Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Taste inflation affects brain function
What is the net result of all this taste inflation? You might be fascinated by this, because it's more than just the desensitizing of your taste to the natural flavors and subtleties in organic foods. My theory is that obliterating the subtleties of taste makes people stupid, and I mean this quite literally. By impairing the tongue's sensitivity and by taking away the brain's full spectrum of possible sensations and stimulation, you actually impair a person's cognitive function and learning ability. You make them less aware. |
| Sweet, redefined
We also have sugar inflation in this country. A loaf of bread was once actually bread, not cake. Today, there's so much sugar in bread that it's basically just sponge cake. A muffin was once actually a muffin, and corn bread once tasted sort of like corn. Today, muffins are just cake in the shape of muffins, and corn bread is just corn-flavored cake. Even our bagels don't taste like bagels anymore; they're just bagel-shaped cake. And what do I mean by cake? I mean a bread-based product loaded with sugar and white flour. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This could lead to spiraling expectations of higher inflation, with the process eventuating in hyperinflation."
It's not like it hasn't happened before. Hyperinflation is actually the norm, not the exception, and it's the escape route taken by virtually every country suffering under the burden of payment promises is cannot possibly keep. Whether we're talking about Germany after World War I, or the United States over the next few years, hyperinflation is the only option remaining for politicians who refuse to practice fiscal sanity. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The other big one that we all are talking about right now is general systemic inflation. inflation is a trigger for damage and repair. If you can basically take the inflammatory condition in your body down, and there are ways to do that, you tend to minimize damage to arterial walls, and the arteries will clear.
Mike: Are you talking about the C-reactive proteins and inflammation?
Barron: Yes, that's how they are measuring inflation. Higher elevated levels of C-reactive protein indicate a state of inflammation.
Mike: Again, we're talking with Jon Barron. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Because the Government cannot artificially keep inflation rates low in this country forever. I think the deficit spending by the Bush administration is a huge factor in all of this, and that practice stands at great odds with low inflation rates. Eventually, inflation is going to affect the housing markets.
Today, I don't care if anybody thinks I'm right or wrong. I'm writing this as a service to my readers, whom I respect and genuinely care about. This is a warning to all of you to look closely at what's happening in the housing market. I don't want you to lose your life savings. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 The government's payment system helped physicians' incomes grow at a far faster rate than that of general inflation. In the first year after Medicare's enactment, average physician income rose by i i percent, although some were bigger winners than others. Primary care doctors did not play the usual, customary, and reasonable game as effectively as specialists did, so their incomes rose more slowly. The earnings of some specialists, by contrast, were soon rivaling those of small-business owners. |
Ray D. Strand
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 Prescription drugs have been the fastest-growing portion of health-care costs over the past decade, rising at the rate of about 17 percent per year (well above the average rate of inflation).2 Physicians and insurance companies have placed all their hopes in drugs as the way to approach and hopefully slow down this epidemic of chronic degenerative disease—much to the delight of the pharmaceutical industry. Yes—we love our drugs.
I have not met a person yet who does not want to have excellent health. Most of us assume that we always will. But the truth is that many of us (doctors included! |
David R. Montgomery
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 Adjusted for inflation, government support for agricultural conservation programs fell by more than half in the 1970s. No amount of data was going to change congressional perception that the real problem was low prices because of overproduction. Why spend taxpayers' money to save soil when grain bins were bursting?
