In response to an article that stated that oil, when adjusted for inflation, is not expensive, Mogambo Guru has this to say...
Therefore, the price of oil strictly adjusted for inflation may not be, as she says, expensive in the big, two-dimensional macro picture, but for those of us whose incomes, mine for instance, have NOT increased in lockstep with inflation because we are mentally unstable and are already getting paid far more than we are worth, gasoline IS very expensive, and I am certainly not in the mood to listen to any crap about how I ought to compare my current situation with some distant time in ancient history when health insurance was affordable and property taxes were much lower and the sheer suffocating size and cost of a grasping, cancerously large system of governments was not eating out my substance, which is a phrase I picked up from guys who were writing during the American Revolution, the one where we, the people, stood up and grabbed our rocket-propelled grenade launchers, loaded up our armored personnel carriers and went to war against the nasty British, who were abusing us by taxing us at the horrific rate of less than 1 lousy percent. 1%! We fought to the death because of a 1% tax! Nowadays, total economy-wide taxation is greater than 50% of total income!
Non-hedonically adjusted inflation is 7.1 percent last I checked. The COLA I will be getting shortly will be 15/100 of 1%
What can I say? Proud to be an American!