I was watching PBS the other night, and there was a very interesting show about appraisers called The History Detectives, and on it there was a dollar bill from when the country was first founded. The show went on and went into some really interesting information about the dollar bill and where it came from. It turned out, the dollar bill was deemed worthless due to inflation. The show also noted that a record was turned up of the President at the time has purposely printed a significant amount of money, and the value of the dollar was decreased tremendously. Why would he want to do that? As it turned out, the United States had war expenses it needed to pay off, and by decreasing the value of the dollar, theoretically they would owe less.

This gets me on a couple of different levels. First of all, why would the President want to screw with its citizens like that? Isn't one of the advantages of going to war the fact that it will supply more jobs for workers, so more people can live a decent lifehouse?

I thought into this a little more, and wondered if history has repeated itself. I found a great source of inflation data at InflationData.com. After looking through the inflation data for only a couple seconds, I turned up something noteworthy: inflation in the mid to later 1970's was in the double digits! Holy geez, what would be the reason for that? Maybe to help pay off the Vietnam?

So the question is... is the rate of inflation going to skyrocket again? I honestly think that in the next decade, inflation rates could reach the double digits to help the government pay off the "War on Terror". This means we could be in for a tough next couple years.

Economists will probably laugh at this little post, maybe say "duh", but really... this is an interesting thing that is going on, and people should at least consider the possibility