Part of the problem was that after decades of substantial expenditures on soil conservation programs, there was little solid information on their effectiveness at reducing erosion from America's farms. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 But even those with financial cushions at the beginning of the great unraveling can't be sure that the one-two punch of depression and runaway inflation won't still shear them clean. In fact, people who were astute or lucky enough to accumulate wealth might not be better off. Unless they have mainly invested in cash, many of those with stocks, bonds, and other property, especially if financed with debt, will see their net worth take a substantial hit during the first phase. In many cases, they will effectively have nothing at all. |
| Robert Mugabe
I n the spring of 2006, the New York Times reported that rampant inflation in the African nation of Zimbabwe had boosted the effective cost of a single sheet of two-ply toilet paper to Z$417. That price was not far below the value of the Zimbabwean Z$500 bill, the smallest in circulation, "spawning jokes about an impending better use" for the currency, said the Times. |
| Spurred by worries about the impact that aggressive monetary easing will have on inflation expectations, domestic capital markets, and the dollar, and compelled to resume the long-abandoned role of hard-nosed central bankers after Alan Greenspan's legacy of "printing" money, the Fed is likely to underreact to the brewing crisis.
Moreover, members of the Federal Reserve, like others inside and outside of government, will almost certainly not have a clear strategy. |
| They either assumed that they would earn higher rates of return on their portfolios than was reasonable or underestimated the effects of inflation. Incredibly, some companies borrowed money when interest rates were near their lows after the stock market bubble burst and managed to convert the financing into an instant arbitrage profit. How? They assumed they would earn more on their investments than the interest they would have to pay out on the loans. Under the regulations, they could immediately book the difference as income. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Even as inflation chilled in the early 1980s, an ominous thing happened: Medical costs, unlike most other prices, kept on rising.
With its ideological preference for market-driven solutions, the Reagan administration was not about to approve price controls on hospital payments. Instead, the president signed a plan to impose the DRG system, an entirely new, draconian payment plan intended to create incentives for efficiency and reduce the number of details over which government and hospitals could quibble. |
Michael J. Panzner
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| Aside from being "off balance sheet," many of the liabilities were obscured through the use of nebulous accounting practices and unrealistic assumptions about future interest rates, investment returns, and health care inflation. Another problem with the vast majority of OPEBs is that they were accounted for on a pay-as-you-go basis, where only current-year program revenues and expenses were recorded. That made it difficult to grasp the full extent of what is referred to as the "benefits gap," or the difference between the present value of what had been promised versus what had been set aside. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| He is counting out the balloon inflation pressure inside the stent.
"Down!"
The technician turns off the pump with a loud click, and Altschuler quickly extracts the balloon and wire from Crofton's blood vessel leaving the stent behind. At the next puff of contrast, everyone looks to the screen. In the spot where the last picture showed nothing, not a branch or a twig below the blockage, Crofton's arteries are once again filling and emptying rhythmically with each beat of her heart. |
Michael Pollan
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 The result is the nutritional equivalent of inflation, such that we have to eat more to get the same amount of various essential nutrients. The fact that at least 30 percent of Americans have a diet deficient in vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A, and magnesium surely owes more to eating processed foods full of empty calories than it does to lower levels of nutrients in the whole foods we aren't eating. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| The average primary care doctor was making $161,000, a 1 o percent loss over ten years after adjusting for inflation.
Primary care doctors felt as if theyd fallen down the rabbit hole. Like Alice and the Red Queen, they were running as fast as they could just to stay in the same place. Many responded to their declining incomes by "bulking up," or increasing the number of patients in their practice. That meant they had to either find more hours in a day or see more patients per hour. In the early years of his practice, Peabody would see at most two dozen patients a day. |
| Medicare costs per recipient rose from under
$£oo per person in 1965 to $5,000 in 1995—a rate of increase more than double the rate of inflation. Not all parts of the country were getting an equal share of Medicare dollars. Wennberg's team spent three years sifting through Medicare records to replicate for the nation what Wennberg and Gittelsohn had done for Vermont. They figured out which hospitals Medicare patients were most likely to be admitted to and then divided the country into 306 "hospital referral regions," each of which was a little bigger than the average county. |
Michael Pollan
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| Nutritional inflation seems to have two principal causes: changes in the way we grow food and changes in the kinds of foods we grow. Halweil cites a considerable body of research demonstrating that plants grown with industrial fertilizers are often nutritionally inferior to the same varieties grown in organic soils. Why this should be so is uncertain, but there are a couple of hypotheses. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 Such subtle grade inflation results, no doubt, from "controversies sparked by several guidelines," in the words of the Task Force. In other words, powerful vested interests cannot be ignored in the preparation of guidelines which have the imprimatur of the government.
