You chose 1973 as your baseline. Let me tell you what happened in 1973.
The dollar fully floated after Nixon severed gold. The first Pell Grants were awarded. The HMO Act was signed. Your chart does not start before the crisis, Bernie. It starts at the scene of the crime.
Healthcare up 35x because Medicare, CON laws, and the AMA cartel run medicine.
Homes up 13x because zoning makes building illegal and the Fed prints.
Rent up 15x because price controls and zoning strangle supply.
Tuition up 23x because federal loans gave colleges a blank check.
General prices rose 7x in that span. Everything government controls rose 13x to 35x. Everything it leaves alone got cheaper.
You are not the prosecutor of this case. You are the defendant.
Same move. Same hand on the heart, same wave to the crowd. Musk did it and gets called a Nazi to this day. Mamdani does it and those same people have not said a word.
Well, not exactly. Once the side by side clips went viral, some of them did speak up. Not to apologize to Musk. To defend Mamdani.
Suddenly the gesture is not the gesture. Suddenly we need to talk about arm speed. Whether the fingers wiggled at the end. Whether he was smiling. Whether his grandparents were in the right party. A year ago none of that mattered. The hand went up, the verdict came down. Now we get a forensic seminar on millimeters and microseconds to prove Mamdani's arm moved slower.
Mamdani's own press office said "in no way was this a Nazi salute." Funny. Musk said the same thing. His did not count. Mamdani's did, instantly.
That tells you everything. The "Nazi salute" thing was never about the gesture. If it were, they would be screaming right now. They are not. It was about Musk. They hate him because he is the richest man in the world and he was attacking their ideological piggy bank with DOGE, so they smeared him.
Mamdani is on their team, so he gets a pass, plus a defense team running stopwatch analysis. Same hand, opposite verdict.
A wave is a wave. The rule does not change based on who is waving. When it does, you are not watching principle. You are watching a hit job.