Profound economic pontifications
May 2nd, 2008 | Published in Economics, Humor and Satire | 6 Comments
In a waiting room yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to these profound pontifications from a loud-mouthed fat man in an orange shirt. I find it interesting how opinionated we can be on subjects where we obviously have very little understanding.
“I just can’t see things getting any better in this country. Oil is at, what, $130 a barrel? Greed. It’s all greed.”
“The farmer’s ain’t growing any food for us anymore — they’re growing it all for fuel!”
“Why do they keep raising the price of diesel? I have a diesel motorhome. It makes everything more expensive because trucks use diesel. It’s a damn shame. It’s just uncalled for.”
“Oil ain’t ever going down. We’ve got a President who makes money off oil, and he’s not going to let the price go down.”
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:11 pm (#)
For some reason your introduction to this piece made me think of the following lyric from the Bruce Cockburn song, You Pay Your Money and You Take your Chance:
“Just a deaf kid talking like Popeye to a large fleshy laughing man in a blue shirt”
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 pm (#)
“To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.”
Henry Kissinger
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:04 pm (#)
“Oil is at, what, $130 a barrel? Greed. It’s all greed.”
Between crude oil futures speculation and five years of uninterrupted Federal Reserve printing presses, I think the man has a point here. Maybe not the one he intended, but a point nonetheless.
“The farmer’s ain’t growing any food for us anymore — they’re growing it all for fuel!”
Replace “food” with “corn,” and it’s closer to the truth. With the Federal Govt. subsidizing maize-based ethanol development, it’s more lucrative (right now) for farmers to grow corn for the gas tank. It also diminishes the amount of corn available for livestock feed, so supply and demand dictates that feed becomes more expensive. When the cost of livestock feed rises, every related grocery item (beef, poultry, milk, cheese, even corn-based cereal) will rise with it.
“It makes everything more expensive because trucks use diesel.”
The trucks shipping products back and forth along the U.S. Interstate Highway System do use diesel, and that does mean that higher diesel costs “trickle down” to the consumer in the form of higher prices for the products which had been transported via truck.
I’m not going to touch that last one. :)
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:15 pm (#)
Yes, some of what he was saying is true. It’s the concepts behind them that I’m concerned with. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm (#)
This guy isn’t far off. Some of lower-middle class America actually know what they’re talking about, even if they tend to be a bit cynical about it. Besides, if the Peak Oil theory is correct (and I believe we’ll reach peak oil very soon), then someone better come up with a cheap alternative quickly, because oil won’t go down otherwise.
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:07 am (#)
Maybe I’m inadvertently making it sound more profound than it really was. Thinking that greed is driving the price up instead of supply & demand, thinking that people “set” the market price, and thinking that the President has any power to set the price of oil shows a lack of a basic economic education.