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They’ve been lying to you about inflation and I can prove it.We’ve been told inflation is normal, even good. That 2% inflation is required for a healthy economy, and that wages rise with the cost of living so no one gets hurt. But that’s perhaps the biggest lie in all of modern economics.In this video I break down why that story falls apart and how the system turns productivity into profit for the few instead of freedom for everyone else.Wages don't keep up, but even if they did, inflation is still the greatest theft of all time and Bitcoin exposes exactly how they pull it off.Value 4 Value: If you enjoyed this content feel free to zap me some sats via the lightning network: [email protected] or https://coinos.io/thesatstackerNYKNYC. Buy Bitcoin and withdraw to self custody with Bitcoin Well. Use my referral link for a chance to win free sats: https://bitcoinwell.com/referral/mftabFollow:https://x.com/thesatstackprimal.net/thesatstackerhttps://www.tiktok.com/@thesatstackhttps://open.spotify.com/show/4b58uoQo9Xl7RsbsbbAqAhhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-favorite-thing-about-bitcoin/id1788973938http://fountain.fm/show/YqXJoHuG6qYRBmDW1k37⏱️ Chapters00:00 – The biggest lie about inflation01:00 – Why “wages keep up” is the perfect distraction03:00 – CPI manipulation and the illusion of stability05:00 – Where the new money actually goes07:00 – The Cantillon effect and wealth concentration09:00 – Productivity doubles, wages stay flat11:00 – How inflation steals what progress should’ve given you13:00 – Sound money vs fiat money15:00 – Why Bitcoin fixes the system
This video is about how Bitcoin
exposes the biggest lie you've been told about inflation.
And what they don't want you to know
about who's really getting rich from it.
Personally, I truly cannot believe
the number of people who believe
we must have inflation for a functioning economy.
I put out Bitcoin content,
so I get these comments all the time.
Number one, they say 2% inflation is required
for a functioning economy.
As if no economy functioned
before the existence of central banking,
I guess they forget about that.
But number two, they say inflation is not a big deal
because wages rise with the cost of living,
so it all evens out and everybody's fine in the end.
Well, I'm gonna debunk that number one claim
more in depth in another video soon,
but today we're debunking number two.
Inflation is not a big deal
because wages keep up with the cost of living.
This video is gonna unpack the lies
that underpin that statement.
But more than that, I'm gonna tell you why
even if it is true,
even if wages do keep up
with the increased cost of living,
inflation is still the greatest theft of all time,
robbing you and your family of the ability
to build wealth and become better off in the future.
We're about to get into that,
but real quick, you're watching The Sad Stacker Show,
a Bitcoin show for people who think deeper about money.
I'm your host, my name is John aka The Sad Stacker,
so if you're interested in learning to stack smarter
and grow your conviction in Bitcoin,
hit the subscribe button,
and let's let the sad out of the bag.
So we all know we've grown up in a world
with normalized inflation.
We don't really bat an eye at the idea
that a Coke cost about a nickel for 75 years
until sometime in the 50s,
and it came in a bottle and it was made
with real cane sugar.
And now today, it costs like 20 times more than that,
comes in an aluminum can and it's made
with high-fructose corn syrup.
You can still get the real sugar one in the bottle,
but for some reason it's called Mexican Coke
and it costs like 50 times the original five cent price.
So inflation is just a part of life
that we all accept, prices rise over time.
We just assume it's the natural order,
the natural way of all things.
And of course, I hope everybody realizes
that price inflation is wage deflation.
So you need that 2% raise every year
or you are officially getting poorer.
And that's just the way it is.
Of course, never forget that that's not actually
the way it always was.
That's a policy choice.
It's the result of buying into one particular economic theory,
but it is not a thermodynamic law of the universe.
It's not an absolutely necessary fact of life.
It's a choice based on economic theory,
not empirical fact.
But we've been told for decades that inflation
is a good thing for the overall economy.
Not only that, that without it,
the economy would apparently completely collapse.
And of course, it's fine for individuals
because wages rise with inflation.
So everything is hunky-dory.
Well, when I use data for these things,
I like to peg it to 1971.
