I don’t know about you, but my friends and I are really starting to feel the squeeze. One friend is canceling her participation in a summer camping trip because the tank of gas required to get to and from the campground is too costly.
Another friend who lives on a fixed income and drives Uber to make money so she can go on an extended, warm weather, winter vacation each year just sold her home to go live in a tiny home costing half as much as the home she just sold. As far as I can tell, the tiny home costs 3X what it did a few years ago when it was new.
She tells me that the half-gallon size soy milk that she buys for her morning cereal costs $6.99 now. She says her grandsons are in their 20s now, and they are miserable because they don’t date anymore, and they can’t do the things they used to love doing. She no longer gets Uber requests because people don’t come up to the mountains for recreation because the trip is too costly.
People at Cost-Co’s gas station fill multiple gas cans in the bed of their trucks. Do they expect shortages, or are they just investing in gasoline now to beat the price hikes in the coming weeks? Their behavior is, of course, what creates shortages.
And people are stocking up on foods that are not perishable. Thank goodness Costco still sells its baked chicken for $4.99!
I just subscribed to an organic farm producer for vegetables each week in case you can’t find them in the store this summer. I asked the farmer if his price was locked in for the season, and he said yes. I guess he does not need fertilizer or a tractor to run his farming operation.
We hear Steve Forbes defining normal inflation as different from this Bidenflation. I wonder if it will respond to the Fed raising interest rates as the normal inflation did in the past. Higher interest rates will probably double the debt service we currently pay. The last time I checked, it was several hundred billion.
What services and programs will be cut as a result? Social Security? Medicare? We hear Mr. Dimon warning of a hurricane coming our way, economically speaking. We hear Elon Musk may lay off 10% of Tesla workers in anticipation of the disaster that is coming in a corporate belt-tightening move.
But, never fear. A friend who could afford to buy a Tesla has had it for two months now. He says he has saved $2000 on gasoline. He says it costs about $20 to charge the car up at the local, quick charging station.
I heard a fire captain say on the radio that he might have to limit the vehicles sent to fight fires because the fuel cost is too high for the department’s budget. I hear that California will have rolling blackouts for 1.5 million homes due to the shortage of electricity. Of course, our nuclear power plant was shut down in the face of all this. I am one of the lucky ones. I have a pool to cool off in.
Who knows what calamity will befall us next. Nobody. We are in uncharted territory thanks to Biden and his team of economically illiterate morons.
Jennifer Mitchell Towner writes at The Blue State Conservative
