If in the $ DOLLAR $ you trust, then get a WAKE UP CALL and check out this graph

The Long Goodbye: The Declining Purchasing Power of the Dollar

WRITTEN BY WALKER TODD

WEDNESDAY, 05 AUGUST 2009 00:00

The first chart in every edition of The AIER Chart Book shows the purchasing power of the dollar since 1792, the first date from which relevant statistics can be calculated. Starting at a value of $1 in 1792, through many fluctuations both above and below that value during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a startling conclusion emerges: The price level always had a central tendency of $1 for as long as the United States was on a gold standard (1792-1933, with an 18-year hiatus during and right after the Civil War).  That is, an explicit link to a particular weight of gold per dollar tended to serve as a long-term guarantor of long-term stability of the purchasing power of the dollar. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (Click to Enlarge.) The purchasing power of the dollar in 1913, when the chart above begins, was close to what it was in the 1830s. As long as we were still on a gold standard (up to 1933), it was almost as though an external force was drawing the value of the dollar back toward that adjusted value.  The Great Depression and the policy tools used to fight it severed the domestic link of the dollar to gold. The external trade deficits of the United States during the 1960s caused the final rupture of the international link to gold in August 1971.  The rate of decline in the purchasing power of the dollar tended to level off in the 1980s, but a long, slow, cumulatively corrosive decline has continued to the present, with the consequence that a dollar today would buy one less than a nickel's worth of goods and services in Woodrow Wilson's time.    The accompanying graph is at least some evidence that the experiment of a Federal Reserve System (created in 1913) with no explicit link to gold, and no effective external check on its activities, has failed the public's interest.  Readers interested in knowing more about these subjects might want to examine AIER's Chart Book and The Pocket Money Book, both available through the AIER online bookstore.

http://www.aier.org/research/briefs/1826-the-long-goodbye-the-declining-purchasing-power-of-the-dollar