“Here it is: gas prices go up: transportation of good goes up, manufacturing varieble goes up, i.e. cost making good and getting it to consumer go up in general, prices go up, INFLTATION!”

Increasing prices due to an increase of value is not inflation. Right now, oil, and everything related to it, is increasing in value. That is what happens when supply can’t meet demand, for any reason. Part of it is the crisis in the ME, part of it is restrictive environmental policies over the last thirty years or so, but whatever the reason, we have decided that oil is more valuable than it used to be. We can decide otherwise, but we have to make that decision and act on it to change the upward trend of oil prices. Still, it’s not inflation; it’s a societal decision to make oil-related things more valuable. Inflation is when prices go up without an increase in value.

“as happen during the great depression?”

Do you know what happened during the Great Depression? Assets didn’t “evaporate”. Due to the inflated value of the stock market caused by 90% margin and the flawed expectation from amateur investors that they would get rich quick, when the market returned to normal value, the emotional impact on the citizenry of those transfers(not losses) to the wise investors, plus a President who made his political career by devaluing the free enterprise system caused a real drop in demand. That, coupled with a very severe deflation caused another transfer of assets from the many to the few. The socialist policies of the New Deal kept capital from being spread into the private sector(as govt policy), thus delaying the recovery until after WWII, when the joy of winning the war returned demand to its rightful level. The rest is history. Nothing going on today even remotely resembles the Great Depression.

Graveyards are ‘stable’ also.

yeah, let’s liberate the Saudis next,

..rising oil prices means our CPI will go up by more than previously expected, making it more likely for the FEDs to continue rising our interest rate,which also means our cost of borrowing will probably increase.
Our economy suffers, we suffer and Dictators in the Middle East and else where PROFIT.

This is bad for Americans,

As Oil Hits New High, Businesses Continue to Struggle
Friday, July 14, 2006

Amid escalating violence in the Middle East, renewed tensions with North Korea and Iran, and continued hurricane fears, U.S. fuel prices have reached a season high of $2.96 a gallon — forcing businesses to charge customers more,

For many business owners, simply absorbing the added costs is no longer an option. Brendan Phillips, CEO of Smart Carpet located in Manasquan, N.J., said that he’s had no choice but to raise his own prices.

Over the past two years, Smart Carpet has passed an increase of 20 percent to 30 percent on to customers. “High prices are driving lower-income [customers] out of the market,” Phillips said.

John Eagleton, CEO of Northstar Aerospace, a Duluth, Minn., manufacturer of small plane parts, hasn’t raised prices yet, but is mulling the option. A couple of years ago, fuel surcharges used to make up 2 percent to 4 percent of his vendors’ invoices — today that number is as high as 24 percent.

“I just can’t keep paying the escalating fuel surcharges without passing that on to our customers,” Eagleton said

(source: FoxNews)

And Dictator in the Middle East are taking in the windfall profits of our pain.

Washingtonpost.com,

An escalation of Middle East fighting and crude oil prices close to $80 a barrel will create more angst on Wall Street this week, ..

We need to stops subsidizing dictator in the Middle East. Our pain at the pump and elsewhere is Irans profit. I really think we need a project of similar size urgengy and scope as the Manhattan project to make ourself energy independent fron those most wanting to cause us harm

MikeA: I will reluctantly agree that my country is a major part of today’s huge problem with terrorism, but not the current President, who is finally getting it right. Starting with Munich in 1972, the US has consistently either ignored or soft-pedaled the problem of Islamic terrorism, which has emboldened them to do what they are presently doing. This behavior has been consistent through all administrations, highlighted by Reagan not responding in kind to Beirut, Carter hiding under the bed while a bunch of pissants took our people hostage, Clinton cutting and running in Somalia and ignoring the Trade Tower bombing in 1993.
Now, we finally have a guy in the Highest Office who responds to these illegal and immoral terrorists, and all you can do is snipe at him in the interest of short-term political gain. You guys are the best allies the terrorists could hope for in our society.

MikeA: You write: “There will always be conflict in the world…” And you describe me as “glum”? I hope you were being facetious there. I guess I’m one of those who believe that evil can be defeated, and if we’re willing to do what it takes to defeat evil, we get some peace. At any rate, IMO it’s better than living in slavery to socialist or monarchist dictatorship.

Not to dash your hopes, but when oil goes up in perceived value, the increase in gas prices is not inflation.

I was NOT referring to the rise of oil prices as derectly causing inflation. Here it is: gas prices go up: transportation of good goes up, manufacturing varieble goes up, i.e. cost making good and getting it to consumer go up in general, prices go up, INFLTATION!

Assets don’t “evaporate”, they move from one area of the economy to another

as happened during the Great Depression?

Not to dash your hopes, but when oil goes up in perceived value, the increase in gas prices is not inflation.

I was NOT referring to the rise of oil prices as derectly causing inflation. Here it is: gas prices go up: transportation of good goes up, manufacturing varieble goes up, i.e. cost making good and getting it to consumer go up in general, prices go up, INFLTATION!

Assets don’t “evaporate”, they move from one area of the economy to another

as happen during the great depression?

aNON: Not to dash your hopes, but when oil goes up in perceived value, the increase in gas prices is not inflation. Assets don’t “evaporate”, they move from one area of the economy to another.

They want Bill Clinton-style foreign policy. Quick action. A minimal amount of troops on the ground. Fire a few missiles from a thousand or so miles away and then call it good. It doesn’t have to really solve the problem, just make it go away for a while so they can return to their bellyaching for tax-funded health care (something Mike already has in Canada) and their favorite television shows.

Like the invasion of Iraq I suppose. It didn’t address any of the crucial issues at the time but, by God, it was action. There’s more to foreign policy than military action as your military well knows…a pity that your Administration doesn’t seem to agree.

