So what are you going to do.

[Materdaddy]

Raise!?!?! Jeezus, I have had a total of about $2 worth of raises in the past 16 years. It sucks. Good thing my rent hasn't gone up in 10 years!!! Fortunately, gas isn't a big issue with me...I work 3 miles from home. For my off-road needs, I keep a jar of coins and that'll fill the Jeep every month or so.

How bad would inflation be if we didn't have to pay the bills of those unwilling to work? I'm a manager at a supermarket, and I get tired of telling people they should hang up their cell phones long enough to pay for their groceries with their ebt card (food stamp/welfare debit card). There is also the WIC program (I think it is actually one of the best "public assistance" programs, because it spells out EXACTLY what they can buy). It is usually 9 cans of baby formula ($17 a pop), approx. 4 or 5 gallons of milk, 9 bottles of juice...apple or pineapple. 72 oz of specific cereals (none of the sugary ones), 4 dozen eggs, 4 pounds block cheese, 2 pounds beans, 2 pounds of carrots, and 12 cans of tuna. That is per month, per child.

As for the welfare abuse...I see it daily. I run people out of the store nearly every day because they offer to pay for peoples groceries in food stamps, in exchange for cash.

I see the amount of beer, alcohol, and cigarettes purchased with welfare. Sickening. I see the huge amounts of soda, chips, and food with little or no nutritional value purchased with food stamps. I remember the uproar when they made candy bars not eligible for food stamps. I see 3 generations come in to withdraw $200 (max daily) each from their ebt cards.

Another example that makes me sick. A co-employee at another store. He is a food clerk and makes the same amount as I do. He owns a duplex. He is married with 2 children. His wife collects welfare for the 2 children (Quite often when Armenian couples get married in Armenia, they retain their own last names, unlike Americans where the woman changes hers.) She "rents" one of the duplex's under Section 8. Basically the state pays him $400 a month. The other part of the duplex his parents live. They rent under Section 8. The state then pays him $400 a month for them to live there. His parents collect social security, yet they have NEVER worked 1 day in America. Great system we have there!

Sorry, enough rambling. I wish I knew what to do about inflation!

Welfare defeats the rule of life:
The unfit shall perish. :devil:

I love the idea of helping people get on their feet and the like but just like everything in life, there are people screwing things up for the ones truly in need and those of us who pay for it. I'd love to opt out of social security too. I am saving like CRAZY for retirement because I don't get pension or anything.

[maddmike]

It has absolutely nothing to do with the Middle East, oil barrel prices, or anything else that the news tries to scare us with. It’s just inflation. It boggles the mind to think that the majority of the population can watch the prices of EVERYTHING go up but the price of gas should not ever change. Gas should actually be a lot more money than it actually is if it kept up with inflation like other products do.

i would propose gas is (adjusted for inflation) only this expensive during a recession. historically, the only other time gas was the same price as it is now was in 1979-1983.

The cost of biodiesel is somewhere between $3.50 and $4.00 a gallon to produce. As demand increases for diesel, so will the supply. The cost of crude sourced diesel will go up, while the cost for biodiesel will go down. Crude is a limited resource. You can’t plant more crude(well you can but there is a 50mil year turaround). Biodiesel is made mainly from corn. Growing more corn is easy. Unless the corn farmers form a union and organize to drive up the prices of corn uniformly across the country, the price should stay stable.

i disagree. it takes more than 1 gallon of crude oil to make 1 gallon of ethanol, and it's less efficient as an energy source, so you come out bottoms up. it is also not physically possible to grow enough corn in the USA to make enough ethanol to supply 100% of our energy usage. i truthfully think the long-term solution(s) has not been thought of yet, or infant technologies that can "save the world from impending doom" have not been perfected.

[YJwonderboy]

All we need is for California to step up and approve diesels for use in new cars. Then the fun begins. California has the most biodiesel engineers out of any state. I’ll bet 90% of them live in Berkeley :-) From what I understand, California frowns on diesels because of the soot a poorly tuned diesel produces and there isn’t an effective way to smog a diesel. I’d kill for a nice big diesel in my YJ, that’s for sure.

Gale Banks claims that Diesels are by far the most effiecient motors on the road, and that if the technology was put into would actually have possibilites of putting out just as much performance as our favorite sports cars while making three times the gas mileage. The diesel uses pure compression to ignite the fuel while petrol engines use a spark to ignite the alcohol fuel. The power output is many time judged by the percentage of ocatane that resides in it. Since diesel does not use octane, the possibilites of producing a diesel that would be more efficient, more powerful, and more practical are endless.

Banks Engineering produced a diesel race truck that was pulling some incredible track times. And you know what it was running for fuel? Vegetable Oil...

I think we need to petition the research to put into diesels. They need to be the future!!

[Kodiak Spirit]

The thing with oil is that everyone thinks along the narrow view of gasoline or diesel. Oil is used for everything! all plastics, rubbers, even food products are being made from oil now. Everything from pesticides to heart stints are being made from oil. Even when they eliminate oil as a fuel source for our cars oil is still going to be a major player in our lives. Heck, the computer your looking at right now is 90% oil. just sitting there... looking at you.

[Shadly1]

i disagree. it takes more than 1 gallon of crude oil to make 1 gallon of ethanol, and it's less efficient as an energy source, so you come out bottoms up. it is also not physically possible to grow enough corn in the USA to make enough ethanol to supply 100% of our energy usage. i truthfully think the long-term solution(s) has not been thought of yet, or infant technologies that can "save the world from impending doom" have not been perfected.

Ethanol does not require crude to be made. It requires an energy source for refinement and that energy source is usually the byproducts of whatever the ethanol was made from. As gasoline prices go up, it will start to become more cost effective to use it. Ethanol however is a gasoline replacement and is basically an alcohol. After I reread my post, I realized I had made a mistake. I was wrong about the biodiesel being made mainly from corn. That's probably where the ethanol confusion(cornfusion?) came from. Ethanol comes from vegetable sugar sources and biodiesel comes from vegetable oil sources. Although you can make it from corn, it's more effective to make it from palm oil, coconut, rapeseed, sunflower, soybean, etc. Biodiesel is pretty much already made for you in nature.

Oh Lord, shut me up before I start wearing Birkenstocks!

[Roger]

Oh Lord, shut me up before I start wearing Birkenstocks![/QUOTE]

You'll have to sell your Jeep and buy a 1972 VW van with peace symbols painted on both sides.... Oh and big flowers too.....

[Shadly1]

You'll have to sell your Jeep and buy a 1972 VW van with peace symbols painted on both sides.... Oh and big flowers too.....

I wonder if I can macrame some hemp upholsery for it. My goal is to make it run on love and harmony... and patchouli :drool:

[Kodiak Spirit]

it's not that bad dude, it can be a Baja bug...

[maddmike]

You'll have to sell your Jeep and buy a 1972 VW van with peace symbols painted on both sides.... Oh and big flowers too.....

where i come from those are fairly common...