanks to the efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Here is an example to illustrate the impact of inflation on your wages. In 1964, the minimum wage was $1.25 per hour. A buck and a quarter might not seem like much today, but American coins were 90% silver, so every $1.25 a person earned in 1964 was the equivalent of 1.15 ounces of silver.

Inflation destroys the labor value of the working men and women in this country. It also destroys the money Americans struggle to save.

Using today’s spot silver price of $31.30/ounce, the 1.15 ounces of silver a worker received in 1964 was worth the equivalent of $36 dollars an hour today. That equates to a salary of $72,000 per year in today’s dollars for a full-time worker receiving minimum wage. This explains how the average working person in 1964 could provide a decent living for their family, and only one working adult per household was needed to do so.

So, what happened to us? How come we have to settle for $15/hr. as a minimum wage instead of getting $36 an hour? The answer is that government deficit spending caused inflation, and wages did not grow as quickly as our currency was devalued.

I intentionally highlighted the year 1964 because it was the last year our country still used silver coins. Coincidentally, it also marked the start of President LBJ’s expensive Great Society social programs and our country’s increased involvement in the Vietnam War, both of which could not be paid for by taxation alone and required excessive inflationary money printing.

LBJ isn’t the only president to blame. Nixon continued LBJ’s profligate spending methods, but to do so, Nixon was forced to devalue our currency further by removing the dollar from being backed by gold.

Every president and Congress since Nixon have followed that same plan of high deficit spending to pay for government programs, and then borrowing the money to pay for it. That is, until now. Donald Trump is the first president in the last 60 years to make a serious effort to return our country to fiscal sanity, starting by cutting government waste and fraud.

Democrat politicians don’t like that Elon Musk is finding fraud and waste in the government, which indicates that they probably benefit from it in some way.

If the early reports are an indication, Elon Musk’s DOGE team is finding gross examples of waste in every government department they examine, with new stories of excesses coming out every day, and each new report seeming to be worse than the one before.

USAID spends $44 billion annually funding every degenerate form of human behavior known to mankind across the world. Social Security is paying benefits to millions of people who are over 150 years old, an obvious fraud that everyone can see but nobody has done anything about. Medicare and Medicaid have spent over $2.7 trillion on beneficiaries living outside the country. The Treasury Department can’t say where $4.7 trillion of payments went. It is madness that we are spending money like this in the first place, but it’s an even greater insanity that this fraud has been going on for years, and nobody in Washington, DC, has done anything about it.

One thing is sure, if our government can fund transgender surgical procedures in Guatemala, the publication of gay porn comic books in Peru, and a censorship industrial complex in this country, they are collecting way too much tax revenue and spending it on the wrong things.

However, Democrat politicians don’t like that Elon Musk is finding fraud and waste in the government, which indicates that they probably benefit from it in some way. This week, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent an urgent demand letter to the acting director of the IRS, asking for a list of all DOGE team members who are helping to ferret fraud in that government department.

It makes you wonder why they are more concerned about who is doing the auditing than what the auditors are finding. When their priorities are not stopping the fraud but stopping the auditors, it tells you all you need to know.

The reality is that our government’s spending practices have screwed the average American for the past 60 years. As the minimum wage example shows, inflation destroys the labor value of the working men and women in this country. It also destroys the money Americans struggle to save. This results in a shift of the nation’s wealth from the working people to the well-connected.

Donald Trump is trying to do something about it by finding waste and fraud as his first step toward fiscal sanity. Future steps will include cutting the budget, perhaps elimination of the Federal Reserve and going back to the gold standard for our currency. Every American should be thankful that Trump has recognized the problem and is trying to improve the situation. He should continue to aggressively do so, with or without the help of Congress.

The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.

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