When we temporarily went off the gold standard
for this one in particular,
there isn't great data on real wages
starting in 1971, so we'll use 1980.
So if you take the data from 1980 to today,
it appears to be true.
Real wages adjusted for CPI are roughly flat
or basically up about 0.3% per year.
So according to that metric,
your cost of living is dropping a tiny bit each year.
And you're getting a little bit better off.
And you tell me, does that feel true to you?
Somehow, I doubt it.
One way to say it is that $100 in 1980,
but the same amount of goods and services
that $27 buys today.
Another way of putting it is that you need $374 today
to buy you what $100 could have bought in 1980.
But CPI, just the data, will basically tell you
that you have the $374 today.
So it's all good.
Doesn't matter if that stuff costs more.
I've done another video in the past
on the manipulated lie that is CPI.
I'll put that video right here.
You can watch that if you're interested
in learning a little more about it.
But suffice it to say, CPI is designed
to under-report real inflation.
Substitution effects, hedonic adjustments,
waiting changes, owner equivalent rent, et cetera, et cetera.
The Fed has about 20,000 employees on staff,
hundreds of them PhD economists coming up
with all kinds of ways to make sure
that the CPI number stays artificially low.
But I was thinking about a way to quantify this
and make it feel real.
So let's put it this way.
If you actually lived your life,
the way CPI assumes that consumers do,
your life would look completely ridiculous.
Basically, when you rent doubles,
you would move into an apartment that's half as big,
and you would say that your cost of living was the same.
When steak got too expensive, you'd switch to Cantuna,
when eggs, double, and price, you'd just eat more cereal,
and when your car costs more, you'd pay it,
but tell yourself that it's cheaper
because now it has Bluetooth.
That is literally what CPI assumes consumers are doing,
and they call that stable prices.
In other words, whatever gaslighting and econometric voodoo
it takes to under-report actual price increases.
So CPI inflation since 1980 is about 3.7% per year,
which means the price level overall
is up about 4x total.
Nominal wages since 1980 are up about 4% per year,
so they roughly increase at the same pace,
or like we said, a little more.
Therefore, real wages after CPI adjustment
are flatter up a tiny little bit.
But let's cut to the meat of the real issue
that's happening here, because something strange
is going on when you dig deeper into the numbers.
For example, the M2 money supply in the US
has grown by about 14x since 1980,
and the federal debt, by the way, has grown by about 40x,
which is over 8% per year.
So government spending has exploded,
and there's a whole bunch of new money in the system
that wasn't there before, but the overall price level
that consumers experience only went up by about 4x.
So there's a strange magic trick going on.
Prices didn't go up by 14x, and that's a good thing.
Wages went up by about 4x2 to offset the price increase,
but all that extra newly printed money,
if it didn't go into consumer prices
and it didn't go into wages, where did it go?
Well, now we're about to see what the magician
does not want you to see, because your 2% raise
or your nominal growing salary
is the attractive magician's assistant over here
in the skimpy outfit who's trying to distract you
from wherever the real trick is happening,
because while the magician was waving a 2% raise
in your face over here, they were pumping
the majority of that newly printed money into assets.
You see, the idea of maintaining your cost of living
is just about not getting poor in destitute over time,
but assets are how you get ahead.
Assets are how you build wealth,
and they're how the rich get richer,
and the 1% become the point 1%.
The cancel on effect is the term
for how the rich and powerful benefit from access
to cheap debt and newly printed money,
because they use it to buy up assets
before the full effects of inflation
show up in the rest of the economy.
The real culprit that exacerbates wealth inequality
and robs the poor in middle class of the chance
to actually get ahead is asset inflation.
That discrepancy between how much money entered the system
and why the general price level didn't rise too high
is because the money is in the assets.
Inflation is dilution, because the share of money
you hold or earn is becoming a smaller
and smaller piece of the overall pie.
But make no mistake that the pie itself is expanding,
and your piece, even if it's getting bigger,
it's doing so at a much slower rate
than the overall expansion of the pie.
That means someone else's share
is getting disproportionately larger
at an exponential rate compared to yours.
This is the number one thing I want you to understand
and take away from this video.
Even if you're getting a 2% raise every year,
you are still getting poorer in relative terms
if they're expanding the money supply much faster than that.
