For a while we've been reading reports telling us how wine consumption over all and per capita has been growing in the United States. Here's one from WS dated October 22. According to this, the US passed Italy in absolute wine consumption in 2007 and could reach France's level within a decade. Granted, France and Italy each have only about one-fifth of the population of the United States.
Then again, millions upon millions of foreign visitors fall on those countries every year and guzzle themselves silly on the local product. Anyway, domestic wine-drinking in France and Italy isn't at anything like the levels of several decades ago.
Now, for the bad news -- the really bad news for Americans. A web site called Shadowstats has published charts showing how our economy has really been functioning for the past decade and more. Short answer: very poorly indeed. The reason so many people feel like the recent expansion didn't improve their standard of living is that it didn't. In most cases it declined. For the worst off, it's been declining since 1973.
Thanks to government tampering with the parameters of economic metrics, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, unemployment, inflation and money supply have been drastically undercounted. GDP, per capita income and the value of the dollar have been dramatically overvalued. The clear implications of all this: we are much worse off than we were led to believe. We knew it experientially but the feel-good figures pumped out by the government have been strongly reminiscent of the glowing, patently fraudulent production gains we heard from "Red" China and the Soviet Union for decades. Click here to see the depressing charts.
I'll draw one snap conclusion from this. Far from benefiting from the "trickle-down" wealth-creation and largesse of the very rich, the vast majority of us have been transferring our wealth to them at a significant clip.
Another: if inflation is actually running at about 15-16% a year, which older methodologies would have shown, we're all suffering more than even I had believed. I'm amazed that people are drinking wine at all, never mind better bottles than they used to. Either the wine industry (not to mention we doughty bloggers) has done a smashing marketing job -- not likely -- or we are truly developing an American wine culture despite all the pressures on the household purse.
Download happy_days_are_here_again.mp3
Winetasting group, 2011.
Comments