I can't tell if this report at cnsnews.com is accurate, especially the figure of 97%. No sources cited, and I couldn't find this story anywhere else (I didn't spend too much time looking though).
Does the USD falling down affect your American's life? I am Chinese and just curious. Just for you to know, in a big city of China, the average income of people is about 3k RMB but the price of a 100m2 apartment is about two million.
Yes it is affecting American's lives. How much, depends on which American.
Most of the inflation here is in gas prices. Much of America is rural or suburban, and spread out, so it is not uncommon for someone to work one hour's drive from where they live. That's two hours commuting each day. And a lot of Americans have trucks, which have low gas mileage. These Americans are hurting, because when gas goes over $5 per gallon and they have a long drive, now they are spending 30% of their paycheck just getting to work and back. And now it is hard to sell their truck to get a car with better gas mileage, because nobody wants to buy a truck with low gas mileage when gas is expensive. Also, with high gas prices, fewer families drive anywhere for vacation, which hurts people employed in tourism industry.
The other thing inflating a lot is food. But for Americans with steady work who only spend say 10% of their paycheck on food, they can absorb the cost. Unemployed and poor Americans might spend 50% of their paycheck on food, so this makes life much harder for them. People so poor they don't have cars obviously aren't much effected by the gas prices. But the working poor who need cars to get to work, they are really struggling to pay for the rising cost of food plus the rising cost of gas.
The only thing getting cheaper is housing. Since the housing bubble crashed, houses are relatively cheap. Rich people who were invested in real estate lost a lot of their investments (screw them - tough luck). Then there are the average people who took out loans (a mortgage) to buy a house when they were overpriced. We can separate these average folks into two camps: those willing to foreclose and those who will not foreclose. The folks who are willing to foreclose can cut their losses and move on. Actually, foreclosing can even be great for them because after they file for foreclosure, it can take over a year for the bank to reclaim the house. In the meantime, they are living in the house for free (not paying on the mortgage loan nor any rent). News has written about this free "squatters' rent" being beneficial to the economy. Then there is the second camp of folks not willing to foreclose because it will ruin their credit. If their credit gets ruined it makes it harder to get loans to buy new cars, a loan to get a new (but cheaper) house, etc.. So because they value their good credit rating and refuse to foreclose, they have to keep paying down their over-priced mortgage loan. The only way out of that for them is to sell their house instead of foreclosing. But selling a house is difficult, which brings us back to why houses are cheap.
