A snapshot from the hampered heartland.
Where the music won’t play for days anymore.
This just in, an old shack located at 1 Terra Parma in Indiana will cost you $2K a month to rent. Hey, you could get a mortgage, with such dirty deeds done dirt cheap. The good news is that it includes utilities; but there’s no AC. That old tack is an old joke, but the rest of this isn’t.
To get there, you are bus riders on the storm, and it’s a bad one, as when the greyhound grey line is nearly full on a Tuesday afternoon, rather than the typical ten passengers, you know the economy is back among the very worst its been in the 2000s, as the sheer fullness of such ridership is a sure barometer. Simply put, more people travel by bus when costs, especially of driving, and only starting with oil, are high. And when the fare to get across the equivalency of two states comes at over $40 one way, even when you get the ticket rather early, you know the price to bring you to a place like here in Hudson, Wis. is continuing to creep up just like groceries. Gas prices, and diesel is worse, have managed to avoid being around $4 a gallon in these parts — until these days. And when I rode greyhound the other week, having to go a longer route because they have dropped a stop, it was a bad omen that there was a mechanic sitting on either side of me.
Here is more fodder for such intellectual food. Grocery prices and fast food are at their highest in maybe years, as everything at the store, including staple products, seems to average out at $5 a pound or more. You used to be able to get off the bus and quickly get two regular roast beefs for $5 at Arby’s, but now the same sandwich, even at the volume price, is four for $12, as beef remains its highest in maybe ever.
But over at the neighborhood quasi-discount grocer, with two of them now in competition, can it really be that bad when they round up everything to the nearest (top) dollar? Very little costs, say, $3.39, much less $3.37, regardless of the now meaningless penny or two, an even less round number. I will have to say, the sales prices still are not that onerous, and this seems how such stores remain to stay afloat.
Makes you long for the lost Biden days and weeks, months and years, but they are long gone, as he and his health are too old to retake The Office. For good or bad, the option becomes Kamala Harris. Better than the current …
How to overcome, rise to prevail? Most of the local taxi services that offer a discount with the help of government grants are stacking multiple passengers on their trips, and I myself have no problem with them doing this as long as it is done well, but usually that means the cabs are running at angles, right or 45, or sometimes even backtracking a mile or two and thus at risk of running late. But hey, this is a cheap service and you get what you pay for. As I joked with one of the drivers, I for one don’t want to be the poor manager who has to go before the jackals of the subsidizing city council and ask for another vehicle or more money.
More people are putting themselves at risk of shaming, and daring to ask for help of all types on the online community bulletin board. Supply sources including medications continue to dry up, and energy prices remain at a premium.
Government think tank stats will soon bear all this out, but it takes time for them to catch up and bring themselves up to date, and then up to speed with analyzing the data. A quick perusal of the latest mamby-pamby info, very vanilla, shows just how pointless this exercise is.
Another downtown store has closed, after only weeks, OK a few, of its opening, and there are signs more are coming.
Those diesel prices can be close to a dollar more than already high unleaded, and more than just to hire Vin for a movie, plus the price of impliments and fertilizer that is also riding the costs of war, as farm gets hit while trying to provide food, in the nation’s breadbasket.
And at the family dinner table, which diminishes in size because of tariffs on wood and lumber.
Take a break? Restaurant prices are at it too, with the loss of low cost labor due to ICE, rubes and cubes, and having to live with the living wage, movies must pay for star’s film fees, concert prices are higher than ever, and not just because of musicians — indeed the blue-collar types among them are often the ones fighting the rising — and that business too, is seeing a market dynamic, due to dozens more than there used to be at every position who can sing and play and dance.