Using Mike’s logic, we would try to solve the problem of ants in the kitchen by stepping on the individual ants rather than finding their source and exterminating it.

Too nuanced for me…just start stomping and keep stomping and forget about root causes and other lefty talking points.

MikeA,

I’m not especially in need of any consolation… at least not that I’m aware of. But I appreciate the thought nonetheless.

Obviously I disagree with your characterization of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy as “adventurism” although I can certainly acknowledge a reasoned point of view such as yours. To my mind, the jury is still out on Iraq, though I believe it was the correct call.

What does concern me, however, is that those who are so quick to criticize Bush’s policy, are unable to offer any viable alternatives of their own. Can a nuclear-armed Iran be tolerated? IF so, why? If not, what to do about it, as the Mullahs are quite obviously not about to give up their nuclear ambitions?

What about North Korea? Are its nuclear weapons and ICBM capabilities to be ignored (and undoubtedly allowed to spread), or dealt with? How else is this to be accomplished?

Is the UN worth saving? Why? Or better yet, what parts of the organization’s global network isn’t compromised by incompetence or corruption of one sort or another?

Criticism, as you well know, without substantive, workable policy alternatives, is merely mindless blather. Where’s the beef?

There’s more to foreign policy than military action as your military well knows…a pity that your Administration doesn’t seem to agree.

MikeA,

The very real problem of the Iranian Mullah’s nuclear ambitions has been thus far handled entirely by diplomacy… with the Europeans, whose nuanced diplomatic savoire faire we are supposed to regard as the gold standard of international behavior, taking the lead role.

The planet’s other major flashpoint, North Korea (amazing how prescient Mr. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” description looks in hindsight) has also been handled strictly via diplomacy, and with the careful and fairly successful involvement of the Chinese, the Russians, and the Japanese as well.

Libya, which no one knew to be harboring a sophisticated nuclear weapons program, has been subtly convinced to give it up. And last year’s long-term agreement with India was a major coup in itself.

Finally, despite the frantic carping and braying of the left, Ambassador Bolton appears to have done a fairly credible job of keeping the United Nations from willfully flushing itself further down the sewer of irrelevancy… no small task that.

There will always be those, especially on the left, whose pacific delusions and objection to anyone more martial than a meter maid, keeps them from acknowledging that negotiations mean nothing unless BOTH parties are serious, and that threats are pointless, and in fact all the more dangerous, unless one is fully willing to carry them out.

Your flippant critique of the Bush administration’s diplomatic efforts has a hollow ring to it. The anti-Bush meme may have lost its most strident voice with Diane’s departure, but there’s really no reason for you to feel compelled to pick up the slack in her absence.

dd: You are partly right, but the devil is in the details. Gasoline is relatively inelastic on the demand side, because there are no cost-effective substitutes. However, if gas goes high enough, two things will happen: Other means of transportation will be increasingly used, and people will find ways to drive less. If gas stays too high long term, other fuels will come online, and people will shift where they live, to be closer to where they work. It’s all about value. Gas is valuable to us, because we use it to make money and enjoy life. The price of gasoline has never been controlled by “free market economics”. It is controlled, in a free market system, by the relationship between supply and demand. Present day fears of interruption in supply are “fueling” the present high oil prices.

All the Democracy has been turned against us.

Some plan.

aNON: Like this “crisis”, the previous ones were about interruption of supply, usually by govt mismanagement, as is this one. Not taking the threat of ME terrorism seriously for over thirty years, while at the same time allowing our own supply to be manipulated for political reasons, has brought us to this point. When you know the cause of the problem, the solution generally becomes obvious: Increase our own supply by whatever means possible. Fortunately, in our system of private ownership of capital, this is easily done. We just have to get the politicians who worship short term outcome(the Dems) out of the way. That is the answer to all your fears.

The price of any single thing is not “bad for our economy”. Your error is the static state analysis of your “fixed pie” thinking. When profits go up, so does the standard of living. Think about it. Only taxes are uncompensated expense, economically speaking.

aNON: “Record high and climing oil prices is bad for our economy. It means we have to pay more at the gas pump it means the cost of making good increases. It means the price of many good goes up. It means our Cost of Living increases.”

We have the choice as to how we spend our money. In a free enterprise system, no one forces us to spend what we don’t choose to. If one commodity gets more expensive, we make other choices. As I explained above, we buy gas because we can do valuable things with it. As long as we get that value, we will continue to buy it. What really happens is that we shift our spending on other things, and they might have to become cheaper to remain competitive. “Fixed pie” thinking always leads to the wrong conclusion in an “expanding pie” economic system, like we have.

“I’m sure those that lived through the Great Depression would agree with you in that it was only a matter of waiting it out.”

Is that all you got out of what I wrote? I never said anything of the kind. FDR’s programs, while well-intentioned, made things worse, IMO. If you read the history of the period, he was always on the radio preaching the virtues of socialism and slamming the free enterprise system. That did a lot of harm, and some of his ideas are still believed by lefties today. Dynamic free enterprise action was called for, not “waiting it out”, but we got socialism instead.

Like the invasion of Iraq I suppose. It didn’t address any of the crucial issues at the time but, by God, it was action.

The crucial issues were addressed in Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq was the opening of a larger front in the war on terror. Islamic terrorism springs from the oppression present in the middle east. The liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq has gone a long way toward rolling back that oppression and will continue to have positive ripple effects in the region for years to come (progress on voting rights in Kuwait, for example, and Lebanon’s resurgent spirit of independence from Syria).

But clearly you don’t agree with that plan. Fine. What’s yours? Wait until we’re attacked, find out who did it and then get them?

That seems sort of like buying car insurance after you have an accident.