It's monster season at our house.
There's a skeleton on the neighbor's porch that my youngest still isn't totally convinced is fake, a witch hanging in somebody's tree down the street, and enough fake cobwebs on the banister that I keep walking through them in the dark.
I love all of it. A good scare is good for a kid.
Of course, the scariest thing this month isn't actually any of that.
It’s a different kind of monster. A truly terrifying one.
This month’s inflation numbers are out, and even by the government’s own metrics (which are always configured to make things look less bad than they are) prices were up 3.7% from a year ago.
You felt that at the pump this week, so I know I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.
But did you know that the Federal Reserve has an official inflation target? It’s a goal they set for themselves to “manage” inflation (whatever that means). Anyway, their number is two percent a year, and now they've missed it 66 months in a row.
That’s right. The last time the Fed met their own target was February 2021. Every month since (five and a half years straight!) has been over.
Nice.
Imagine a guy whose one job is to keep a thermostat at 70, except it keeps getting hotter every day. For five and a half years. And he keeps insisting everything is fine, and that it’s really not that hot in here.
It’s literally the meme.
Thanks, I hate it.
It’s worth remembering that, contrary to politicians and pundits, inflation isn't prices going up. That's just the symptom. Inflation is the money itself getting watered down—more of it conjured out of nothing, so that the dollar in your pocket does less than it did before. "Rising prices" is just what that looks like from the checkout line.
So when you hear the word inflation, remember: don't blame the price tag; blame the people with the printing press.
It’s a scam as old as time. Heck, even the Romans ran it.
When emperors needed more money than they had, they didn't raise taxes, because people notice taxes and get mad. Instead, they got sneaky. They called in the silver coins, melted them down, mixed in a little cheap metal, and sent them back out stamped exactly the same. The coin still said it was worth what it used to be—it just wasn't. They did this again and again, over and over, for generations, until a coin that was once nearly pure silver was mostly junk.
Milton Friedman described the same trick, at play in our own time, in six words: "Inflation is taxation without legislation."
You could think of inflation as the Empire Killer. It has an incredible track record.
That's a monster to be worried about.
In The Tuttle Twins and the Creature from Jekyll Island, Ethan and Emily learn how the dollar got captured by a "creature" cooked up by politicians and bankers who slipped off to a private island off the coast of Georgia back in 1910. We even made a cartoon version of it in our Tuttle Twins TV Inflation Monster episode.
Have you seen it?
If you haven’t, you should go check it out.
My favorite thing about the Tuttle Twins cartoon is that we take the episodes of the show and turn them into full-color hardcover graphic novels so your kids can revisit them again and again—even when they’ve already burned through their screen time for the week.
The good thing for you is that even though they think they're just reading comic books, they’re actually learning vital lessons about money, power, civics, and history that they won’t ever encounter in school. And I say this as a guy who's watched it happen on his own living room floor: kids who will fight you to the death over a chapter book tear through these, then flip right back to page one and start again.
The monsters in them are the fun kind of scary, but tucked inside every goofy adventure is a real idea—like why the money's worth less every year, and why that's no accident—all taught while they think they're just reading about a time-traveling grandma and her scruffy raccoon.
Today marks the start of our Monster Sale!
The Season 4 box set graphic novels are finally here! That’s 10 books full of dinosaurs, gold-grabbers, athletic orcs, and of course Dark Dumpster Derek. If you're just starting your graphic novel collection, you can get all four seasons bundled together into 44 hardcover books, all on major sale through Halloween.
There’s no better way to keep your kids reading all fall!
(And if you're the type who likes Christmas shopping done before the turkey's carved, well, now’s your chance.)
The porch skeletons come down November 1st, but the real monsters are still out there.
The least we can do is raise a generation that knows what they’re up against.
We’ve spent the last decade creating resources that make that kind of learning fun.
Shop the Monster Sale here!
— Connor
