Businesses track returns on investments (ROI'S) with all advertising. If the dollars spent on advertising didn't return more than the investment, they would stop doing it and try something else, simple as that.

Biggest reason things cost more as time goes by is government printing unbacked money - depreciating money aka inflation.

I would say the vast majority of people have way more money than they need.
The key word there is need.
People work like n----- to make more money to buy junk that they use once or not at all and then throw it away in the trash.This consumerism is promoted by companys advertising to make people want stuff they don't need.
Most city people go shopping as a recreational activity and the deed becomes more important than the goods.
It is really a mass mental illness.

Great point ^^

Lotta truth in that statement too Boco!

J

It sounds as if your speaking to communism/socialism? I think in this country we are individuals, we always have been. Our mistake is we have groups that choose not to work blaming folks that do work for the reason they don't have "stuff" rather than looking in the mirror and blaming the one person who is truly responsible for the situation that they are in. If you choose to go out and bust you butt and chase your dreams then you can be what you want to be, everyone has that choice, no one has any more special privilege these day then anyone else. I think where we have failed as a society is we have raised a gov dependent generation or two.

We start putting limits to welfare, limits to gov assistance, not let people go hungry or suffer but start placing incentives to go to work. Make them do work for assistance given? many ideas out there but somehow start to get able bodied folks to work. Everyone talking about huge infrastructure projects needing to be done? well we have plenty of folks capable of operating a shovel.

Also start more trade schools? Mike Rowe has great point here and spot on.

Interesting thread and great points,

Don't think for a minute the rich are not in a long boat with oar's and the rest are in Kayak's. The legislator's have created socialism and protectionism for the rich through many different channel's that's why we have the ever growing wealth gap. And this is not just true in the US but around the world.

All this money printing the central banks are doing is going directly to the top as the inflation because of it goes to the rest.

The wealth gap was created way before money printing or any other government intervention. While millionaires are created every day the old saying that it takes money to make money was true a 100 years ago as it is true today.

Never in the history of the world have we seen money printing on the scale it is going on now. And never has the wealth gap been so wide.

Kinda of hard to print gold and silver before the fiat currency we have now.

Few things to consider

A manufacture I worked with compared making a part in house Vs. China (magnetic ramp for a Glock)

Same steel, same specs, heat treating....

Cost in house = $9.48 Cost in China with shipping $4.91

Now add in all the costs of business (Compound them!!!)

Manufacture over head and profit + 35 to 40%

cost of sales + 3% to 10%

Distributor + 10% to 25% (Plus cost of shipping)

+ Shipping to Dealer

Now your at Dealer cost...... + 25 to 50% pending for Dealer's overhead and profit

$ 29.99 Vs $13.99 retail to you and I

Second thing that will get everyone's panties in an up-roar.
When our women went to work, and remained working post war.

It was the first time in US economics that the vast majority of US families had duel incomes and abundance of cash for luxury items. Fueled the economy by huge leaps and bounds. Families were not only buying A new car, they bought a second car. Spoiled kids with more toys, built / bought bigger homes, and so on.

Multiple things happened. Demand grew beyond supply. Corporations grew and the wave of self-sufficient small companies dwindled. People grew accustom to "having it now". Credit cards became the norm. Profits for shareholders and executives became more important than sustained economics for the "common man".

So here we are today....fueling corporate greed where nearly every family must have duel incomes just to survive.

Go weight up a steel product at harbor freight then go try to buy that same amount of steel at your local supplier.

Exactly

Same thing happens in every single economic structure ever built, capitalism, socialism, communism, empiricism, kingdoms and even no structure at all. All the wealth moves mostly in one direction, eventually a tiny few own almost all of it, as is the case today in America. Their interests become the cultures priorities, like it or not. Eventually either war, or famine, or revolution, or some out of the ordinary situation puts an end to it. And we start over on the same trail.
They did in Greece, Rome, China, the Mid-east, the story is always the same.
It boils down to when people decide they have had enough of it and take the French option
and drag the oligarchs out in the street and cut their heads off.

Just wait until China figures out we can't pay back our debt. They probably won't be excepting anymore green paper for there real manufactured product's anymore. Trump is just speeding up that process.

All fiat currency's have ended the same. It will be no different this time.

So far at this time the tiny few, (and I mean tiny, as in only 6 entities) are doing a marvelous job of keeping the American public divided along imaginary ideological lines with the media, to prevent their necessary consolidation and subsequent move on control that would be necessary to actually change anything.

Citizens United was the worst Supreme Court decision in history, and what has followed it has pretty much turned complete control of our govt. and it's vast resources over to the richest people not only in this country but the world.
If Americans are going to change things so that the majority and their needs are our nations priority, then things are going to have to change. Otherwise we are destined for the same fate as all powerful nations who came before us.

The reason the disparity is greater is there is more wealth, hard to have a billionaire 100 years ago when there was no such thing. More wealth available the more the gap. As far as I know money printing is over.

The cost of things is very high and going up..folks today base their self esteem on how many nice things they own and what false self esteem they have rather than who they are and how they behave in general. Caring so much about what some people you will never meet on the internet think about you is a prime example of a created false reality.

I would disagree but I guess its what you are comparing. A slightly used truck didn't used to cost more than 2 years salary for some folks as I understand it. I also hear old timers say time and time again that farming is a dying breed. I agree, I would love town a farm for me and my kids but prices of land, homes, tractors, trucks, feed, really makes it unrealistic for a young man/family.

The rural real estate economy has been skewed and polluted by government interference. Take away the subsidies and the CRP and land prices would readjust to allow new blood into the farm economy.