Don't blame Canada for this!

I'm heading north to Canada in a few weeks, which always gets me thinking about just how far we've fallen and how gullible we are.

The government and the Fed always churn out numbers saying inflation hasn't robbed us hardly at all, and the media dutifully reports the numbers. By now, we probably all know how they mess with things -- for example, excluding "volatile" prices like what we pay for gas and food. I mean, shoot, it's not like you have to buy those things. Wait for the price to drop.

But cross a border and you see just how little you get for a buck these days.

My regular trips to the Great White North started right about the time GW took office. For five George Washingtons you could get more Canadian dollars than you could stuff into your wallet. You were greeted at the border with a necklace of wadded-up Canadian bills, placed around your neck like a Hawaiian lei.

College boys fled there on weekends because, well, the drinking age is somewhere around 15, and waving a US hundred-dollar bill in a bar there attracted almost as many local women as it would in a bar in Bangkok. That they called their dollar the loonie pretty much said it all.

These days, the tides have turned. The loonie kicks George Washington's butt. A hotel room that used to go for $100 US goes for twice that. Instead of American shoppers going there for bargains, they come here. What used to be a $20 Cuban cigar goes for $40, hardly worth the effort of smuggling it across the border.

And this has been policy. The Bushies have spent years trying to make the greenback less valuable, on the logic that that it helps US business. Smaller dollars must be easier to stuff into offshore accounts in the Caymans when CEOs are trying to avoid US taxes.

Canadian wages are rising faster than ours, too. And they get health care for their tax dollars; we get Iraq. If this keeps up, I swear, Washington state will soon be Canada's version of Tijuana. They'll come her to get plastered, win our women with their hard currency, then flee across the border before the police close in.

Before you know it, mounted bands of Canucks will be policing their border while pressuring their government to build a wall and stop illegal aliens from stealing their jobs.

After all, they can pay US migrants in cheap little dollars. Canadians won't work for those things.