Are you sitting down? Have something to hold onto? I’m about to give you some jarring news.
The U-S government---our government---the we the people by the people for the people people---those people in Washington---they’re lying to us. Every month, the labor department puts out a pair of reports on inflation. There’s the Producer Price Index, which supposedly measures the trend of prices being paid at the wholesale level and the consumer price index, what we saps pay for the most part at the retail level. I say for the most part, because some of the bargains you’ll find at Wal Mart or at the Warehouse Clubs..if you buy 10 pounds of beef or 20 rolls of paper towels or 60 pounds of dogfood are sometimes better than wholesale.
But the government has this bad habit of taking the American people..collectively as idiots..because every month..in those reports they give us two numbers. The first number is what I’ll call the happy number..which tells us how much prices rose or fell…without taking into account…and this is how the government puts it…”volatile food and energy prices”, then in the news release version of a stage whisper, we get the REAL number-what it really costs to live when gas prices, meat prices, milk prices and grain prices go higher. Now, I suppose you can’t blame the government for treating us like idiots, because there are idiots among us, many of them journalists, who because they’re lazy or busy or…well idiots, refer to the happy number…the one without those food and energy components in reporting on inflation. Ever wonder, how you can be a couple hundred dollars short at the end of the month, when Ken and Barbie on C-N-N…the chump news network…smile and tell us inflation last month was up just one tenth of one percent.
In fairness the government does try to take care of some of the people it treats like idiots, because there are colas…cost of living allowances that supposedly help people keep up with inflation. Now that 2 or 3 percent bump each year make you get a warm and fuzzy feeling about Uncle Sam…until you consider that the cola is tied to the idiot inflation index the one without food and energy figured in.
According to the Wall Street Journal, even idiots are hip to the fact that we’re paying more for gas…the average family shelled out about 3 grand for gasoline last year or about 4 percent of family income.
I don’t know who the average is, but I can tell you I’m not a member of it. Gasoline in Sacramento is averaging 3.74 a gallon and if you run premium it’s closer to four dollars. Over the past 12 months we’ve seen some peaks and Valleys..let’s say on average, it was 3.40 a gallon. If you have two cars and put in two 15 gallon tankfuls in each..that adds up…and if you have a long commute or kids on travel teams, it gets even pricer. Using our example..which is moderate, gasoline alone is costing almost ten thousand dollars a year. So if some how gas got down to about 2 bucks a gallon, you’d save 5 grand…enough for a pretty neat vacation…or within a few years, a nice little nest egg.
Of course, we’re getting slammed by everybody elses gas pains…like fuel surcharges on airline ticket prices, or the cost of shipping on things we order or send…and you can bet diesel fuel isn’t a key ingredient in a loaf of bread, but it is in the price that sometimes hovers around 4 bucks a loaf.
Why are gas prices going higher..speculators who see the stock market jumping and feel a need to get in on the fun…and a greater demand for a finite amount of oil in those worker bee nations of china and india…
We’re told there is plenty of oil beneath the Dakotas and even off the shore of California…and theres a ton of natural gas if Detroit or Japan wants to convert to that technology…
But only an idiot would try and convince the government it might be a smart move…after all theres solar and wind and hydrogen cells…but right now…they’re not saving me ten grand a year…how about you…
