William Hogarth
Burning the Rumps at Temple Bar,
plate eleven from Hudibras
(February 1725/26)

"How much longer before nobody has a Benjamin?"

When I was seventeen, my older brother bought his first house. I remember that he paid about fourteen thousand dollars for it, qualifying for the mortgage under some government program designed to help working stiffs acquire a home. He was managing a Safeway produce department at the time and all of eighteen years old. I looked at that sticker price and quickly calculated how long the indenture would last before he could pay off that place, and I felt aghast. I couldn’t imagine ever willingly agreeing to such an indenture, no more than I could imagine myself ever being able to afford to buy anything priced at anything close to an astronomical fourteen thousand dollars.

I’ve spent my life since convinced that I couldn’t afford. When I see a price tag, my gut reaction instantly concludes that I “must not need that because I can’t afford it.” My first Prosperity came this way. I was comfortable in the knowledge of all I wouldn’t ever be able to afford. I found Prosperity there because I felt freed from that sense of indenture that I always feel when I owe money. I’d honestly rather do without than live in debt. I later learned how to leverage, but I remained, and, indeed, I remain extremely hesitant to take on debt or to buy hamburger, acts which have taken on more or less equal gravity since the recent economic idiocy began. I find myself increasingly dusting off my first Prosperity as I face off with the emerging reality that everything recently seems to cost about 40% more than it did before our Prosperity went into exile on or about January 17, 2025.

I don’t feel an ounce of embarrassment reporting that I almost rejected the idea of buying hamburger last week. My son and his two kids, my grandkids Roman and Tilda, were visiting for my birthday, and I proposed an old-fashioned grilled hamburger supper. I even volunteered to trek to the store to buy the meat and buns. I had steeled myself before leaving, figuring that this would be a splurge. After all, the kids were visiting. I had chosen not to purchase much beef lately, it having become largely a target of my derision. Hell, even the butcher confided that he wasn’t buying it for himself anymore, not at those prices. I was fine until I confronted my choices. I calculated that five eight-ounce burgers would require two and a half pounds of burger. That would require three one-pound packages at over ten bucks a pound! Thirty-three dollars for the meat for five burgers! My visceral response was the same one that overcame me when I learned how much my brother’s first house had cost.

I bought a pound of sausage and mixed it with two pounds of hamburger once I returned home. That act brought the cost down to a little less than thirty dollars. Still outrageous! Hardly tolerable! I left the supermarket bereft, mourning more than celebrating. Mourning has increasingly been replacing my sense of Prosperity. Perhaps it has become the New Prosperity, a registered trademark of the idiot incumbent who never met a tariff he didn’t love or a constituent he wasn’t convinced he was superior to. I quietly calculate how much longer The Muse and I might be able to maintain our modest lifestyle with prices increasing so alarmingly. I feel like my grandfather must have felt when he derided me for what I considered penny candy. For his entire life, a Hershey bar had cost five cents. In the middle of the Great Depression, when he was in his thirties, Hershey’s even increased the size of their bar to nearly one and a half ounces to retain their customers. Later, the size shrank until it was three-quarters of an ounce by the late sixties. In the seventies, inflation finally became inescapable, and the price soared to a dime, then twenty cents. Now, of course, a one and a half ounce Hersey bar costs more than a dollar, and more than two-fifty at any inconvenience store.

My sense of plenty seems terminally StickerShocked. Yes, I was predisposed to feel so, if only due to my native sense of everything naturally being too expensive for me to afford. My nickel sensibilities now wrestle with hundred-dollar realities, and I cannot resolve the price with the value I seem to be receiving. I can’t seem to stop feeling like somebody’s stealing something from everybody, as if Everyman has been officially declared a shill in somebody else’s Three Card Monte game. I know the idiots currently in charge have been overplaying their hands for decades. I do not know when or if the rest of us will decide to tolerate this no longer. They have twisted the laws to protect the monopolist and to give people who seem incapable of comprehending the value of money control over how much of it might be required to sustain life. They have a relatively free ride. How could they possibly comprehend the price of anything or the value of nothing at all?

This represents the fall: An emergency importation of millions of pounds of previously rejected, infected beef won’t fix a system reaching the bottom of stagflation. There’s not enough Hershey Bar left in the economy to shrink it more while raising the price. Those sleight-of-hand economics have reached their limit. My mother told me that during the Great Depression, when she was a kid, pork chops only cost a nickel, but nobody had a nickel. Now, everything seems to be screaming toward a hundred bucks. How much longer before nobody has a Benjamin?

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz