Friday, May 23, 2008

"Girl, we couldnt get much higher!"


Ah, the sunny days of the 1960s when the songs were all about how much LSD we just took and having sex with all and sundry. Jim Morrison died before merciless old age could turn him into a fumbling Ozzie Osbourne-like acid-casualty and a good thing too, because the song has changed. Now what couldnt get much higher are taxes, energy prices and the cost of food. Oh, but they CAN get higher, much higher! There will soon be only one issue in this election and the rising cost of living will be it. Because various different measures are used to calculate inflation, and because the government, which has so foolishly linked all transfer payments, government salaries and even most procurement contracts to inflation, has a vested interest in underreporting inflation the true decline in the value of money is not in the statistic books. But people dont read the statistics while they watch the numbers on the gas pump rotate with a speeding blur as though they were wheels on a slot machine and feel their hearts sink as their Suburban, which they still owe $25,000 on, gobbles up every penny of their disposable income and dollar of available credit. Then, when the enormous gas-burning flivver squeezes into the spot marked 'COMPACT' and comes to a halt at the local supermarket and the cel-phone is temporarily given a rest, the middle-class shopper is confronted by prices that seem to have morphed into their worst nightmare. Working housewives are now faced with a horrible specter. Just picking the kids up at day care and zipping through the drive-thru at Burger World to provide dinner has become out of the question, the money for that just got put in the gas tank, and if you look at which prices have risen in the most in the supermarket its obvious that the more processing a product has gone through the more the price has risen. So now Mrs America has to face a reality that younger women have never had to face before, they have to cook a dinner from scratch. And they dont know how. The result is anxiety. Fear. How could things be going so wrong? Why has my electric bill doubled? Where are we going to get the money to pay the gigantic property tax bill thats just arrived? Right now the anger for this has been successfully focused on Bush, and rightfully so, because Mr. Comity allowed the feeble and oppressive bureaucracy to grow like a cancer and never pushed for a sane energy policy that might have mitigated this situation a bit. Did he ever say one word against the environmental radicals who are hamstringing our country? This guy is from a oil family and from an oil state but he didnt have the guts or the imagination to stand up for energy policies that made any sense.
But Bush is history. Now we have to decide which of these three inarticulate idiots is going to do something about the pickle the average person finds themselves in. They're still talking about nationalizing the health care industry and Global Warming. But oil prices havent stopped rising yet. There still hasnt been a corresponding drop in demand, that will happen when the manager of Burger World starts laying off employees because the line of Suburbans at the drive-in window has shrunk to nothing. When the Winnebago factory closes. The former employees of these establishments will be living in the cars they cant afford to put gas in.
We have reached liberal nirvana. The result of abandoning the moral code and economic system that made this country rich will be that the country wont be rich. An era where the average person lived better than the richest people in past history is coming to a close. The housewife who cant cook and the laid-off fast food worker are going to vote for Obama.
The End.

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