The 2015 report pointed to "the benefits of a non-inflationary currency." We can put real numbers on it now.
The dollar has lost about 97 percent of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve opened its doors in 1913, about 88 percent since Nixon cut the last tie to gold in 1971, and about 22 percent since 2020 alone (BLS Consumer Price Index). That is not bad luck. It is policy. When Washington spends past what it collects, it prints the difference. The money supply (M2) jumped about 40 percent, from 15.45 trillion to 21.70 trillion dollars, between February 2020 and March 2022. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet roughly doubled, from 4.2 trillion to 8.8 trillion, and in the early months of the COVID response the Fed bought close to 90 percent of all the new federal debt the Treasury issued (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget). Inflation then peaked at 9.1 percent. This is the same deficit from finding three, paid a second time, by quietly draining the value of the money in Texans' pockets. Washington runs the deficit, and Washington is the first to spend the new money. Texans hold the bag.
Economists have a name for it: the inflation tax. The mechanism is older than the Fed. New money reaches the banks, the government, and the large asset-holders first, and they spend it before prices rise. Ordinary Texans get it last, after their wages and savings have already lost value. Richard Cantillon described the effect in the 1700s, and it still works exactly as he said.
Here is the size of it for Texas. The Federal Reserve's own St. Louis bank found that inflation wiped out 1.8 trillion dollars of purchasing power from Americans' bank deposits in a single year, the twelve months ending March 2022. Texans held about 1.45 trillion in bank deposits as of mid-2024, which we pulled straight from the FDIC's Summary of Deposits, all 6,213 branches in the state. That is about 8.3 percent of the U.S. deposit base. Apply that share to the Fed's 1.8 trillion and Texans lost roughly 150 billion dollars of purchasing power on their bank balances alone, in one year, and on the most conservative reading no less than 130 billion. That counts only deposits. The same debasement hit Texans' wages, pensions, and cash too. A one-year haircut on that scale is about the size of the entire annual dividend of independence, taken back invisibly, with no vote and no way to opt out.
Texas is already building the door out, and this is not theory. The Texas Bullion Depository opened in 2018, the only state-run bullion vault in the United States, and any citizen, business, or institution can hold gold in it. HB 1056, signed into law on June 22, 2025, recognizes gold and silver as legal tender in Texas and sets up a metal-backed payment system: deposit gold, spend it by card or app, converted to dollars at the register at the day's price. It phases in across 2026 and 2027, and it passed with overwhelming legislative backing. A bill we backed, HB 4857, would have chartered a state commission to study exactly this fiscal relationship and prepare a contingency currency against a dollar collapse. It drew eight coauthors before dying in committee in the 2025 session. And the idea that a small, disciplined country can hold a stable currency is not speculative. Switzerland and Singapore both run inflation under 1 percent, a fraction of the dollar's recent record. An independent Texas with sound money simply stops paying the inflation tax. It is the largest tax Texans never voted for.