High Prices

 Saturday, Andrea and I ordered our favorite Chinese food for delivery, a sweet and sour pork combo. 

Which has for years been $9.95.

This Saturday, the price was now $10.95.

AND it only came with one container of sweet and sour sauce for two combos.  

Should I blame Joe Biden?

Some right win yahoos have been affixing stickers to gas pumps that show a grinning Joe Biden pointing at the price with a word balloon that says, "I did that!" 

The price of gas is very high and some of it is due to certain economic pressures caused by Biden's sanctions against Russia for their Ukraine invasion. 

But the reality is that Joe Biden, indeed no American President, has any power to raise or lower gas prices. 

The reason gas prices are so high is that oil companies charge what they think that can get away with. 

In fact, American oil companies are flush with cash and are earning record profits.  Under the pretext of world wide political and economic pressure, they're raising prices at the pump and sending the extra money to shareholders. 

Some people are willing to blame Joe Biden for something he has no control over but perfectly willing to let oil companies slide on by with no scathing commentary. 

Recently, gas prices have shown some modest relief. I noticed a few days ago that some stations that were charging $4.29 a gallon had inched down to $3.95.  

Meanwhile, price crunches continue unabated elsewhere, particularly in the area of food. 

Inflation is a sad fact of life. Everything costs more today than it did yesterday and will cost more tomorrow. 

I think we got caught up in a long cycle of rather moderate pricing with only slight upticks in cost.  

That sweet and sour pork combo has been $9.95 what seems like forever.  

I remember when I was a kid dealing first hand with the perils of inflation.  When I first began reading comic books, the average comic was 20 cents with 20 pages of story and art.

From 1974 to 1979, the price of basic comic rose from 20 cents to 40 cents as the content dropped from 20 pages to 17 pages.

It was a rough time to be a comic book fan. 

By 1980, the price of comics leveled off at 50 cents an issue but at least content pages went up to 25 pages for story and art. 

40 years later, the average comic is $3.99 with a variable content page count of 20 to 22 pages.

My comic books are too expensive. 

Can I blame Joe Biden for that?  

Or my missing sweet and sour sauce?