An article at KTAR.com asks the question, do rising gas prices threaten the recovery?
It's a very nice article by reporters Sandra Haros and Bob McClay, and it reminded me that when gas prices get high enough, there's a thriving cottage industry in siphoning gas out of gas tanks!
But to threaten a recovery, there has to be a recovery.
And with absurdly high unemployment rates, and inflation running at 10%, but coffee going up by 27% in recent months, I have to ask the other question.
Where is the recovery?
And I may be a bankruptcy lawyer in Arizona, but that doesn't make me want a depression to destroy the hopes and dreams of multiple generations.
And because I talk to so many decent people, and smart ones, who burned through their entire retirement funds trying to make payments on credit cards after their jobs were outsourced, or downsized, or laid off, that it breaks my heart.
And I can see that the Happy Hippie Generation of the late 60s is going to be the Cranky Where-is-my-Retirement Generation of...Now.
Because inflation just reduced social security (if inflation makes everything cost 10% more this year, that's like a 10% decrease in social security payments, right?), and that reduction will continue. And continue.
And ordinary folks who can't play the statistics game can tell that inflation is currently out of control just by watching the numbers when they go to the grocery store.
And folks will stop wanting to retire, and start hoping to find a new job, so they can buy food.
It's a very nice article by reporters Sandra Haros and Bob McClay, and it reminded me that when gas prices get high enough, there's a thriving cottage industry in siphoning gas out of gas tanks!
But to threaten a recovery, there has to be a recovery.
And with absurdly high unemployment rates, and inflation running at 10%, but coffee going up by 27% in recent months, I have to ask the other question.
Where is the recovery?
And I may be a bankruptcy lawyer in Arizona, but that doesn't make me want a depression to destroy the hopes and dreams of multiple generations.
And because I talk to so many decent people, and smart ones, who burned through their entire retirement funds trying to make payments on credit cards after their jobs were outsourced, or downsized, or laid off, that it breaks my heart.
And I can see that the Happy Hippie Generation of the late 60s is going to be the Cranky Where-is-my-Retirement Generation of...Now.
Because inflation just reduced social security (if inflation makes everything cost 10% more this year, that's like a 10% decrease in social security payments, right?), and that reduction will continue. And continue.
And ordinary folks who can't play the statistics game can tell that inflation is currently out of control just by watching the numbers when they go to the grocery store.
And folks will stop wanting to retire, and start hoping to find a new job, so they can buy food.
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