Business as Usual
When we invaded Iraq we asked Pres. Bush if he would release the oil reserves to stabilize prices the way his father did when the Gulf War broke out in 1990. He said no. He said that would make us appear weak. So for the last five years we’ve tried to operate rather misguidedly under the presumption of “Business as Usual.” The problem is that as prices have gone up we have shifted the difference onto credit cards. The shell game that we used to think we were good at has gotten more and more difficult as we’ve done “0%” balance transfers from Peter to Paul and vice versa, all the while the paycheck we’ve used to finance the whole thing has gotten more and more watered down. This has happened despite whatever raises we’ve gotten, and those have been shrinking as well.
What should we have done? We should have realized that this is not the President Bush that we grew up with in the 1980s. Not opening the reserves was a signal that higher prices were coming and quicker than we thought. We hollered when the gas hit $2. We moaned when it hit $3 and now that it is at $4 most of us are cussing. Those of you who don’t suffer from acute potty mouth, you’re cussing too. You’re feeling the same stuff the rest of us are. You’re just more elegant about how you express it. We know what you really mean when you say “Fiddle Faddle!” And if you’re a Galactica nerd, you’re saying “FRAK!” But seriously we should have started shortening vacations, combining and consolidating trips, eating out less, all the stuff the budget nerds tell you you need to do.
Would being more mindful of our spending have hurt the economy? Not in the sense you might be thinking and certainly not in the manner it is now. A reduction then would have clued the business community of what was coming. I doubt it would have stopped any of these price hikes in fuel. The people who could have stopped this do not listen.
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This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 3:33 and is filed under RogueSun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
