Our leaders and the press they control love to use those words, prices go up and we are told to tighten our belts and learn to do with less. That message is pointed directly at the working class it seems. Oil companies post record profits when the price goes higher. Oil from the other side of the globe spikes over $100 a barrel, but here in the States where we don’t have civil war brewing (yet) in every state we can pump it out of the ground for less than $40 per. As the fat oil execs say “Cha ***king Ching!” No belt tightening there. The same as natural gas, we pump it out of the ground right here, but the cost goes up when the middle east gets an itch. Electricity? I don’t know where all of you live, but my power source is nuclear, the cost still goes up. Are they buying the gas for their employees cars or what? Of course groceries go up because the cost of fuel to plant, harvest, ship to the distribution centers and then to the markets goes up. Farmers don’t get enough most of the time to cover their expenses, that is why most family farms are going under. I have never seen pictures of the Arabian Peninsula roaming with cattle or fields of grain, meaning they not only pay the afore mentioned costs, but also the cost of shipping it half way around the globe in huge cargo ships, still, the Saudis are eating cheaper than we do.
It’s all there in the second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence, look it up. When we are cutting our own throats to pay the bills and sending the blood overseas to fund ketchup tasters and researching fuel from stone we are not being represented by those that the rich people give us to choose between on election day.