Quantitative Easing is making me exponentially poorer? Inflation has not been a problem since QE has started, so how exactly am I poorer, nevermind 'exponentially' poorer?
It's an exponential with a base that is really close to 1. Check back in a few hundred years and you will be outraged at what inflation has done to your savings!
If you put a dollar in a box in 1914 and took it out in 2014 it would be worth 2230.49% less (or, $23 today is one 1914 dollar).
If you have cash on hand, that money becomes worth less as quantitative easing expands the monetary base, among other inflationary factors.
If you spend that money (on investments, goods, etc) then you are putting your long term value in other things than your currency.
The distinction is that the austrian school wants a reliable money sink that grows more scarce and thus more valuable over time. The modern US dollar is anything but a place to store value - instead, the monetary system heavily incentivizes you to get rid of your dollars as quickly as possible.
Which is fine, it means money doesn't rot in banks and fall out of circulation. You aren't at maximum velocity but you definitely have good momentum that way.
I think the real issue is blaming inflation for wage stagnation (which started around the same time the gold standard was dropped), when in reality it is just business exploitation of supply and demand that keeps wages down while all other goods and services prices rise somewhere in the ballpark of inflation.
I love bitcoin, and have a good chunk of my on hand cash stored in it for buying stuff or just having fun trying to play the price, and state currency manipulation does abuse their monopoly on legal counterfeiting to benefit a select few and hurt the rest of us, but it isn't an issue with having an inflating currency, I don't think.
It is why I like Doge in many ways. It is going to have constant inflation forever, so it is very predictable, and if it ever got market demand saturation it would only devalue over time so people would keep spending it. And bitcoin is a great peer to that, because we are only going to have a finite number of btc, and once the printing presses stop we will only see that money supply shrink from lost wallets and such, so they will only become more scarce over time.
The #1 mandate of the federal reserve is to keep inflation steady at around 3%. They've done a pretty good job of this (with the exception of the 1970s). But QE isn't about causing inflation; it's about stopping deflation. QE is designed to stave off deflation by intentionally expanding the money supply.
Basically, the money supply was artificially inflated by the housing bubble. Once the bubble burst, a lot of money disappeared over the course of 3 months or so. So the fed is using QE to prop up the money supply so the dollar doesn't rapidly appreciate in value. What we've learned from Japan's "lost decade" is that deflation can have even more harmful long-term consequences to an economy than inflation (suddenly it becomes MUCH more expensive to make goods in the US than the rest of the world, banks stop lending completely because money gains value with no risk, etc.) It starts a chain-reaction cycle that is really tough to break out of.
So the fed wasn't gutting the value of the dollar as much as they were preventing it from appreciating value quickly. As good of a thing as it sounds like it is, it's a bad idea to have money become more valuable just by holding on to it. Inflation creates an incentive to invest your money back into the economy, and while rampant inflation is almost always bad, a small amount of predictable inflation is a good thing if kept in check.
Inflation is non-uniform throughout the economy. Personally, in Silicon Valley, I see ample evidence of inflation - my rent on the same 1BR went up from $1410 to $2250 over 4 years. Anyone trying to put a kid through college has noticed a similar effect. The stock market is up about 100%, so if you're looking to buy stocks with your money or save for retirement, prices are also inflating. Fortunately, my salary has been rising similarly, but people stuck on fixed incomes or jobs without much negotiating leverage in this area are very much dealing with inflation.