The high price of living

Things are tough all over.

We all know inflation is killing us, as prices increase faster than our wages do. Even though gas prices have subsided from their $5 a gallon highs in most areas of the country, we’re still about a buck and a half higher than we were 18 months ago. Since Joe Biden took office, me and my family and friends here in Delaware have seen prices increase 13.9%. I don’t think our incomes increased by that much.

Yet the Democrats’ idea of inflation reduction is to spend a lot more money on two key things: one, the dubious idea that going to green energy will somehow reverse whatever change we have made to our climate, and the other being the claim that 87,000 new IRS employees will only audit people who make over $400,000. Then, to top it off, he’s going to screw those of us who paid off our college debt in order to buy votes this coming November. But we’re promised this is the last extension of a two-plus year student loan repayment pause. (Until the next campaign.)

Anyway, I’m going to preface the next few paragraphs by noting that I’m not a trained economist; however, I think I have the mastery of the portion of economics that coincides in the Venn diagram of life with common sense and life experience. I often use this argument when it comes to the minimum wage, but a variation of it will work here too.

An employee has a value to an employer; as it stands the wage given out as a representation of value, more or less. Someone who makes minimum wage is probably not creating a whole lot of value for their employer because they’re doing menial tasks or can’t be relied on to make important decisions. Thus, their wage is not as high as it will be once they gain skills or life experience that makes them more valuable to an employer. Of course, thanks to what remains of our capitalist free market, an employee is always able to switch hats and sign the front of paychecks if they so desire. It’s not easy to succeed but people do so all the time.

We need those people to make our system go, but it’s becoming more difficult by the day to find those who are willing to stick their necks out thanks to all the red tape, troubled economy, and - to be bluntly honest - lack of people willing to start at the bottom as an employee in a new company.

More importantly, though, we are finding it more and more difficult to create value, and it’s the value we need to begin to soak up all those excess dollars out there. It used to be, just three years ago, that we had a thriving energy industry which not only created a lot of value with extraction but modified the raw material to make things even more valuable. Now we want people to build wind turbines that sit still on calm days, solar panels that don’t work at night or when it’s cloudy, and maybe look for rainbow-colored unicorns to capture their farts.

At one time we had people who had the investment made in them in order to educate our children in several core subjects. There are still many good teachers out there, but their collective value is diminished when indoctrination and grooming is the name of the game in our public schools. Private schools are being swamped right now, but that’s only a temporary reprieve as government schemes on how to make them conform, too.

Perhaps it can be contended the system was unsustainable from the start, but I disagree since it’s worked fairly well for most of my nearly 58 years on the planet (and quite awhile before that.) Sure, there have been hiccups along the way but a lot of that was due to short-sighted policy and a market that changed. (In some cases, I have to disagree with Gordon Gekko: greed is not very good. There’s a reason it’s considered to be a deadly sin.)

It may be the solution is to adopt, in some respects, a Depression mentality. Unfortunately, most of our ancestors who actually lived the part are gone to meet their Maker, and this doesn’t hide the fact what you save and scrimp today is rapidly losing its worth. If you found the $100 great-uncle Ernest buried in the back yard because he still didn’t trust banks in 1940, you may be better off in a numismatic sense than you would be with the cash, since it might only buy you a couple days’ worth of groceries. Back then, that C-note - which was probably a wad of singles and fives because hardly any working stiff in that era had a $100 bill to his name - was a healthy two weeks’ pay; you were livin’ large on $100 every two weeks. (As context, a full-time minimum wage job then was worth $12 a week.)

Yet it’s clear that at a time when we’re undergoing a “tsunami of (utility) shutoffs” (the article is behind a paywall but the headline says it all) the family budget is being cut beyond the bone. What began as “two weeks to stop the spread” has only spread misery thanks to a bogus election and factors not necessarily beyond our control.

I suppose all we can do is pray things get better.