The joke here is that the cost of fuel and food and everything else is rising to the stratosphere and the government and media will point and say "Look, Americans are spending more this year than last year, isn't that wonderful?"
There are dopes that don't get the concept of inflation.
I regard myself as a student of history, and one thing I have seen is that people are content and happy until they wake up one day and find themselves walking down an icy road in the winter with a thin overcoat, cardboard suitcase, and holes in their shoes.
Nobody living well ever, EVER thinks they are going to be in that situation. They always think it will be someone else walking down that road, and they will still have their dinner parties and fine wine because they were responsible and made money, invested it, and saved it.
Whether it happens by war, personal misfortune, or national misfortune, the end result is the same. Not saying people should run their lives based on that reality, but neither should they ignore it.
There is a line that is repeated in many movies, and it applies personally for me here: “I have a bad feeling about this.”
There is something that, to my eye, is fundamentally flawed in our economic approach, and that famous “Three Days from Anarchy” saying has never felt more foreboding to me.
Granted, I worry about things like energy supplies for winter and the suppression of other things that rely on petroleum for production and distribution. Those things are not important to some people, but I know at least of a percentage of them think food just magically appears on supermarket shelves. The same kind of people who think a steak doesn’t come from a steer cut up in a slaughterhouse by human meat processors who drive to work in cars that use gas to work in a slaughterhouse that is powered by electricity from coal and gas, and transported in trucks, but from a cellophane covered Styrofoam plate on a shelf in a supermarket.