For many affluent Americans the price of gasoline is a minor inconvenience. However with a shrinking middle class being constantly squeezed on all fronts, for many younger Americans it is becoming a matter of desperation.
And if they are part of the real estate sheep (last buyers)every raise in the fancy high-tech ARM they hold is magnified when their discretionary income is reduced with high gas prices.
These prices for the September contract. That gasoline yet to be priced at the pump. "The Guns of August"... "The Missiles of October"... "The ****s of September"...
Yes, every thread has a half dozen "adjusted for inflation not a record posts." Hopefully that is not the administration line when the president has to go on national television to calm Joe and Jane Six-Pack. If it is the GOP is going to be laughed right out of the 06 elections.
J
1. Auto traffic volumes decline and transit ridership increases in our major metropolitan areas; and
2. Big-box retailers -- whose sites are designed specifically to serve an auto-oriented customer base -- start to experience a tangible decline in sales.
Don't worry about that - the Administration is not stupid. The problem is that there's no way to honestly deal with the fears of Joe-Six Pack - his way of life is under serious attack and there's nothing anyone can do about it. He's going to have to make some very difficult compromises which allow him only to save certain elements of that life-style.
Not all incomes are so fortunate. From what I have seen the necessities have inflated considerably even while the official inflation number remains laughably low. Should we believe what the gov't says, or our lying eyes?
If there is to be a third party, it will be given birth by financial dislocation, as is usually the case.
But are the Democrats any different. Do they too not share in the lack of leadership on this issue. How can the problem have existed all these years without any real leadership on the problem in Washington if both parties had not gone along with the supression of any attempt at actual solutions? Let's take the ethanol boondoggle. Did not Andreas of ADM and his progeny corrupt Hubert Humphrey and a host of liberal Democrats as well as powerful members of the GOP. The contribution to the Terrorists by the myth that Ethanol helps in the war when it really helps the other side because it consumes more energy than it produces and thus makes us more dependent on oil from terrorist dominated Islam as empowered by that dependence can be attributed squarely to both parties' leadership.