And you are unequivocally being stolen from
because that money is going to someone who's not you.
The median worker's income since 1980
has lost two thirds of its claim on the total money supply.
That's the real reason the wealth inequality has exploded.
CPI deliberately hides this by focusing on
some arbitrary basket of goods,
but excluding the expansion of financial assets and credit.
So for example, the cost of the median home since 1980
has gone up by about 6.7 times,
and the cost of a share of the S&P 500 has gone up 47 times.
So in 1980, the median home cost about three years
of median income, and today it's over five years of median income.
And in 1980, a share of the S&P cost 19 hours of median work.
And in 2025, it's 230 hours of median work.
That's six weeks of work.
12 times the amount of work it took in 1980
to buy one share of the S&P 500.
And I know that a lot of people like to retort.
Well, if you just bought a house
or if you just bought the S&P,
then you benefited from it.
Yeah, that's literally the point.
Everyone who was priced out or left out
or just plain not even alive yet got completely screwed.
For the record, direct ownership of S&P 500 index funds
was basically negligible amongst retail in 1980,
since they were brand new and mostly institutional.
And S&P index fund wasn't even available
for everyday investors until 1976.
And the spy ETF that everyone today essentially equates
with the S&P 500 didn't launch until 1993.
And of course, that's just talking about Americans
while the rest of the world had of course,
no shot at accessing it and probably lived under
a much worse currency regime.
To some degree, a result of the fact
that America gutted our industrial and manufacturing base
and made our biggest export inflation.
I think I'll do another video soon
to explain that concept too.
So subscribe to the channel and look out for that one.
But we have trillions of dollars of new money
injected into the system, the vast majority of it,
not ending up in wages for the average person,
but if that's not enough of a kick in the teeth,
here's where it gets even worse.
It's not just that the money supply grew by 14 times
and all that new money went into assets instead of wages.
It's that over that same time period,
worker productivity more than doubled up about 120 to 130%.
We built the internet, we automated entire industries,
we invented smartphones, cloud computing, robotics, AI,
the mobile wave, we literally reshaped civilization
and the economy as we know it.
And yet median real wages barely budged.
So one of supposedly the most productive periods
in history and real wages for everyday people are flat.
That right there by itself should be another red flag
for you that something's not right with this system.
Because even if nominal wages are up,
it still means that virtually none of those
real productivity gains trickle down to the average person
in the form of higher real wages or lower overall prices.
That productivity boom should have meant everything got cheaper
and your paycheck went further, but more every year,
regardless of whether it went up in nominal terms or not.
But under a fiat system of ever expanding credit and debt,
the actual benefits from those productivity gains
are slightly redirected from you and funneled
to the very tippy top to be captured
by those closest to the money printer.
The productivity gains did happen
but inflation redirects where they end up.
Instead of showing up as falling prices
and more freedom for everyone,
they show up as rising asset prices
and more wealth concentration.
This is a lot of information.
So I'm gonna lay the whole process out one more time
so it's clear as day.
In a sound money system, increased productivity
causes prices to fall naturally.
Yes, that is deflation.
And no, it's not a bad thing.
Just imagine a world where prices are falling
and your paycheck goes further.
Does that feel like a bad thing for you
in your life? No, I didn't think so.
So if inflation is more money chasing
the same amount of goods and services,
price deflation is the same amount of money
chasing more abundance in goods and services.
The money is worth more as prices fall.
Your paycheck would buy more every year,
even if your wages technically nominally stayed the same.
The reward for working and saving compounds automatically.
Everyone shares in the benefits of innovation
through lowering prices.
But in the fiat system, the government and banks
constantly expand the money supply.
That new money doesn't enter the economy evenly.
It's not like here's your quarterly check
of new money we printed, your portion of QE.
No, of course not.
It enters through very specific controlled channels first
like banks and corporations and governments.
Those closest to the money printer
can spend the new money before prices rise
while everyone else feels the effects later.
So instead of prices falling as productivity improves,
that new money keeps prices rising no matter what.
They print to avoid deflation,
which means they print to make sure prices never go down.
No matter how much real productivity is gained,
the inflation cancels out all natural price deflation
that productivity should have delivered.