That complaint notwithstanding, this chapter could not be written, or not written with as much authority, without these valuable reports. Even if we occasionally differ with the Task Forces, we applaud their efforts. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 Labor unions are discovering that they cannot negotiate contracts that keep wages apace with inflation because the cost of health care is severely eroding corporate profit margins. Companies are closing down factories and jobs at home and relocating them overseas, where wages and health costs are much lower. All the while, increasing numbers of American workers are sliding into the ranks of the uninsured.
What can we do? I have a fairly radical answer for that question: We should aim at eliminating chronic illness. That is not an unattainable goal. |
Charles Barber
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 Reimbursement rates have systematically been cut or have not kept up with inflation, causing a number of psychotherapists to leave the field. The New York Times ran a story about a social worker who took on work as a seamstress on the side in order to get by.14 Denying claims for arbitrary reasons, cutting back on the number of authorized sessions, paying late: these are all standard fare. More than these actual hassles, what is so unsettling to many mental health professionals is the general message of managed care: that the work they are doing is not consequential or clinically robust. |
| Prices of the best-selling drugs routinely go up at two to three times the rate of inflation. Uninsured patients in the United States pay more for drugs than people who are insured, who have the large FIMOs to bargain for them. The United States is unique among Western countries in that it does not limit drug costs in some way.27 Big Pharma has the largest lobbying contingent in the country— there are more drug lobbyists than members of Congress28—which has helped create an extraordinarily regulation-friendly environment for the industry. |
| But current forces are creating a new kind of "misery index," beyond the fiscal one invented by the Yale Economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s: Economic Misery Index = Unemployment Rate + inflation Rate. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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 Whether inflation has crept in here we shall never know, but Bernal Diaz del Castillo states that more than
2000 containers of chocolate beverage, with foam, were daily destined for the soldiers of Motecuhzoma's guard alone.19
We have some idea of what Motecuhzoma's warehouse, or at least a part of it, looked like thanks to the depredations of the cruel and avaricious Pedro de Alvarado, the Heinrich Himmler of the Conquest. |
David R. Montgomery
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| The [First] World War and the following inflation pushed the price of wheat to new high levels and caused a remarkable extension of the area planted to this crop. When the price collapsed during the post-war period Great Plains farmers continued to plant latge wheat acreages in a desperate endeavot to get money with which to pay debt charges, taxes, and other unavoidable expenses. They had no choice in the matter. Without money they could not remain solvent or continue to farm. Yet to get money they were obliged to extend farming practices which were collectively ruinous. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Those nations that reject elite-controlled banking and money systems and restore the power of the currency to the people, where open trade can happen with zero inflation, creating enormous abundance for the people.
No nation will likely fully embrace all these points, but those that manage to fulfill at least some of them will do far better than those who don't. |
Richard Bartlett
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 In order to play the problem-set game, you must see the problem, realize that everyone who has tried to make a difference with it has failed, access all of the times in your life when you have failed at anything, adjust that for inflation, and then get that feeling of non-resourcefulness and "own" it. Now of course, you are armed with the tools you need to go out and make a difference. Or are you?
Feeling like a whipped dog, I was about to concede defeat when I intuitively heard the sound of laughter. |
Peter Rost
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 According to the New York Times, average worker pay has remained flat since 1990, at around $27,000, after adjusting for inflation, while CEO compensation has quadrupled, from $2.82 million to $11.8 million.24 Our CEOs are in a position in which they can basically use public companies as personal piggy banks. And this is perfectly legal as long as they get someone else to sign their check. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained at $5.15 an hour since September 1, 1997. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is at its second lowest level since 1955. |
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