The Federal Reserve was created in December 1913. The federal income tax was ratified that same year via the 16th Amendment. Both arrived under Woodrow Wilson. This is not a coincidence — it is the origin story of how the U.S. government funds itself without honest public consent.
The case against Wilson. Some credit him with "modernizing federal finance" — the Fed and income tax had bipartisan support as reforms of their day. But "modernized federal finance" is a polished way to describe building, in the same year, the machinery of permanent taxation and currency debasement. From 1913 forward, the state could tax what you earn and inflate what you save. Everything the 1913 Index measures is the bill, still arriving in your grocery cart. Wilson also dragged the U.S. into a European war it had no clear stake in, signed the Espionage Act to imprison war critics, re-segregated the federal government, and blocked Black veterans from the benefits White ones received. The mainstream view is that he was a visionary Progressive; the honest accounting is that his presidency accelerated three permanent expansions of federal power that are still compounding today.
Before 1913, the dollar was tied to gold. A fixed amount of gold per dollar meant the government could not create money faster than it could mine it. Since 1971, when Nixon cut the last tie to gold, there has been nothing backing the dollar but the word of the institution that prints it.
$1 in 1913 = ~$0.02 today — a 98% loss, measured in real goods the 1913 Index tracks.
$1 in 1913 = $1.00 in gold today — if you'd held gold instead of dollars, you would have lost nothing.
Since 1971, M2 money supply has grown from ~$0.6 trillion to ~$22.8 trillion — 38×. Prices followed.
The steelman: most economists argue the dollar's debasement enabled growth — cheap financing for WWII, the interstate highway system, and Social Security. They have a point. The counterpoint: those goods were bought on an installment plan where future generations pay through inflation, and the bill never really stops. A dollar your grandparents saved and never touched lost 98 cents without anyone voting on it.
Not one dollar of the post-9/11 wars was raised through taxation. Every dollar was deficit-financed — meaning borrowed, meaning the Fed printed money to cover the gap, meaning the cost was partly paid by eroding the purchasing power of every American who holds dollars. The war costs in the database are tracked items, updated monthly.
The pattern. Direct military operations cost one amount. Add veterans' healthcare for 30–50 years, add interest on the debt used to finance the war — costs the government never advertises when it decides to fight — and every modern American war has cost two to four times its "official" price tag. Afghanistan's all-in cost will exceed $2.5 trillion. The Iraq War's WMD justification was false. Every dollar was borrowed and covered by the same Fed that was "fighting inflation" the whole time.
War costs live in the Prices database as tracked items — searchable, charted, sourced, and auto-refreshed monthly alongside everything else.
This is not a neutral site. We believe the Federal Reserve has been, on net, bad for ordinary Americans — not necessarily by malice, but because institutions that can print money will, and the costs fall silently on everyone who holds dollars.
The alternative isn't necessarily gold (though gold's 110-year track record against the dollar is instructive). It is any monetary system where the supply of money cannot be expanded by a committee meeting in secret. Sound money is not an eccentric position — it was the global default for most of Western history, and the last century of monetary experimentation has been the exception, not the norm.
Steelman: Central banks prevented deflation spirals in 2008 and 2020; without Fed intervention those crises may have been much worse. We take this seriously. The honest trade-off is: flexible money buys short-term crisis mitigation at the cost of long-term purchasing-power erosion. Whether that's a good trade depends on who you ask — and most people who are asked have never seen the 1913 Index.
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