Of course assets like stocks and real estate rise first
because cheap credit floods the market
and asset wealth compounds far faster than wages.
The top roughly 10% who own 90% of financial assets
capture almost all of this new value.
Corporations can borrow cheaply,
buy back shares, expand margins,
rather than raising wages.
This means record profits that benefit insiders
and shareholders, but still stagnant paychecks.
Governments and banks spend new money
while its purchasing power is still high,
effectively dumping on everyone else
through the inflation that shows up later.
Meanwhile, the middle class loses purchasing power,
the poor lose savings value entirely
as their cash buys less every year,
and the gap between wages and asset prices
just keeps widening.
So since 1980, we saw productivity per worker up about 120%,
and to money supply up about 1,300%,
S&P 500 up about 4,700%, real wages, basically flat.
So the productivity gains that did happen
just showed up in the rising asset prices
and more wealth concentration.
The inflation tax took away
what the productivity revolution should have given to you.
The problem is not that we don't create enough value,
it's that the system keeps stealing it
before it reaches you.
The money itself is the leak in the bucket,
which is why Bitcoin matters,
not because Bitcoin is an investment,
but because Bitcoin is a repair to the broken system.
This is why Bitcoiners say we need a money
that doesn't steal from you,
a money that doesn't cheat your time,
a fairer system at the base layer,
where no one can inflate the supply to enrich themselves
at the expense of everyone else.
Where no amount of lies about prices and wages
can let them steal from you while you're not looking,
and where no matter how much the magician
tries to distract you,
he can't pull the magic trick
of enriching himself and his friends at your expense.
Bitcoin is the first money in history
that truly levels the playing field.
Everyone plays by the same rules.
No wonder they hate it so damn much.
Under Fiat, productivity gains get stolen
from the workers and funneled to the top.
Under Bitcoin, productivity gains flow directly
to everyone in the form of falling prices.
Every worker and saver gets wealthier in real terms
as their time, effort, and money get more valuable.
As Jeff Booth says,
eight billion people working for eight billion people.
Bitcoin represents a world where you can actually keep
what you earn instead of having to go further out
on the risk curve and earn it again
in the form of picking the right investments.
Bitcoin represents a world where progress lifts everyone
and the money finally tells the truth.
So I just want you to remember
that when somebody says inflation is not a big deal
because wages keep up with the rising cost of living,
they are not only going out of their way to believe a lie,
they're going out of their way to miss the real theft
that's going on under the surface.
It's not just that your dollar buys less.
That in and of itself, by the way,
in my opinion, it should just be enough
for this to be outrageous.
But the even bigger problem is that no matter
how much more productive we get,
the gains are always stolen from us.
Working your whole life to earn a broken money
means that best case scenario,
your cost of living just treads water.
Decade after decade, we get more productive,
but your chances of getting ahead get worse and worse.
While the system is literally designed
to redirect the real gains and the fake printed money gains
to those at the tippy top,
but under Bitcoin productivity actually makes your life better.
Prices fall, savings grow, your freedom expands,
and everyone is forced to play by the same rules.
Can't be printed, manipulated, or weaponized against you.
It rewards productivity and not proximity to power.
It does what real money is supposed to do,
which is restore the connection between hard work
and real wealth building.
Somebody asked me in my comments the other day,
is there an argument that could make you
change your mind about Bitcoin?
And my response was, well, here's the problem.
I've tried.
I've tried to steal man every argument for Bitcoin.
I've tried to examine every argument against Bitcoin.
I've tried to examine every argument for Fiat.
But every time I do that, I just come out of it
with greater conviction in Bitcoin
and greater hatred for Fiat.
So if you like me at all,
leave a comment telling me why you don't want to live
in a world without Bitcoin.
Subscribe to the channel and watch another one
of my videos right here to learn to stack smarter
and grow your conviction in Bitcoin.
And as always, you never forget quitslacking
and start stacking.
Stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.
Quitslacking and start stacking.

The Sat Stacker Show | A Bitcoin Podcast

The Sat Stacker Show | A Bitcoin Podcast

The Sat Stacker Show | A Bitcoin Podcast