If you’ve noticed a higher grocery bill in this era of supposedly low inflation, you’re not imagining things. Despite Washington estimates of low consumer inflation over the last few years, the prices of goods at the market are rising rapidly — especially for meat items, which have risen by double digits since 2011.
I've all but quit buying red meat, and not for health reasons or that I've become a vegetarian: I'm a red meat carnivore, but who in the world can afford a $24 rump roast for Sunday dinner? Mr. SIGIS bought groceries at the commissary on base last week and paid $4.00 per lb. for ground beef. A whole chicken runs about $6 now as opposed to about $4 a year ago at my grocery store. Milk? About $4.50 a gallon. Our weekly splurge of ribeyes for the grill is a thing of the past. Even my own favorite food group, beer, now costs about $2 more a six-pack.
Coincidentally, food stamp use is higher than its ever been, especially among our military. Via CNN:
Food stamp redemption at military grocers has been rising steadily since the beginning of the recession in 2008. Nearly $104 million worth of food stamps was redeemed at military commissaries in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.
This graphic tells the story:
Meanwhile, Congress tried to cut military pensions and the Pentagon wants to close base commissaries.
Of course, Obama's gutting of welfare reform including making food stamps easier to obtain, so that could explain part of it; more Americans than ever are on food stamps, but there's no question that food prices are rising.
What's the answer? Buy stock in Ramen? Ed Morrissey again:
That won’t change until two pressures on the economy are reversed: rising costs on business and improvement of chronic joblessness. The latter keeps wages depressed by providing a large labor pool for a relatively small number of net jobs created over the last five years since the beginning of the recovery in June 2009. On average since then, we have created significantly fewer jobs each month than necessary to keep pace with population growth. In large part, the job-creation market has been stifled by extra costs and disincentives to investors and businesses in job-creating expansion and risk-taking. Those same costs, along with relatively high energy costs, get passed along to consumers in higher prices, putting them in the economic vise described in this CBS report.Seems to me that the stimulus has failed and that Obama's policies have done more harm than good.Marco Rubio, today:
“If you recall five years ago, the notion was that if the government spent all this money — that, by the way, was borrowed— that somehow the economy would begin to grow and create jobs. Well, of course, it clearly failed,” Rubio says in the video, according to POLITICO’s Mike Allen in Playbook. “Five years later, underemployment is still too high, the number of people that have dropped out of the workforce is astounding, unemployment remains stubbornly high and our economy isn’t growing fast enough — proof that massive government spending, particularly debt spending, is not the solution to our economic growth problems.”
Maybe it's time to start living off the land again.
Here in Louisiana it's crawfish season! (Oh, but they're $8 a pound right now.)
