inflation

"Inflation is a process in which the prices of most goods and services are increasing from year to year or month to month."
It seems that the news is a bit more bleak than they are aloud to divulge, especially in the fourth and most important, shopping season, quarter. While hopes for a steady economy through the end of the year may help in keeping the consumer, consuming, energy prices are increasing and so is the cost of living.
Just in time for winter, the highest increase for one month in fifteen years, energy prices jumped more than 7%. People heating their homes with natural gas may see a spike in cost up to 48% greater than last years bill. Main stream media is keeping hope alive by insisting that there is no housing bubble, however the cost of a home from last year to this year rose 23%, (expect another ten percent in 2006). The average cost of a home across the country is over two hundred thousand dollars, to buy these homes last year, about forty two percent were with no money down. From 1955 to 1995 home prices rose with inflation, which was basically nothing, but for the last nine years they rose 45%, this is leaving home ownership at a thirteen year low. We are told not to fear inflation, but unemployment rates are on the rise, food costs have increased 1.4% in the month of September, and also last month wholesale inflation rose at its fastest pace in fifteen years.
The Federal Government's official poverty level was based in 1965, and even at that outdated figure, last year 37 million people lived at that poverty level. This would give a family of three a monthly income of less than fifteen hundred dollars. In places like California, the northeast or southern Florida as one person you'll need at least double or triple just be able to pay for your basic life package, nevrmind expecting people to live in this country with the federal minimum wage at a stale, five dollars and fifteen cents an hour. It only appears to be getting worse.

There are going to be attempts at drilling for natural gas in the United States, in places that were once "off limits". Yesteday The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee authorized drilling in Alaskas Arctic Wildlife Refuge in a 13-to-9 vote. Senator Pete V. Domenici the committee's chairperson said, ''We must produce more of our own oil". It is laughable that this is the solution, (clearly alternitives are not the route we need to already have gone in). This is just a waste of money for us, and a waste of the Alaskan Wildlife, we will run out of oil, drilling is a waste of resources. Energy companies are trying to convince state legislators to allow them to drill off Hilton Head Island too.

There are winners in all of this, the oil companies are making all the money right now, they will make each other more wealthy once they start poking more holes in the earth, and they destroy ecosytems. It is all for money, and as long as the oil company runs this country, the oil companies will be making money, they are their best interst, not us.



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