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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;fatima, post: 1369185, member: 22143&quot;]Average salaries don&#039;t matter if you don&#039;t have a job.&nbsp; Your statistics don&#039;t include participation and the skew.&nbsp; &nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>However there is a very easy answer.&nbsp; It&#039;s ~85 million people which is ~28% of the population.&nbsp; See below.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>As of Nov 2011 (last month figures are available), there are 46,286,294 people that are on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which is more commonly known as the Food Stamp program.&nbsp;&nbsp; According to the program description on Wiki, in order to qualify <i>&quot;Recipients must have at most near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits.&quot;</i>.&nbsp; Despite common perceptions, it&#039;s difficult to qualify for this program.&nbsp; I think it is safe to assume that if you are on this program, a loaf of Wonder Bread each week at $2.86 would be difficult.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><ul> <li>46,286,294 is a record number of people on Foodstamps and it represents 15% of the USA&#039;s population using the number from your link above.&nbsp; These are people who absolutely can&#039;t buy the bread without government assistance.&nbsp; </li> <li>There are another ~25,000,000 workers who don&#039;t earn enough money to pay federal income tax.&nbsp; I would say that purchases of $2.86 Wonder Bread might be an issue for them.&nbsp;&nbsp; This brings the number up to 71,286,294, or ~23% of the population.&nbsp; This includes 8.2M people who the BLS were recently forced into part time workers. </li> <li>The BLS also says 13M people are unemployed as of last month, and another 1.1M stopped looking.&nbsp; So this brings the total 85M.</li> </ul><p>(In reality the numbers are worse than this, but a different subject)</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>-----------------------------------------</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course in regards to this topic, it doesn&#039;t matter.&nbsp;&nbsp; It could be argued that it was the policies of the central banking system, which decides currency values without regard to the market, which has caused this desperate situation in the USA.&nbsp;&nbsp; But the point is that monetary inflation does this to prices over time.&nbsp; In the case of bread the rise was over 3000%.&nbsp; A very real number for many people.&nbsp;&nbsp; It serves no purpose but to force people to take their hard earned savings and put it at risk or suffer a inflation tax.&nbsp;&nbsp; The problem with this kind of risk is that it is then easy to engineer booms and busts and for most people the end result is they lose anyway.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>This is why gold &amp; potentially silver will continue to do well.&nbsp; It&#039;s one way out of this mess.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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