Grumpa Joe's Place

I know, I know, this will be old news to my readers because you are affected by the same phenomenon, but it will make me feel better to get this off my mind. But really?? Eight dollars a pound for strawberries? Okay, so they are out of season at the moment, and it is a holiday week so the vendor can charge an arm and a leg for something I want, but I think this is pushing the window too far. During the season, that same container of strawberries will cost $1.79 and I will avoid buying because it is too expensive. Imagine what I will do when they are $7.99. Yep, I’ll avoid them and my love for sweetness will have to find something else to satisfy my appetite, like left over Halloween candy. As I write and the stress of seeing that high price begins to flow from my body I am happily gorging on 3 Musketeers and Snickers bites. That is definitely not KETO.

What is the underlying cause of this rising price phenomenon? It is th evil word spelled “i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n. “What is inflation in regard to money? Webster defines it as “a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.” Do we understand how the purchasing value of money changes? It’s simply the government printing money to pay its bills. So, if our national budget is a trillion dollars, and Uncle spends a trillion dollars more than he has, and prints a trillion to cover, the dollar just lost half of its value. The seller who once paid $4.00 a pound for strawberries now has to pay eight, for the exact same pound of berries, they didn’t get bigger, they didn’t get sweeter, there are still the same number of berries in the container and you didn’t get a single damned thing more for those extra four dollars because the value of the dollar just shrunk by a hundred percent. The simple problem for you and me is that our pay did not grow accordingly. In the case of a senior citizen like me who lives on a fixed income which means I can’t, or won’t get a raise in pay, inflation is as deadly a as COVID-19.

And, that my friends is why I believe I am preaching to the choir, because the people who can do something about it are not sitting in the same church as you and I. They are sitting in Congress and are deaf to everything but campaign contributions. What is our option? We have to vote the bastards out of office, and that means we have another one to three years to survive, and sadly, some of us won’t make it. In the meantime, we have to vote when we can, and pray that our country doesn’t go bankrupt.

Filed under: Aging, Conservative, Election, Food | Tagged: economics, Inflation, Keto, Straberries |