Inflation frustration

It never fails to amaze me, every time I gas up the car or go to the grocery store, how much more expensive things are getting. My wages cannot keep up with this runaway inflation due to gas prices affecting every single aspect of our lives, from prescription costs to groceries to nearly everything we purchase. I heard on the radio just yesterday that prices are expected to be in the upper $3 to close to $4 a gallon this summer during peak driving season, which may just put a dent in my ability to take my usual vacations. Everything else is going up as well - medical costs, utilities and everything I have to spend money on. No one knows where this runaway inflation train is going to stop, or even if it will stop anytime soon, but it's running out of control down the track and as our dollar continues to sink in world markets to where it's becoming no better than the currency of a Third World economy, there are worries that oil will stop being traded in dollars and will be traded in Euros instead, further driving up the price of oil even higher than what we're paying now. In other words, it wouldn't take much to tip things over into pure economic collapse and plunge us into another Depression the likes of which we have not seen in 70 years. With my retirement looming a mere 5 years off, this is not a prospect I particularly relish facing. I'm struggling right now just to pay bills and get by, and I can't imagine what life is going to be like 5 years from now on about two thirds of my salary, which isn't expected to get much bigger than what it is now, and it's not that much right now to begin with. Sure, I'll save a couple of hundred dollars per month on commuting costs (I hope), but there will still be the attendant costs of basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter, and I suspect that I will be paying a lot more for those things 5 years from now than I am at this very moment. Well, I suspect that I won't be able to fully retire like our parent's generation could. I'll probably have to work until I drop, at the rate things are going right now.

And if the wars in the Middle East don't simmer down soon, things are going to get a lot worse before they can even begin to get better, and I don't see that happening anytime soon, not with 9 months left in the disastrous Bush reign of terror. Even if either Obama or Hillary succeeds him, neither of them are going to be able to bring things to heel in the Middle East by the end of their first term in office. I have heard, from experts on NPR, that it could take decades to put Iraq back together again, and we've still got to face the contentious Israel-Palestine problem and figure out if there is any way to forge a lasting peace there. Then there's Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kashmir.....the list goes on and on. These are places that are dealing with centuries of old hatreds and inter-tribal feuds that are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to quell. What a cheery picture......and what a monumental challenge awaits Bush's successor. He's managed to make a royal mess of things in his catastrophic years in office, and I have faith at the end of the day that history will not treat him kindly of all his blunderings. In every single endeavor in the man's life, he's made a mess of things and has had to have Poppy Bush bail him out, and I suspect that ol' Poppy is waiting in the wings to make a final bail out of his miserable failure of a son before this is all over in some noble attempt to salvage his son's legacy. If there is even going to be one. Well, this is what America gets for electing a President who is someone so dumb that English doesn't even seem to be his native language and who pretends to be a tough white hat wearing Texas cowboy. May we at least do better next time and may we finally learn the lesson that when Republicans run the country, they do their best to run it into the ground.